Notes to Pages 2–4 Introduction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NOTES Notes to pages 2–4 Introduction 1. For a suggestive discussion of similar topics, see Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, rpt. 2001), 143–59. Geertz himself has had much of relevance to say in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books [1973]). On the richness and on the debate of the nature of science, see, for instance, Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On subjectivity and objec- tivity in neurology, see Israel Rosenfeld, The Strange, Familiar and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (New York: Knopf, 1992), a work whose title might invite comparison to Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621) and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, rpt. 1973). 2. In this paragraph I am drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989. More particularly, the etymology of “read” is as follows: “[Comm. Teut.: OE. raédan ϭ OFris. reda using, OS. radan (MLG. raden, MDu. and Du. raden), OHG. ratan (MHG. raten, G. raten, rathen), ON. ráqa (Sw. råda, Da. raade), Goth. -redan: OTeut. *ra[d¯an, prob. related to OIr. im- rádim to deliberate, consider, OSl. raditi to take thought, attend to, Skr. radh- to succeed, accomplish, etc.” 3. Geertz, Available Light, 16. 4. Geertz, Available Light, 16. 5. Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York, 1964), 15. 6. Brecht on Theatre, 34. 7. See Bertolt Brecht, Vesuche, 12 (Berlin, 1958). 8. Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984, rpt. 1986), 17; Carlson’s survey is helpful in many ways and also suggests that the perception of theatrical performance and action has philosophical, ideological and historical variants; see also Gerald Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 322. 9. The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (1941; New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1945, rpt. 1968), 80 here and below. 10. Cornford, Notes, The Republic of Plato, 323–24, see Plato Apology, 22 B; see also T.B.L. Webster, “Greek Theories of Art and Literature down to 400 B.C.,” Classical Quarterly 33 (1939), 166. 240 Notes to pages 5–9 11. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 12. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. George Walley, ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 87; for below, see 87–91. 13. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1928), 67–73. A helpful essay that frames the relation between the making and unmaking of meaning in inter- pretation is M.H. Abrams, “Construing and Deconstructing,” The Creating Word: Papers from and International Conference on the Learning and Teaching of English in the 1980s, ed. Patricia Demers (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1986), 30–65, esp. 32. 14. See, for instance, Hume, Treatise, 264–70 and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158–64; Abrams, “Construing,” 33–36. 15. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) and his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Northrop Frye’s double vision, Roland Barthes’s double sign, and Derrida’s double writing might well differ on the notion of the integration and disintegration of texts, but recognition and misrecognition through reading and interpretation concern them all. What is a double bind or double blindness and what is prophetic vision might be a question that goes back to Plato and carries on through philosophy and literary criticism or theory. For exam- ple, Derrida has attempted to shake up the way we see the world of texts and the textual world. 16. For one of my earlier discussions of doubleness, see Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 17. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1970); in translation New York, 1974 and London, 1975. 18. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 293–95; for the original, see L’Écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967). Catherine Belsey summarizes this nexus nicely: “Common sense proposes a humanism based on an empiricist–idealist interpretation of the world.” See Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 7. 19. For an insightful discussion of presentation and representation, see Jean Bessière, Quel statut pour la littérature? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), esp. 119–27. 20. For a discussion of the reading process (a phenomenological approach), see Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, trans. David Henry Wilson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 21. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; London: Oxford University Press,1948, rpt. 1966), 282. 22. Collingwood, Idea, 282–83. 23. Erich Kahler, The Meaning of History (1964; Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1968), 16–17; see Collingwood, Idea, 9. 24. Kahler, History, 19; Kahler also provides a discussion of comprehension and other philosophers of history (19n2 and 19 and 20n3), which I draw on here. 25. Theodor Lessing, Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen [History Seen as Imparting Meaning to the Meaningless] (München, 1921), 10, 15, quoted in Kahler, History, 20n3. 26. Derek J. de Solla Price, “The Science of Science,” New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. John R. Platt (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 47–48. 27. For a punning extension of this phrase, see Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. Coordinated by Jerome Agel, The Medium is the Massage (New York, Random House [1967]). 28. John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (London and New York: Methuen, 1978, rpt. 1982), 19. 29. Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (1954; rev. 1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 179. 30. Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 1–9. 31. Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. John R. Platt (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 96. Notes to Pages 10–13 241 32. For a good discussion of tragedy, see Richard B. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy, rev. and enlarged (1959; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 1–9, esp. 5–6. Sewall speaks of such a vision but does not focus on recognition. 33. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, rpt. 1974), 554–57. 34. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (1988; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), esp. 190–91, 489. See Frye, Anatomy of Criticism and Jonathan Hart, Northrop Frye. 35. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 12th ed. (1950; London: Phaidon Press, 1972, rpt. 1973), 224, see 223. 36. E.H. Gombrich, New Light on Old Masters: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance IV (Chicago: The University Press, 1986), 170. 37. Gombrich, Story, 170. See Plato, Sophist, L. 266c. 38. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), esp. 54–80. 39. Carlo Ginsburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (1986; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, rpt. 1992), xii. 40. Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. George Whalley (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, (1997) 81, 83 (1451a–b). 41. For discussions of their notions of tragedy, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, rpt. 1979). 42. See G.W. Bowerstock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, rpt. 1997), 16, 122–25. See Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study in the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976). 43. Frye, Secular Scripture, 183. 44. Lionel Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). 45. Northrop Frye thinks value judgments are not vital, whereas E.D. Hirsch, Jr. does. See E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 3, 106. 46. See, for instance, Explorations in Difference: Law, Culture and Politics, ed. Jonathan Hart and Richard W. Bauman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 47. See Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 48. See Evelyne Keitel, “reading as/like a woman,” Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 371–74. 49. See, for instance, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (1982; New York: Harper & Row, 1984); Michel