Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From ancient to modern times, nature—the object of scientific study—has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of science, scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly have been men.

But what about science? What gender was it—as an activity and set of ideals—to have? In one tradition the answer was clear: science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to Boethius’ sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman, was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed each of the sciences as a woman. “Scientia”—knowledge or skill—was portrayed as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes (fig. 2). “Physica”—physical science—was a goddess with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and symmetry of the skies.

5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).

6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a dream in his De consolatione philosophiae. See also Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Rome, 1593), first illustrated in 1603.

See also: Lorraine Daston, Science Studies and the History of Science

Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Her book, “The Mind has no Sex”: Women in the Origins of Modern Science, will be published next spring.

Wishing to contribute to the brief history of title science, I would argue that the difference in terminology between “secondary title” and “subtitle” is too weak for the mind to grasp; and since, as Duchet has noted, the principal feature of his “subtitle” is to contain a more or less explicit generic indication, it would be simpler and more vocative to rebaptize it as such, thereby freeing the term “subtitle” to resume its usual present meaning. Hence these three terms: “title” (Zadig), “subtitle” (ou la Destinée), “generic indication” (Histoire orientale). This is the most complete state of a de facto system in which the only mandatory element, in our present culture, is the first one. Nowadays, we find most frequently incomplete combinations, such as title plus subtitle (Madame Bovary, Moeurs de province) or title plus generic indication (La Nausée, roman)—without counting the really simple titles that are reduced to the single “title” element, without subtitle or generic indication, such as Les Mots or, a little differently, statements such as the following, clearly parodic: Victor Shklovskii, Zoo / Letters not about Love / or The Third Heloise.

See also: Gérard Genette, The Gender and Genre of Reverie

Gérard Genette is professor of history and theory of literary forms at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His principal works in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures III (1972), Introduction à l’architexte (1979), Nouveau discours du récit (1983), and, most recently, Seuils (1987). Bernard Crampé is assistant professor of romance languages and literatures at the University of Chicago. His principal work is in the history of rhetoric.

If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in principle impossible that we might choose to set going an initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of the predispositions for or against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey (with the later case of Fredric Jameson) do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety, evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form, threatens to remain merely gestural and generic. “History” promises thus to function as legitimating any reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived, whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist reconstructions.

See also: David Simpson, Criticism, Politics, and Style in Wordsworth's Poetry  ·  Hayden White, Historical Pluralism

David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (1986) and Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (1987).

W. B. Yeats’ poem “Politics” has as its epigraph Thomas Mann’s remark, “In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.”1 Yeats chose the epigraph in 1938, just before World War II, for a poem proclaiming that sexuality holds his interest more than politics. This still may be true for poets, but by the looks of things, not for many contemporary critics, who, if they do not choose one over the other, subsume one under the other. For them everything is political (no more so than when it is sexual), which is to hold that everything is reduced to questions of power. So it is, in their eyes, with canons.

The first canonization of note for western culture seems to have been that of the Hebrew Scriptures; and although there is much dispute about the whole matter of how that occurred, it is interesting to observe that in a 1971 book entitled The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New Interpretation Ellis Rivkin presents the development of that canon in political terms, arguing that production of the Hebrew Scriptures “was not primarily the work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling to gain power.”2 In a very interesting article on this subject, Gerald L. Bruns observes that the lesson of this is that the concept of canon is not literary but a “category of power” (“CP,” p. 478). Rivkin himself decides, as Bruns remarks, to treat “the promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according to power criteria” (“CP,” p. 475). Presumably it is this program that warrants Rivkin’s subtitle Radical New Interpretation. But what would the literary criteria that are opposed to power criteria here be? Are there any longer believers in the more than trivial existence of such criteria? Does the destiny of literature now present its meaning political terms? If there are no longer thought to be such things as literary criteria, is there, can there be, literature? We have heard answers in the negative to the last question; and the notion of canon has recently been addressed almost always in terms of politics and power, most notably, of course, but certainly not exclusively, by feminist and minority critics. The destiny of women’s writing has certainly presented its meaning in political terms.

See also: Richard Ohmann, "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975  ·  Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value  ·  Arnold Krupat, Native American Literature and the Canon

Hazard Adams is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. He has recently completed The Book of Yeats’ Poems and a collection of critical essays.

Soon after modern spiritualism announced itself with the “Rochester knockings” of 1848, tables took on a new and controversial life. No longer were they content to live out their days impassively upholding dishes and glasses and silverware, vases, papers and books, bibelots, elbows, or weary heads. They were changed: they began to move. Tables all over the United States and then in England, France, and other countries commenced rapping, knocking, tilting, turning, tapping, dancing, levitating, and even “thrilling”—though this last was uncommon. So Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan said in her discussion of Daniel Dunglas Home, probably the most famous nineteenth-century medium:

It is only in Mr. Home’s presence that I have witnessed that very curious appearance, or process, the thrilling of the table. This takes place for some seconds, perhaps more, before it rises from the floor. The last time I witnessed this phenomenon, an acute surgeon present said that this thrilling, the genuineness of which was unmistakable, was exactly like what takes place in that affection of the muscles called subsultus tendinum.2

And the tables did still more. Their actions were a language; and so they came to symbolize “the ‘movement,’ as it has been called,”3 of modern spiritualism. Spirits had chosen the table as an organ of speech.

Tables were customarily viewed as objects of economics, aesthetics, utility, diversion, tradition, even theology (in the case of church artifacts). Now, though, as Professor De Morgan jokes, “London and Paris were running after tables in a new sense.”4 Tables had become a different kind of thing. Whatever one might think about reports of spiritual communications, the conception of tables had changed. They had become moral objects.

2. C. D. [Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan], From Matter to Spirit. The Result of Ten Years’ Experience in Spirit Manifestations, with a preface by A. B. [Augustus De Morgan] (London, 1863), p. 27.

See also: Daniel Cottom, Purity 

Daniel Cottom is an associate professor of English at the University of Florida. His most recent books are Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (1987) and Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation (forthcoming). This essay is adapted from a work in progress on spiritualism and surrealism.

That [John] Cage’s challenge to our musical beliefs, attitudes, and practices is posed from the difficult perspective of a Zen master has often been discussed. What has been neglected both by Cage himself and by others is another equally potent challenge to the ordinary which Cage formulates in a related but distinct voice: that of the philosopher. Through his relentless inquiry into new music, Cage had defined certain radical possibilities for musical change. What is in effect his skepticism about music as we know it contains a cogent analysis of our musical concepts and practices: of what it is for us ordinarily to believe that something is music as opposed to not music, and of how those beliefs about music connect with styles of feeling and treating what we hear when we hear it as music. Indeed it is Cage’s genius to have established the topic of skepticism about music as an issue for philosophy and cultural criticism. Cage’s radical perspective on our musical beliefs allows us to consider both what those beliefs are and whether and how they might be justified. This invitation to philosophical response is an important feature of the avant-garde which Cage shares with Duchamp in plastic art, Gordon Matta-Clarke in architecture, and others. I wish to give it its due by outlining and addressing Cage’s skepticism about music.

See also: Robert P. Morgan, Musical Time/ Musical Space

Daniel A. Herwitz is an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently at work on a book exploring philosophical tendencies in twentieth-century music, art, and architecture.

It is an irony perhaps worthy of John Ashbery that the critics who made his reputation as our premier contemporary poet have virtually ignored the innovations which in fact make his work distinctively of our time. The received terms show us how Ashbery revitalizes the old wisdom of Keats or the virile fantasies of Emersonian strength but they do so at the cost of almost everything about the work deeply responsive to irreducibly contemporary demands on the psyche. Such omissions not only distance Ashbery from the urgencies of the present, they also make it far more difficult to appreciate just how the best contemporary art actually defines the challenges and possibilities created by that present. By banishing writers like Ashbery to literary tradition, we leave the domain of the postmodern to two dominant discourses. One is driven by post-structural theory’s idealization of the nomadic, the undecidable, and the profusion of simulacra. The other champions Marxist values which cast as the most significant contemporary art the rather slight oppositional devices of artists like Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, and Barbara Kruger. These critical idealizations then ignore what might be the central historical problem facing contemporary art. Can it continue to elaborate new dimensions of that late fifties postmodernism which set the values of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg against the increasingly formalist versions of modernism that then dominated the art world and the poetry workshops? Or does the age demand the emergence of a new sensibility, strands of which are being woven in post-structuralist mills?

See also: Charles Altieri, An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon

Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Washington. Author of books on contemporary poetry and literary theory, he has just completed a book on abstraction in modern poetry and painting. This essay lays some groundwork for a book, Bourgeois Utopians, attempt to keep the arts central to our discussion of postmodernism.

The Color Purple problematizes tradition-bound origin myths and political discourse in the hope of creating and addressing an Afro-American nation constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous culture. But rather than using patriarchal language and logics of power to describe the emergence of a postpatriarchal Afro-American national consciousness, Celie’s narrative radically resituates the subject’s national identity within a mode of aesthetic, not political, representation. These discursive modes are not “naturally” separate, but The Color Purple deliberately fashions such a separation in its attempt to represent a national culture that operates according to “womanist” values rather than patriarchal forms.5 While political language is laden with the historical values and associations of patriarchal power, aesthetic discourse here carries with it a utopian force that comes to be associated with the spirit of everyday life relations among women.

5. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (San Diego, 1983), p. xi. “Womanist” is a neologism of Walker’s invention. Much more than an idiosyncratic translation of “feminist” into a black/third-world female tradition, the term describes the “woman” in a range of personal and social identities: “Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one…. Also: A woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually…. Sometimes loves individual men, sexually and/or nonsexually…. Traditionally universalist, as in … ‘the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color flower represented.’ ” In calling the new nationalist epistemology imaged and advocated in The Color Purple an “aesthetic/symbolic” logic, I mean to honor the careful historical and categorical distinctions that operate in the novel and in Walker’s critical work around it. Central to her practice is a delegitimation of traditionally patriarchal-racist political practices, institutions, and language.

See also: Elizabeth Abel, Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation  ·  Homi K. Bhabha, Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817

Lauren Berlant is assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s readings of the cultural/sexual politics of national identity.

In most groups, there’s a sort of commedia del l’arte distribution of roles. In families, factories, universities, corporations, people are known not only for their work, their looks, their social and economic status, but also for the characters they assume in the organization. So there are clowns and those who laugh at them, there are leaders and there are followers; some followers are worshipful, some resentful. Most people put on their organization-character as they put on their uniforms. It doesn’t mean that the character isn’t related to their temperament—they have, after all, chosen it as they have chosen what they wear—but it never represents all of what they are and often represents very little. It is a convenience, a way of smoothing the roughness of interaction.

At a congress of writers, things are somewhat different. At the PEN Congress there were the clowns—writers, say, like Salman Rushdie, the young Anglo-Indian novelist; there were dour, dynical observers from the periphery—I think of Sven Delblanc, the Swedish novelist; there were writers who’s pulled themselves out of Pleistocene social pockets which they’d barely survived and which they record: here I think of Kenji Nakagami, the Japanese novelist, screenwriter, and critic.

See also: Richard G. Stern, Penned In

Richard Stern’s Noble Rot, Stories 1949-88, will be published in the fall of 1988.