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Form and History:
Reading as an Aesthetic Experience
and Historical Act
Paul B. Armstrong
The choice between form and history is a bad one, and it is not a
choice that any critic or reader should either want or feel compelled
to make. The otherness of a literary work — its challenge as well as its
appeal — is inextricably both formal and historical. Understanding an
intriguing, not entirely transparent text is in part a matter of how it is
made and may require learning unfamiliar or no longer current con-
ventions. The most immediate and prominent indication of a work’s
pastness is typically its use of strange, remote, or outmoded language
or forms of expression. Reading provides access to vanished worlds
through the formal work of deciphering their traces. Construing liter-
ary works is both an aesthetic experience and a historical act because it
involves making sense of (and often taking pleasure in) the forms that
preserve past acts of signication.
Although form and history are joined in reading, the profession
of literary studies has regularly regarded formalism and historicism
as opposites and even antagonists. In the s and s the New
Critics dened their practice of “intrinsic criticism” against the alleged
fallacies of historical contextualization.1 Over the last two decades the
Modern Language Quarterly 69:2 (June 2008)
DOI 10.1215/00267929-2007-032 © 2008 by University of Washington
1 The most inuential statement of this case is René Wellek and Austin Warren,
Theory of Literature, rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ). For evalu-
ations of the legacy of the New Criticism see esp. Daniel Green, “Literature Itself:
196 MLQ June 2008
ascendancy of historical, political, and cultural criticism has prompted
opposing voices to articulate the neglected importance of aesthetic
value and literary form.2 As Austin E. Quigley notes, “The contempo-
rary clash between proponents of literary studies and proponents of
cultural studies often recapitulates that between the New Critics and
the earlier historicists.”3
If the only way back to form is by opposing historical and social crit-
icism, however, then inevitably literature will be impoverished as litera-
ture. It will not enrich our understanding of literature to turn a blind
eye to its involvement in processes of cultural production and exchange
that the historical and cultural critics have powerfully revealed. I for
one do not want to return to the days when my New Critical teachers
chastised me for interpreting literary works as if they were part of their
social worlds (and mine) and as if they made political, social, and moral
claims worth taking seriously in their time and ours. We diminish lit-
erature as much by denying its social, cultural, and political meanings
as by ignoring how they are mediated by formal acts of signication.
Some observers predict a swing from historicism back to a renewed
The New Criticism and Aesthetic Experience,” Philosophy and Literature ():
– ; Anthony B. Medici, “The Restless Ghost of the New Criticism,” Style ():
– ; and John R. Willingham, “The New Criticism: Then and Now,” in Contempo-
rary Literary Theory, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, ), – . The best explanation of the New Criticism’s quar-
rel with historicism is still Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ).
2 Susan J. Wolfson provides a helpful history of this development and a survey
of contemporary positions in “Reading for Form,” ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall
Brown, special issue, MLQ , no. (): – . Other noteworthy essays in this spe-
cial issue are Ellen Rooney, “Form and Contentment,” – ; and Heather Dubrow,
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Reinterpreting Formalism and the Country House
Poem,” – . See also Marshall Brown, “Le style est l’homme même: The Action
of Literature,” College English (): – ; Stanley Fish, “Why Milton Matters;
or, Against Historicism,” Milton Studies (): – ; George Levine, “Saving
Disinterest: Aesthetics, Contingency, and Mixed Conditions,” New Literary History
(): – ; and Richard Strier, “How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why
We Can’t Do without It,” in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark
David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, ), – .
3 Austin E. Quigley, Theoretical Inquiry: Language, Linguistics, and Literature (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), .
Armstrong Form and Histor y 197
formalism and a new aesthetic criticism.4 That would be unfortunate,
but it is a sign of the dilemma facing the profession — how to rediscover
form without losing sight of history. I am not alone in feeling the need
to nd a middle ground.5 As a contribution to mediating this opposi-
tion, I think that it would be useful to ask what reading can tell us about
the interdependence of history and form. When dichotomous terms
replicate themselves without mediation, a phenomenological approach
to resolving the stalemate is typically to reect on how they interact in
lived experience. Refocusing attention in this way, I offer ve theses on
how history and form are connected in the experience of reading:6
. Literary works are historical entities, but they are not reducible to
their origins.
. The historical meaning of a literary work includes the history of its
reception.
. Reading literature entails a response to value and form.
. The form of a literary work is integral to its moral, social, and politi-
cal meaning.
. Unmasking is not an end in itself but a means to various kinds of
revelations.
These are relatively simple propositions to which readers with various
loyalties and interests may assent, although they are also more complex
and controversial (as my arguments on their behalf show) than they
may at rst appear.
These theses are necessarily both descriptive and prescriptive. This
4 E.g., see Lindsay Waters, “Literary Aesthetics: The Very Idea,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, December , .
5 In addition to the essays by Brown, Dubrow, Rooney, and Wolfson cited above,
see esp. Michael P. Clark, ed., Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory
Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); George Levine, ed., Aesthetics
and Ideology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, ); and James Soder-
holm, ed., Beauty and the Critic: Aesthetics in an Age of Cultural Studies (Tuscaloosa: Uni-
versity of Alabama Press, ).
6 On the reading model implicit in my argument see my books Conicting
Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, ) and Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ). As a phenomenologist in the tradition of
the Constance school, I am interested in describing the lived, intersubjectively shared
experiences of readers reading. These experiences in turn enact the hermeneutic
processes that critics employ in developing “readings” of texts, interpretations based
on the same epistemological activities in which the common reader engages.
198 MLQ June 2008
is a common conundrum for phenomenologists when they reect on
experiences that are cultural practices, as in hermeneutic phenomenol-
ogy, which studies the different ways in which interpreters understand.7
Phenomenological descriptions are also sometimes imaginings of how
a practice could be improved in light of the interests and aims that
guide it. My demonstrations of these ve theses are based in part on
attempts to describe intersubjective experiences that I hope others will
recognize as common to their own encounters with works of literature.
But these theses are also instructions for how to read better, paying
more appropriate attention to the contradictory multidimensionality
of literature as a formal, historical state of affairs.
I make my case dialectically, by engaging the arguments of some
of the best formalist and historicist critics, focusing mainly on well-
known examples from the New Critics and the New Historicists, and by
trying to bring out aspects of the reading experience that they ignore
or insufciently address. My intention is not to write a history of the
last fty years of literary criticism but to show how, in some important
representative instances, form and history are inextricably linked even
when a critic or theorist seeks to emphasize one or the other. When the
lived experience of form and history in reading is neglected or forgot-
ten, they can split apart and seem antagonists, as they often do now, or
else what is repressed can return in unacknowledged ways. My goal is
to recover the interaction of form and history by analyzing reading as
an intersubjective experience in which literary works are preserved and
passed on through our ever-changing engagement with their forms.8
7 See my entry “Phenomenology,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, ), – .
8 By form I mean nothing more (or less) than how a literary work is made out of
artistic conventions and linguistic materials. What constitutes literary form, including
its values, is essentially contested and historically variable. An “aesthetic experience”
is a response to form, but that experience will vary according to the conceptions
of form that guide a reader’s construal. This is true even among formalist critics,
who can disagree radically about the values and functions of literary structures. For
example, the Russian formalists view innovation as tonically disruptive and dehabitu-
alizing, whereas the New Critics value form as the achievement of organic unity, even
as a deconstructionist may see linguistic binaries not as synthesizing harmoniously
but as endlessly unraveling. Readers disagree about the value and function of form
and, consequently, about the structure and signicance of the aesthetic experience,
and these conicts are integral to the historical existence of literary works.
Armstrong Form and Histor y 199
Literary Works Are Historical Entities,
but They Are Not Reducible to Their Origins
One of the strongest cases ever made for bracketing out history was
offered in The Well Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks’s enormously inu-
ential demonstration of the principles of the New Criticism. “What
residuum, if any,” Brooks asks, “is left after we have referred the poem
to its cultural context?”
We tend to say that every poem is an expression of its age; that we must
be careful to ask of it only what its own age asked; that we must judge it
only by the canons of its age. Any attempt to view it sub specie aeternitatis,
we feel, must result in illusion. Perhaps it must. Yet, if poetry exists as
poetry in any meaningful sense, the attempt must be made. Otherwise
the poetry of the past becomes signicant merely as cultural anthropol-
ogy, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or
moral instrument.9
By this account, there are only two alternatives: either to view the work
as if it were eternal, as a quasi-ideal state of affairs transcending his-
tory, or to regard it merely as an expression of and a response to the
concerns of its time (whether then or now).
Brooks’s stated methodological principles suggest, however, that
the historical existence of literature is more complex and contradic-
tory than this opposition implies. His chosen texts “were to be read as
one has learned to read Donne and the moderns. One was to attempt
to see, in terms of this approach, what the masterpieces had in com-
mon rather than to see how the poems of different historical periods
differed — and in particular to see whether they had anything in com-
mon with the ‘metaphysicals’ and with the moderns” (). Brooks’s
argument that “the language of poetry is the language of paradox”
() reenvisions the literary canon through the lens of Donne’s poetics,
a historical act of reinterpretation motivated by T. S. Eliot’s argument
in “The Metaphysical Poets” that the “dissociation of sensibility” from
which modern culture suffers would benet from the metaphysicals’
facility with contradiction, ironic juxtaposition, and wit.10 Brooks has
9 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, ), x – xi.
10 On Eliot, Brooks, and modernism see Kenneth Asher, “T. S. Eliot and the New
Criticism,” Essays in Literature (): – ; John N. Duvall, “Eliot’s Modern-
200 MLQ June 2008
not ascended to a position outside history, then, but is engaged in his-
torically situated acts of reevaluation and reinterpretation. The texts he
interprets offer themselves for this work because they too have a histori-
cal existence as part of the literary canon he inherits and regures.
Instead of moving him outside history, the modernist agenda
behind Brooks’s attempt to read texts sub specie aeternitatis is evidence
of one dimension of the historicity of literature: the acts of interpre-
tation and reinterpretation through which readers receive texts and
pass them on. The danger, however, is that his attempt to emphasize
what his texts have in common may reduce them to the very instru-
ments for present-day concerns (the preoccupations of the New Critics
and modernism) that Brooks wants to transcend by seeking out poetic
universals. In order not to reduce works to his own cultural context,
Brooks needs what he would suppress: a sense of the otherness of a
poem as “an expression of its age” that provides it with the position in
the past from which it addresses the present. Without this otherness,
the dialogue of interpreting the past becomes a monologue of the pres -
ent with itself.
In their famous warnings against the “Intentional Fallacy,” how-
ever, W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley worry that focusing
on the past out of which a poem arose may divert attention from the
poem itself and reduce it to its originating contexts: “The Intentional
Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case
of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by
trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes
of the poem and ends in biography and relativism.” Consequently, “the
poem itself, as an object of specically critical judgment, tends to dis-
appear.”11 A more adequate conception of literature understands that
“the poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the pecu-
liar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object
of public knowledge” ().
ism and Brooks’s New Criticism: Poetic and Religious Thinking,” Mississippi Quarterly
( – ): – ; and Mark Royden Winchell, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Mod-
ern Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ).
11 W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Mean-
ing of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, ), .
Armstrong Form and Histor y 201
In ways that Wimsatt and Beardsley may not have fully appreciated,
however, a work that has a “public” existence is social and historical
through and through. This existence includes the work’s formal dimen-
sions (language is “the peculiar possession of the public,” as Wimsatt
and Beardsley point out) but is not limited to them (ever ything publicly
knowable about “the human being” is, they note, fair game as well).
As a public state of affairs, a literary work may not be reducible to the
psychological or biographical circumstances of its creation. But nei-
ther is it simply an “object” for impartial scrutiny, for what Wimsatt and
Beardsley call “objective criticism” (), which would regard the work
as an autonomous entity, lacking a history with a particular beginning,
a continuation, and, perhaps, an end if it is lost, discarded, destroyed,
or simply no longer read.
Where to mark its beginning is a question of how to dene the
historical existence of the work, not of whether it exists in or out of
time. Not simply an ever-unchanging object, a public work has an inter-
subjective existence as it begins to interact with readers at a particular
moment and then continues (or ceases) to be reinterpreted and passed
on.12 It may be debatable whether an author’s intentions or psychologi-
cal state during a work’s creation is relevant to its interpretation, but to
argue that the work begins its meaningful existence once it is offered
to the world is to recognize that it is a historical, social entity. The prob-
lem for the critic, then, is not whether the work can be interpreted
objectively but how to tell the story of its history, including where this
narrative starts and how (or whether) it should be continued.
Perhaps surprisingly, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s characterization of
the literary work as a public entity is entirely consistent with Stephen
Greenblatt’s well-known explanation of the purpose of the New His-
toricism, namely, to investigate “both the social presence to the world
12 This focus on reading may seem to suffer from what Wimsatt and Beards-
ley call “the Affective Fallacy”: “a confusion between the poem and its results (what
it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually
advanced as if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepticism. It
begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of
the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism” (). My notion of reading as an
intersubjective, social, and historical activity is not merely “psychological,” however,
and the very process of dialogue among readers is a safeguard against “epistemologi-
cal skepticism.” See Conicting Readings, – .
202 MLQ June 2008
of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary
text.”13 This statement of methodological purpose acknowledges both
the formal and the historical dimensions of literature inasmuch as the
“social presence” of the text is mediated through language, including
its manipulation of generic and aesthetic conventions. Yet the concern
with exploring the reciprocal presence of literary text and social world
to one another is a curiously static formulation of the historian’s work.
History entails change, after all, whether continuous or disruptive,
developmental or revolutionary, progressive or random or reactionary.
Louis Montrose is quite explicit, however, about the implied syn-
chronicity of the New Historicism’s “reciprocal concern with the his-
toricity of texts and the textuality of history”: “In effect, this project
reorients the axis of inter-textuality, substituting for the diachronic text
of an autonomous literary history the synchronic text of a cultural sys-
tem.”14 This seems like an apt description, for example, of Greenblatt’s
concern with charting “the circulation of social energy,” a metaphor
that similarly implies a simultaneously existing set of relationships,
whose dynamism is created by the interactions of the elements in the
system.15 As the structuralists once powerfully demonstrated, and as
the interpretive juxtapositions of the New Historicism show in a delib-
erately less systematic, more anecdotal way, a synchronic approach can
lay bare relations or patterns uniting seemingly disparate phenomena
at a particular point in time. But this methodological ction explicitly
brackets out the horizonality of the slice it takes out of time, with the
difculty that it thereby undervalues how the meaning of that moment
is also dened by its participation in processes and events with begin-
nings and ends outside it.16
13 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
14 Louis Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Cul-
ture,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, ), ,
.
15 See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social
Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, ); here-
after cited as SN.
16 As Veeser notes in the introduction to his useful anthology, the New Histori-
cists typically prefer “surprising coincidences” or “bizarre overlappings” to the “over-
Armstrong Form and Histor y 203
arching hypothetical constructs” of the structuralists (xii). This technique of creative
juxtaposition depends methodologically, however, on the same assumption of syn-
chrony that informs the structuralist attempt to decode the comprehensive logic of a
system. See also Richard Lehan, “The Theoretical Limits of the New Historicism,” New
Literary History (): – . On the role of the anecdote in the New Historicism
see Sonja Laden, “Recuperating the Archive: Anecdotal Evidence and Questions of
‘Historical Realism,’ ” Poetics Today (): – .
17 Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” in
New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, ), . Quigley similarly argues that “the initial historically situated
dialogue between reader and text generates further and other dialogue as history
The dynamic eventfulness of history is captured more adequately
by Montrose’s description of a literar y work as productive and performa-
tive: “To speak of the social production of ‘literature’ . . . is to signify
not only that it is socially produced but also that it is socially produc-
tive — that it is the product of work and that it performs work in the
process of being written, enacted, or read” (). These processes of pro-
duction and performance are transhistorical. They occur across time,
and an analysis of the reciprocal presence of text and social world at the
moment of a work’s rst publication will necessarily miss them. As an
entity “produced” in history and also “productive” of history, a literary
work is dened by horizonal relationships with states of affairs that a
synchronic analysis brackets out. This horizon includes a future of read-
ers through, with, and on which the text enacts its effects, beginning
with its rst emergence into the social world. A work can perform and
produce social effects only by existing across history, through transhis-
torical processes of reception that the work cannot completely predict
and control. A fully dynamic, historical conception of literature must
begin with the world that contributed to its production but must then
include its address to and engagement with a future of readers, down
to the present day.
The Historical Meaning of a Literary Work Includes
the History of Its Reception
These are some of the reasons that, as Hans Robert Jauss argues, “the
historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active par-
ticipation of its audience.”17 The history of reception gures less promi-
204 MLQ June 2008
nently than it deserves, however, in most contemporary versions of his-
torical and cultural studies. So it may come as a sur prise that Greenblatt
invokes this dimension of history in explaining the motivation for his
own work: “I began with the desire to speak with the dead ” (SN, ). The
metaphor of “speaking with” interlocutors who are no longer present,
not merely “speaking to” or “speaking for” them, imagines a dialogue
bet ween “meaning-then” and “meaning-now” through which each con-
stitutes the other by reciprocal interaction and exchange. The “dead”
cannot speak without critics in the present to lend them their powers of
expression, which will necessarily reect current assumptions, conven-
tions, and concerns. Hence Greenblatt’s subsequent qualication: “If I
wanted to hear the voice of the other, I had to hear my own voice” (SN,
). But the reason for seeking to speak with the past is that one also
wishes to listen and respond to other voices across the horizon sepa-
rating past and present — to engage in dialogue, with voices then and
now interacting, rather than to pose as a ventriloquist through whom
another voice speaks with minimal distortion, or merely to project one’s
own voice back into the past to hear its echo.18
The dialogical qualities of this conversation between meaning-then
and meaning-now can be difcult to reconcile with the historian’s con-
cern with doing justice to the pastness of the past. A focus on the past
as such is understandable, given the historian’s interest in identifying
unfolds” (). This is not to say, however, that only literary works are preserved in
this way or that the “literary” is dened by preservation. The boundary between the
literary and the nonliterary is a shifting, historical phenomenon, and many nonliterary
texts (legal, political, and even scientic) likewise exist in and through traditions of
reception.
18 See Marshall Brown’s critique of the circularity implied in Greenblatt’s con-
fession that he hears himself when he interrogates the past: “This school, in its obses-
sion with power, authority, display, containment, and subversion, discovers what it
already knew about. . . . We practice literary criticism . . . not when we speak with the
dead, but when we recognize voices interpellating us — literary history as provoca-
tion, to adapt Jauss’s formula” (). Brown’s call to recognize other “voices” suggests
the doubleness of dialogue between meaning-then and meaning-now. In my view,
this call is consistent with the aim of “speaking with,” not as “speaking to” or “speak-
ing for” but as a genuine to and fro between voices in dialogue. Whether Greenblatt
and other historicists achieve such reciprocity, or are guilty of the circularity Brown
criticizes, is another question. If they do not achieve it, then they are not living up to
the epistemological ideal of “speaking with.”
Armstrong Form and Histor y 205
the mutually determining relations in a particular period between a
text and other discursive as well as nondiscursive states of affairs (and
these relations can themselves be multiple and difcult to establish). If
the historicity of the text is a function not only of its pastness but also
of the relation between past and present, however, meaning-then can-
not be the whole story. As Montrose argues, historical interpretation
“necessitates efforts to historicize the present as well as the past, and
to historicize the dialectic between them — those reciprocal historical
pressures by which the past has shaped the present and the present
reshapes the past” ().
A step in the direction of acknowledging the historicity of interpre-
tation is to reect on the contemporary methodological assumptions
(Foucauldian, Marxian, feminist, etc.) that inform one’s guration
of the past. Such moments of self-critical reection are not the same,
however, as a dialogue between past and present in which each tests
and criticizes the other in an exchange that can be mutually trans-
formative. In a truly reciprocal to and fro, it is not only the past that
changes as it is viewed through different perspectives in the present;
the assumptions and aims of present-day methods are also challenged
by their encounter with the past. To articulate the historical situated-
ness of one’s interpretation can be a way of suppressing the voice of the
past by insisting on the primacy and inescapability of current perspec-
tives and concerns. Confessing one’s biases is not the same as question-
ing them.
A historicism too rooted in present interests risks lapsing into a
kind of formalism. As Catherine Gallagher points out: “The actual pro-
cedures of many New Historicist analyses are often not very different
from those of left formalists. We too often take the text as a constant,
the very instability of which is stable across time, so that its historical
impact can be determined from an analysis of its structures and the
logic of their disintegration when set against other discourses.”19 The
19 Catherine Gallagher, “Marxism and the New Historicism,” in Veeser, . By
the term left formalists Gallagher refers to Marxist critics who view literary forms as
potentially politically subversive. She continues: “Historical reception studies are
sometimes suggested as an antidote to such formalism, and, despite the fact that
these often import their own epistemological naivete, they certainly deserve much
more of our attention than they currently receive” (). She unfortunately does not
206 MLQ June 2008
unchanging stability of meaning-then, even when it is the stability of a
self-consuming artifact, can seem like an ahistorical formal constant,
and this circumstance is not altered by acknowledging that its construc-
tion involves the application of current methodologies and concerns.
How is the critic to engage in a genuine dialogue with the past?
Contemporary historical and cultural studies may be skeptical about a
dialogical model of understanding out of a reasonable fear of return-
ing to the old-fashioned notion of “tradition” as the home of “classical”
meanings and values that should be venerated. Such veneration is also
static, however. It is not an exchange based on reciprocity in which the
values, assumptions, and aims of both partners are in play and at risk.20
Nevertheless, the dominance of various hermeneutics of unmasking in
contemporary criticism makes it difcult to imagine how to conduct
a dialogue between past and present that is not naively adulatory and
remains aware of its own historical contingency. Without such reciproc-
ity, however, historical criticism is not fully historical.
Formalists also need to take account of the history of reception,
if only because it provides access to their object of study. In Theory of
Literature, the denitive statement of the principles of the New Criti-
cism, René Wellek and Austin Warren dene a work as “a structure
of norms, realized only partially in the actual experience of its many
readers. Every single experience (reading, reciting, and so forth) is only
an attempt — more or less successful and complete — to grasp this set
of norms or standards” (). This conception of a work’s relation to its
reception imagines the work’s meanings and values as self-identically
explain how reception studies risk “epistemological naivete” or whether this danger is
intrinsic or avoidable.
20 My thinking about the history of reception is indebted to Hans-Georg Gadam-
er’s conception of interpretation as a “merger of horizons” between past and present
on the model of “play,” a to and fro that is mutually constituting and ever-changing,
but his notion of the classical as a set of enduring truths and values that emerge
from tradition is not, in my view, sufciently dynamic and pluralistic to do justice to
this epistemology. See Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen
Hermeneutik, rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, ), – , – . Hence his student
Wolfgang Iser’s attempt to develop a theory of play as an open-ended, unpredict-
able exchange that preserves the historical contingency of Gadamer’s model without
its glorication of tradition. See Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary
Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), – .
Armstrong Form and Histor y 207
residing in themselves from the beginning, awaiting a series of imper-
fect realizations, none of them getting it quite right or fully actualizing
the work’s potential.
Although the work’s “structure of norms” seems in this model to
be a formal object independent of interpretation, Wellek and Warren
point out that “it has something which can be called ‘life’ ”:
It arises at a certain point of time, changes in the course of history,
and may perish. A work of art is “timeless” only in the sense that, if pre-
served, it has some fundamental structure of identity since its creation,
but it is “historical” too. It has a development which can be described.
This development is nothing but the series of concretizations of a given
work of art in the course of history which we may, to a certain extent,
reconstruct from the reports of critics and readers about their experi-
ences and judgements and the effect of a given work of art on other
works. ()
The notion that a work “lives” and “develops” calls into question, how-
ever, the stability and independence of its identity. To characterize a
work as an autonomous, always incompletely realized normative struc-
ture is too static a description to explain the many ways that later inter-
pretations can redene those norms and can even nd meanings and
values in a work that were inconceivable at the time of its creation.
So Wellek and Warren slightly but signicantly alter their model,
nevertheless insisting that they are not really changing it: “Still, it could
be scarcely denied that there is a subst antia l identit y of ‘structure’ which
has remained the same throughout the ages. This structure, however,
is dynamic: it changes throughout the process of history while passing
through the minds of its readers, critics, and fellow artists. Thus the sys-
tem of norms is growing and changing and will remain, in some sense,
always incompletely and imperfectly realized” ( – ). If this “struc-
ture” is indeed “dynamic,” a product of a dialogue between readers and
text in which the work itself “grows” and “changes,” then it is not an
essential, invariant standard — a self-identical “structure of norms” that
is “incompletely and imperfectly realized” in any particular concreti-
zation. Rather, a work so dened is a historical state of affairs whose
“incompleteness” is its openness to a future of interpretations that it
cannot fully encompass in advance.
A more adequate way of conceptualizing a work’s paradoxical exis-
208 MLQ June 2008
tence, dependent on a history of interpretations but also not reducible
to them, is to stop thinking of the work as an autonomous formal struc-
ture and to regard it instead as a “heteronomous” eld. A character in
a novel or a play is heteronomous to the sentences through which he
or she is created in the sense that the character would not exist with-
out them but nevertheless transcends them (so that we can talk about
Hamlet or Isabel Archer as if they were persons, without referring to
the semantic acts that gave rise to them, or even without having read
Hamlet or The Portrait of a Lady at all). A literary work is similarly het-
eronomous to the interpretations through which its meanings, forms,
and values are concretized over its history of reception, inasmuch as it
depends on those interpretations for its very being but is not reducible
to them and has an existence that goes beyond them.21
The notion of heteronomy preserves the otherness of a text that
Wellek and Warren emphasize in describing the text as a “normative”
entity (consisting of instructions about how to construe it, or rules that
must be obeyed), but it also acknowledges that these norms are vari-
able and historical. A heteronomous entity transcends any particular
interpretation, which is nothing more or less than an interpretation of
it. On the one hand, the of of interpretation is its directedness toward a
state of affairs other than itself that it seeks to recognize and respond to.
On the other hand, the of suggests the contribution of the interpreta-
tion to what it construes, inasmuch as the norms that the interpret ation
recognizes exist only through acts of construal that constitute the text
as a text “of” an interpretation of one kind or another. This model of
textuality also accounts more adequately than the notion of autono-
mous norms for the fact that the pressures to which an interpreter must
respond are a product not only of forms and meanings she or he discov-
ers “there,” “in” the text, but also of other interpretations that have con-
stituted the work previously and are therefore part of its heteronomous
existence. Who Hamlet or Isabel Archer is, for example, is a matter not
only of sentences that interpreters with opposing hermeneutic perspec-
tives may construe differently but also of what other interpreters have
said about those characters. When interpreters construe a heterono-
21 For a fuller explanation of textual heteronomy see Conicting Readings,
– .
Armstrong Form and Histor y 209
22 K. Anthony Appiah, “Humane, All Too Humane,” Profession, , .
mous text, they are responding not only to an otherness in the text
that they seek to recognize but also to a history of interpretations that
has handed the text on in particular ways that a reading may accept
or contest but cannot ignore because they are “there” in how the work
presents itself at that specic, contingent moment.
According to this conception, a literary work is more like a eld of
interconnected but disparate positions than like a self-contained, inde-
pendent entity. This eld has boundaries (not everything belongs to it,
such as other works or misinterpretations), although they can change
(what was once considered a wrong reading can later be regarded as
permissible, and vice ver sa). Even more, some posit ions wit hin these bor-
ders may contradict one another (a literary work is sometimes dened
by the very disagreements in interpretation that make up its history of
reception). Not invariant structures awaiting concretization, the forms
of a literary work are heteronomous because they are historical.
Reading Literature Entails a Response to Value and Form
An interpretation of a work both discovers and creates the norms it con-
strues, and this duality animates the history of reception as a process
that preserves the past by ever reevaluating and reconguring it. As K.
Anthony Appiah points out, “Not any old pot or painting or verse is wor-
thy of sustained attention.”22 A judgment of value, he argues, is implicit
in our response to the past. By reading and studying works transmitted
from earlier periods, we testify to our belief that “much of what was
done then is worth understanding for its own sake — not because it
explains the present or because it illuminates the universal — worth
understanding, worth knowing, and therefore worth passing on” ().
Disagreements about worth are inescapable, however, and are typically
key issues in the history of reception. This history is a conversation
among interpreters about what merits transmission from the past to
the present into the future, for what reasons, based on judgments about
what kinds of constructions matter and should be preserved because of
this or that sort of value that they are seen to have. Value and form are
historical not only because they go beyond the present moment that
210 MLQ June 2008
receives and retransmits them but also because they are contingent
products of ever-changing acts of interpretation and judgment.
One of the most signicant contemporary challenges to the notion
of the literary canon as a repository of meanings and values worth pre-
ser ving because they have stood the test of time is John Guillory’s argu-
ment that what is really at stake in disputes about canon formation is
the control, “constitution, and distribution of cultural capital” — that
is, “access to the means of literary production and consumption” and
to “a kind of knowledge-capital” that “entitles its possessor to the cul-
tural and material rewards of the well- educated person.”23 To point out
that acts of aesthetic judgment participate in various power relations
is, however, by no means to contend that they do not matter. Quite the
contrary: as Guillory argues, “The specicity of aesthetic judgment is
not on this view simply an illusion to be exploded, but rather a privi-
leged site for reimagining the relation between the cultural and the
economic in social life” (xiv). Aesthetic evaluation becomes more rather
than less important when one recognizes the cultural work it does and
the political stakes it may involve. Indeed, “the most politically strategic
argument for revising the canon remains the argument that the works
so revalued are important and valuable cultural works” (xiv).
To contest the ownership and denition of “cultural capital” is
not to argue that all cultural objects are equal in worth (however that
is dened, which is usually one of the issues in dispute). It is, rather,
to claim that previously disenfranchised candidates for inclusion are
more worthy of attention than was once recognized and that the works
they would displace are less valuable than they were once thought. The
social status and political power that cultural capital conveys may be
at stake, but these disputes still nevertheless concern how to make aes-
thetic judgments, including the reasons for regarding some works as
more worthy than others of being studied and passed on.
The political implications of such disagreements do not by them-
selves make conicts about value irrational. The “rationality” of aes-
thetic evaluation is the process of exchanging reasons about what to
value and how to dene worth, a process in which the very meaning
23 John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, ), ix.
Armstrong Form and Histor y 211
of the aesthetic is typically at issue. The requirement that one artic-
ulate and defend one’s arguments about worth is the basis of their
rationality, not their ability to win universal agreement or to provide
denitive proof (neither of which is usually possible, or else the his-
tory of reception would stop). Social interests and power differentials
can disrupt disputation and interfere with what Jürgen Habermas calls
“the unforced force of the better argument” in adjudicating disagree-
ments.24 The exchange of reasons is enhanced to the extent that an
analysis and evaluation of the political consequences of the judgments
at issue can be explicitly included in the disputation. It is impaired,
conversely, to the extent that relevant if not immediately evident politi-
cal interests and aims are not submitted to review (which may happen
even when they are identied because of privileges and powers not
subject to effective challenge).
Arguments about the politics of aesthetic judgment should attune
us to the competing factors at work in the process of evaluation. Only
if these forces and interests are articulated can they become part of the
debate or be understood for what they are: expressions of the will to
power of the combatants and their actual or aspirational dominance.
No interpretive conicts ever take place outside other power relations,
and so assessment is never perfectly rational. But to recognize the
potentially disruptive pressures affecting aesthetic judgments is not to
dismiss them as mere epiphenomena in contests for status or domi-
nance. It is, rather, to understand how evaluation does cultural work.
The aesthetic experience, dened as a response to form, is part of
this work. As Guillory notes, “There is no cultural product . . . which
does not possess form, and therefore no way to experience cultural
objects without having aesthetic experience” (). The response to
cultural forms may participate in other social processes of making dis-
tinctions and regulating access to power and privilege, but it does so as
an aesthetic experience. To show that a hammer has a particular social
and technological history has nothing to do with its ability to drive a
nail (although the activity of reecting about and narrating that history
may interfere with one’s employment of the tool). Analogously, to point
24 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans.
Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, ), .
212 MLQ June 2008
out that the reader’s experience of literary works as literature — in their
aesthetic dimension, as meaningful forms — participates in cultural
processes of distributing and regulating cultural capital leaves the aes-
thetic as such intact (although, similarly, theorizing the aesthetic expe-
rience may get in the way of having one).
It may be more difcult to dene the aesthetic or the literary than
to identify the characteristics of a hammer, but to recognize the his-
torical contingency and the contestedness of these categories does not
mean that they do not exist or that we do not have aesthetic experi-
ences or responses to literary form. It simply means that what counts as
aesthetic and literary is variable and subject to conicting interpreta-
tions and so may be experienced in different ways at different points
in history by different communities.25 How to dene literary form and
which forms to value as worthy of attention and preservation, accord-
ing to which conceptions of the aesthetic, are all matters for discussion
and disputation as part of the history of reception. The fact that litera-
ture and literary value are multivalent and open to endless contestation
does not make them mere gments. It means, rather, that they exist
historically. They have a history because they are experienced in differ-
ent ways as aesthetic experiences in the variable, historically situated
act of reading.
The Form of a Literary Work Is Integral to Its Moral,
Social, and Political Meaning
To explain how literature does political and social work, we must take
into account its forms and their effects. Its ability to perform political,
social, and cultural functions is not merely or even primarily a matter
of its content, its moral and social meanings, but also a function of how
it is made and how its forms engage and challenge the audience’s cus-
tomary modes of perception and signication, its habitual conventions
for interpretation and communication. This is why, as Jauss points out,
25 See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for
Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). See also my analy-
sis in Conicting Readings, – , which attempts to preserve Smith’s notion of the
variability of value while rejecting her radical epistemological skepticism and instead
understanding evaluation as a pluralistic but limited, rational phenomenon.
Armstrong Form and Histor y 213
formal innovations in and of themselves can have political and ethi-
cal effects: “A literary work with an unusual aesthetic form can shatter
the expectations of its reader and at the same time confront him [or
her] with a question which cannot be answered by religiously or pub-
licly sanctioned morals” (). Literary forms can have social and moral
signicance of this kind because they can reinforce or question other
structures through which readers perceive the world and interact with
one another.
The ethical or political functions performed by a literary work are
not constants, however, but will vary as they are differently engaged.
Texts address a future they cannot predict and control, and they may
be taken up and retransmitted in ways that meet needs and respond to
conditions they could not have anticipated. This future is already part
of a work’s or iginal circumstances, inasmuch as it anticipates being read
from the moment it enters the public sphere. Emphasizing the futurity
of the text, Jauss notes that “there are works which at the moment of
their publication are not directed at any specic audience, but which
break through the familiar horizon of literary expectations so com-
pletely that an audience can only gradually develop for them” ().
Jauss’s formulation is too static, however, if it implies a preset meaning
and ignores potentialities inconceivable at the time of creation. Noth-
ing is certain except that works will be read in ways that their authors
cannot imagine. This open-ended contingency is essential to the ability
of works to survive and be transmitted to and read by audiences that do
not yet exist, with conventions for understanding and social needs and
moral concerns that no writer can fully anticipate.
No style has an intrinsic political value. Different audiences can
see different possibilities and dangers in particular forms. Guillory
is correct, for example, that “the meaning of simplicity and difculty
as qualities of poetic language cannot be resolved into unambiguous
political oppositions” (). “Simple” forms can be regarded as pro-
gressive because they are accessible, potentially popular, and therefore
democratic — or as reactionary because they may be all-too-easily con-
sumed in the manner of commodities in a capitalist economy. Analo-
gously, “difcult” forms can seem inaccessible, elitist, and consequently
undemocratic and reactionary — or they can be understood to offer
tonic resistance to bourgeois conventions and to the commodication
214 MLQ June 2008
of culture, thereby denaturalizing everyday habits and perceptions and
calling attention to the power relations embodied in them. Literary
forms can do political work, but the work they do depends on how they
are used, and use is historically variable.
The reader’s response to a work’s value may (and sometimes
must) include an assessment of its political and ethical attitudes.26 It
is obviously not the case that useful lessons or inspiring messages by
themselves make good art or that stupid, supercial, or even repulsive
moral and political content is always by itself sufcient to spoil a work’s
artistic value. These matters are also, of course, historically contingent.
The moral and social meaning that one audience may nd offensive
or unacceptably radical may come to seem unexceptionable and even
trite to another; or an attitude (say, toward women, blacks, formerly
colonized peoples, or Jews) that was conventional at one time may later
interfere with an appreciation of a work’s formal qualities.
Ethical evaluation is complicated by the fact that moral and social
meaning is presented in literary form. Recognizing this problem,
Roman Ingarden takes the extreme position of denying that the sen-
tences in a literary work have moral or social meaning relevant to the
world outside it. Unlike ordinary assertions that relate to our shared
reality, he argues, these sentences are “quasi-judgments” (Quasi-Urteile)
that only refer internally to various aspects of a ctional world (so that
when it is reported in a novel that someone has been murdered, the
proper response is not to call the police).27 Rather than deprive such
statements of extratextual relevance, however, the very “quasi”-ness of
“quasi-judgments” (how they are both like and not like genuine judg-
ments) suggests that they are characterized by what Paul Ricoeur calls
“split reference.” As an example of this doubleness, Ricoeur cites the
26 For a thoughtful analysis of the ethical dimensions of aesthetic judgment see
Paisley Livingston, “Literary Aesthetics and the Aims of Criticism,” in Theory’s Empire:
An Anthology of Dissent, ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), – . Other important studies of this issue include Tobin
Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Wayne C.
Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California
Press, ); and J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope,
James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, ).
27 See Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk, nd ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
), – .
Armstrong Form and Histor y 215
28 See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation
of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John
Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), – .
29 See Iser, esp. – , for a similar argument about the doubleness of ctional
statements in their relation to the real.
storyteller’s traditional formula “It was and it was not,” a contradictory
assertion that simultaneously claims credibility, authenticity, and verisi-
militude even as it acknowledges that the tale is nothing but a ction.28
This doubleness refers at once to the world constituted by a work’s for-
mal elements and to the world that the author and reader share outside
the text, a world on which the reader draws to make sense of the work
(so that we know what a murder is and why calling the police might be
appropriate) and to which in turn he or she relates the meanings and
values discovered there (e.g., in addition to considering the function
of a corpse in the narrative structure of a detective novel, exploring
whether the conicts among the characters that led to the death of one
of them have anything to say about their social world or about human
beings in general).
Interpreting this split reference calls for evaluating the formal
qualities of a work to understand its moral and social meaning. The
work’s contradictory complexity as a synthesis of meaning and form is
oversimplied either by an unmediated response to the work’s appar-
ent moral or political message or by a denial of the social and ethical
relevance it possesses as a self-enclosed artistic structure. The duality
of split reference requires attention to the ctiveness of ctions — their
artice as formal, aesthetic structures — because this is the means by
which they disclose reality.29
Unmasking Is Not an End in Itself but a Means
to Various Kinds of Revelations
Given the sorts of mystication that literature has been made to serve,
it is perhaps not surprising that a hermeneutics of suspicion has been
the dominant mode of political and social criticism. As Emory Elliott
observes, “The aesthetic is always in danger of being exploited in the
service of individual prejudice or of nationalism, racism, sexism, and
216 MLQ June 2008
classism.”30 If these isms seem tired and clichéd, it is nevertheless true
that there was (and still is) important work to be done in their name to
unmask ideologies and power relations that would otherwise go unno-
ticed and unchallenged. The hermeneutics of unmasking can perform
a variety of useful functions. One of these is, certainly, to disclose the
historicity of aesthetic value — to show how “aesthetic values and prin-
ciples are always changing and are embedded in particular cultures”
and how “notions of human beauty vary depending on the time and
place” (Elliott, , ). The rst step in appreciating the historical and
transhistorical workings of artistic forms is to demystify any claim to
universality that may have become attached to them.
Suspicion alone, however, is not enough to characterize adequately
the social, political, and cultural work that literature does. Terry Eagle-
ton reminds us in The Ideology of the Aesthetic that Marxian dialectics are
informed by a contradictory understanding of how repressive struc-
tures can contain emancipatory moments, even as progressive devel-
opments invariably carry reactionary legacies. According to Eagleton,
the aesthetic must consequently be regarded as “an eminently con-
tradictory phenomenon,” potentially oppressive and emancipatory at
the same time — not only, among other things, an instrument in the
construction and disciplining of bourgeois subjectivity but also, possi-
bly, “an unusually powerful challenge and alternative to . . . dominant
ideological forms.”31 A hermeneutics of unmasking runs the risk of
being insufciently dialectical to capture the contradictory coexistence
and interrelation of repressive and emancipatory elements in the same
state of affairs. To combine suspicion and appreciation and, even more,
to make each support and inform the other — that is the dialectical
ideal.
The alternative is an absence of openness that may prevent us from
learning from literary works and enjoying the pleasures they offer. The
issue is not only, as Levine argues, why we should “read or encourage
the reading of literature” if our “project is to expose its implicit coop-
eration” with political forces we oppose and resist: “In effect, the point
30 Emory Elliott, “Introduction: Cultural Diversity and the Problem of Aesthet-
ics,” in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and
Jeffrey Rhyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), .
31 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, ), .
Armstrong Form and Histor y 217
of reading literature sensitively [for some suspicious critics] is to warn
readers against reading literature.”32 It is also that what Peter Brooks
calls “the arrogance of claiming to know better” may be blinded by its
very will to dominance unless it is “tempered by passage through the
askesis of poetics and reading”: “One cannot claim to speak for the text
until one has attempted to let the text speak through oneself.”33 A cer-
tain humility is required by the reciprocity of dialogue in which reader
and text speak to and with one another in a process of give-and-take.
Otherwise the hermeneutic circle may turn in on itself. If what we nd
in texts depends on our presuppositions and expectations, then a pride-
ful insistence that we know better than the works whose deceptions we
unmask runs the risk of becoming a self-validating solipsism, blind to
contrary evidence or always knowing in advance how to convert it into
conrmation.
The historicity of interpretation calls both for suspicion of a text’s
potential mystications and for appreciative openness to the pleasures
and instruction the text may offer, perhaps in ways that its author could
not have understood or anticipated. Because a literary work addresses
the present from a particular situation in the past, it is appropriate and
even necessary for the interpreter to question the limits of its mean-
ings, values, and self-understanding that give evidence of its originating
context. In the very act of speaking to future readers, however, literary
works reach across the horizon that delimits their original situation
and, in the process, may themselves seek to expose its constraints and
offer meanings and values that go beyond them, even if the capacity of
works to do so is restricted by their historical circumstances.34 Inter-
preters will miss this dynamic of self-transcendence unless they hold
themselves open to the possibility that texts can engage their historical
circumstances, not only formally but also socially and morally, to create
32 George Levine, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in Levine, Aesthetics
and Ideology, .
33 Peter Brooks, “Aesthetics and Ideology — What Happened to Poetics?” in
Levine, Aesthetics and Ideology, .
34 Hence, for example, Edward W. Said’s argument that there are “two Conrads”
in Heart of Darkness, one captive of the racial prejudices of Victorian imperialism and
another depicting the falsehood and oppression of those same attitudes in a scath-
ing indictment of the crimes of Leopold’s Congo (Culture and Imperialism [New York:
Knopf, ], – ).
218 MLQ June 2008
new meanings and values that reveal and seek to exceed the limitations
of their day. A combination of suspicion and revelation is necessary for
one to do justice to the historical dynamic of interpretation as a cross-
ing of temporal horizons.
This duality can be practiced in different ways, by critics with differ-
ing agendas, informed by differing interests and aims. Deploying doubt
and belief in a mutually instructive manner is not a means for achieving
a nal assessment on which all will agree but is, rather, an ever-variable
activity through which understanding and appreciation may continue
to evolve. Nor is aligning suspicion and appreciation solely a question
of how to understand a text’s semantic content. Literary form can also
function doubly, either as a disguise, as a structure of mystication and
deception, or as a horizon-altering conguration that extends previous
modes of perception and signication.
Directing suspicion toward a text and holding oneself open to its
revelations cannot be done simultaneously. Just as one cannot see the
rabbit and the duck at the same time in the well-known gestalt that
can support both interpretations, but must alternate between mutually
exclusive modes of conguration, so the trick of literary interpretation
is to go back and forth between opposing attitudes in ways that are
mutually informative and ultimately constructive rather than frustrat-
ing or paralyzing.35 What is required is a reformulation of a well-known
version of the hermeneutic circle, which stipulates that one must under-
stand to believe, even as one must believe to understand. The rst part
of this formula (understanding to believe) means that one must criti-
cize, demystify, and suspect to be able to nd pleasure and instruction
in a text. But the second (believing to understand) points out that one
can have nothing to demystify and no work for suspicion to do without
opening oneself to a text’s revelations, meanings, and values.36
The reason to ask hard questions about the limits of a text’s self-
35 See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Repre-
sentation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), .
36 See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans.
Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ), esp. – . Although
Ricoeur’s notion of belief is ultimately theological (his nal object of interpretation
is the “Wholly Other”), his formulation of the hermeneutic issues at stake can be put
to secular use, as I intend here.
Armstrong Form and Histor y 219
understanding is that one wants to know whether the text has anything
to say that is worth preserving. One must believe that it does for sus-
picious interpretation to matter. The goal of demystication should
be not the pride of epistemological superiority, a potentially solipsistic
dead end, but the revelations and the pleasures that a text may offer
and that one can trust and accept and appreciate only because they
have withstood skeptical critique.
Engaging in a dialogue with the past means conducting oneself
as an interlocutor who takes the other seriously, who is wary of having
one’s good faith taken advantage of even as one opens oneself to the
unpredictable and potentially transformative to and fro of a recipro-
cal, open-ended exchange. Such an interlocutor is duly suspicious of
the mystications, deceptions, and manipulations that can undermine
such encounters. But he or she also desires to listen to what the other
has to say, valuing it as a contribution worth paying attention to and
handing on to other interlocutors. The ethical and hermeneutic chal-
lenge in such a conversation is to be receptive but also tough-minded;
to be humble and open but also wary and critical; to keep faith that
new meanings and values worth cherishing and preserving can come
into the world, but for that very reason to exercise suspicion about the
abuses and deceptions to which the aesthetic realm, like all human
endeavors, can fall prey.
Paul B. Armstrong is professor of English at Brown University. His most recent book
is Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (2005). He
is also editor of the fourth Norton Critical Edition of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart
of Darkness (2006). He is currently at work on a book on Bloomsbury and the
1930s. His essay “Being ‘Out of Place’: Edward W. Said and the Contradictions of
Cultural Differences” appeared in the March 2003 issue of MLQ.
