Literary Meaning Reclaiming the Study of Literature
Today's student of literature is faced with an overwhelming variety of critical approaches. The need to evaluate their usefulness in furthering our understanding of literature is therefore a growing concern. In Literary Meaning, Wendell V. Harris explores
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Also by Wendell V. Harris
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH BRITISH SHORT FICTION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY THE OMNIPRESENT DEBATE INTERPRETIVE ACTS DICTIONARY OF CONCEPTS IN LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY
Literary Meaning Reclaiming the Study of Literature Wendell V. Harris Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University
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MACMillAN
©Wendell V. Harris 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1996 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 978-0-333-64015-9 ISBN 978-1-349-24412-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24412-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 05 04
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Contents Introduction
1
1
The Great Dichotomy
9
2
Hermeticism
20
3
Fallacies of Hermeticism
50
4
Hermeticism and Science
65
5
Hermeneutics
90
A Note on the New Pragmatism
127
6
The Pretensions of Theory, the Necessity of Pluralism, and Terminological Promiscuity
132
7
Historical Scholarship and Literary History
157
A Note on New Historicism
175
8
Professionally Speaking: Rhetoricity and Mimesis in the Classroom
179
9
Publishing the (Highly) Perishable
205
Works Cited
224
Index to Terms
235
Index of Names
238
v
Introduction It is easy enough to make fun of the outrage and anguish expressed
when the creation of a School of English was being debated at Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century. Such a School, it was contended, would either force lecturers into mere gossip about the lives and times of authors in order for them to have something to say, or else quickly become a dry philological study of the history of the language, which, by usurping the place of Latin and Greek would, in the acerbic comment of Thomas Case, Wayneflete Professor of Moral Philosophy, "reverse the Renaissance." The conservatives of course lost and the progressives entered the citadel, waving a banner reworked from Matthew Arnold that might have read, "the best that is known and thought in the world includes a good deal of English literature" (to which could later have been added "and a little American"). Well, yes, the crusty old dons, many of whom perhaps knew their port vintages at least as well as their English literature, were wrong. But in matters like these it is rare for intelligent persons to be wholly in error. Arnold himself had serious doubts about making the study of English a formal curriculum in
