The road to Xanadu led to Mars: Why structuralism sent me there but the profession went elsewhere

I've issued a new working paper. Title above, download, abstract, contexts, and introduction below:

Download at:

Academica.edu: https://www.academia.edu/50780325/The_road_to_Xanadu_led_to_Mars_Why_structuralism_sent_me_there_but_the_profession_went_elsewhere
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3901083
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353755798_The_road_to_Xanadu_led_to_Mars_Why_structuralism_sent_me_there_but_the_profession_went_elsewhere

Abstract: Academic literary criticism has become centered on the interpretation of meaning in literary texts. As a consequence, the profession has no consensus account of what texts are or what form is. By following tentative interest in structuralism, semiotics, and linguistics to the analysis of “Kubla Khan” I moved deep into the cognitive sciences with an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That effectively removed me from the profession, which continued to pursue a wide variety of interpretive approaches. A 21st century discipline would retain interpretation as ethical criticism while incorporating other approaches as description, naturalistic, and computational criticism.
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.17288.75521

Contents

If this is a paradigm shift, how can it be understood? 2
The problematics of text, form, and diagrams 5
Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the word illusion 10
The word illusion in literary criticism 12
The failure of structuralism and linguistics: Why did academic literary criticism turn its back on intellectual opportunity in the mid-1970s? [and why did I ignore the profession?] 17
Jakobson’s poetic function and textual closure 30
Literary studies for the Twenty-First Century 34
Appendix 1: A short chronology of career events 39
Appendix 2: Cognitive science and literary theory, 1948-1999 40

If this is a paradigm shift, how can it be understood?

I have characterized my career in the following fanciful way:

In the early 1970s I discovered that “Kubla Khan” had a rich, marvelous, and fantastically symmetrical structure. I'd found myself intellectually. I knew what I was doing. I had a specific intellectual mission: to find the mechanisms behind “Kubla Khan.” As defined, that mission failed, and still has not been achieved some 40 odd years later. It's like this: If you set out to hitch rides from New York City to, say, Los Angeles, and don't make it, well then your hitch-hike adventure is a failure. But if you end up on Mars instead, just what kind of failure is that? Yeah, you’re lost. Really lost. But you’re lost on Mars! How cool is that!

Of course, it might not actually be Mars. It might just be an abandoned set on a studio back lot.

I have all but concluded that I have indeed landed on Mars, rather then being lost in an abandoned movie studio. But I would like to know how it happened: There we were back in the 1960s and 1970s, all set to explore the lands that structuralism laid before us, and I end up in a strange and different place while the others more or less abandoned structuralism and ended up where they had started, but facing the other way, any other way, and spinning elegantly in circles.

I two reasons for having chosen this rather fanciful way of characterizing my career. Fanciful though it is, it does give a reasonable sense of how I see things. And the fancy blunts the embarrassing fact that I have to talk about myself so much. I can’t help it. I don’t approach the study of literature the way other literary critics do. I want to know why. The only way to figure that out is to look at what I do and what they do.

The times they are a changing

If I talk of a paradigm shift, I do so because “paradigm” seems to be the word we use to characterize the difference between how I think about literary texts and phenomena and how most members of the profession do. The difference between us is paradigmatic.

Of course, as Thomas Kuhn used the word in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms are communal conceptual objects. An intellectual discipline or some substantial group of thinkers within the discipline has a paradigm, a way of construing the world so as to interrogate the world and establish answers. In this case the discipline in question is academic literary criticism. And literary criticism perhaps best thought of as a family of closely related paradigms, if indeed the term is at all appropriate, as Kuhn was talking about science, not intellectual life in the large, though others have generalized from his use of the term. But that’s a quibble.

Given that use, it’s rather, grand, shall we say, for me to talk about my paradigm. One adherent does not a paradigm make. As I said, this is a bit embarrassing. But I do approach the study of literature a bit differently than other critics. I want to understand how and why that difference came about.

Back in the early 1970s, when I was still a graduate student, I was more or less aligned with many of my fellow critics in the pursuit of textual meaning. In the processing of thinking about why interpretations for a given text seemed to proliferate rather than converge the profession entered a period of methodological reflection that included an interest in structuralism, semiotics, and linguistics. I followed that interest and went beyond it, deep into the cognitive sciences. For the most part, however, those others who had been interested in structuralism had abandoned it by the early 1980s in favor of post-structuralism, deconstruction, or something else. To be sure some critics pursued narratology, which has affinities with structuralism, but those are a small minority within the profession.

How did that happen? Why? I suppose I could assert that I am brilliant and creative while the profession is populated by hide-bound clerks. But, aside from the fact that that is not true, it wouldn’t explain anything. What did I see that others did not, or, if you will, why did I pursue it further than others did? Correlatively what interested them that was not so compelling to me? Those questions require fairly specific answers, answers that allow everyone to come out of this story with a some measure of dignity.

On the one hand there is the fact that I have written papers that are quite unlike others offered within the discipline; I mention some of them in the text and in the footnotes of the section, “The failure of structuralism and linguistics.” All of the ones I mention in that section, save working papers on ring-composition (and on Heart of Darkness) have been published in the formal literature. Publication does not mean acceptance as gospel truth, it means only that the work is judged worthy of consideration by other professionals. But I have yet to convince other professionals to take up some of the methods I use in those papers. More importantly, as far as I know, others have not arrived independently at them. Why not?

What’s in the rest of this document?

I make my major argument in the longest section of this working paper: “The failure of structuralism and linguistics: Why did academic literary criticism turn its back on intellectual opportunity in the mid-1970s? [and why did I ignore the profession?].” Since all of the sections in this paper were originally written as independent blog posts, you may choose to read that without reading any of the others.

But I have included them for various reasons. Actually, come to think of it, I have included them for one reason: They are about the problematic nature of the concepts of both text and form within what I am calling standard literary criticism. Neither concept is problematic for me. But then I don’t use them to mean quite the same thing.

Let’s take them up in order:

The problematics of text, form, and diagrams: I look at an apology that Mark Rose offered for including simple diagrams in a discussion of Shakespeare plays. I take the fact of that apology as evidence of the profession’s (informal) norms about proper intellectual method. But why would such simple diagrams raise suspicions?

Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the word illusion: This one and the next one are about something I have come to call the word illusion, a term I use to refer to the fact that what we see on the page (or hear in the air) is only a word form, not the word-in-full, complete with meaning and syntactic affordances. That turns out to be the key concept in this paper. I this post I talk about the role dictionaries and encyclopedias play in fostering and supporting the word illusion.

The word illusion in literary criticism: The word illusions opens the way to problematic conceptions of both the text and literary form. Though such conceptions are central to the discipline, it has no consensus accounts of either.

The failure of structuralism and linguistics: Why did academic literary criticism turn its back on intellectual opportunity in the mid-1970s? [and why did I ignore the profession?]: I suspect that text and form only became problematic after the structuralist collapse, that is, after literary criticism had to rationalize its willingness to countenance the world illusion, as I call it. All the elaborate theoretical language serves the purpose of saying that we are not fooled by words. The professions made tentative gestures toward structuralism, semiotics, and linguistics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is an account of why, in following those gestures I abandoned standard interpretive methodologies in favor of the nascent cognitive sciences while the profession felt it was necessary to truncate those gestures in favor of the interpretive approaches that came to be known as Theory.

Jakobson’s poetic function and textual closure: I re-interpret Jakobson’s poetic function in terms of computation as the governing process in reading a text.

Literary studies for the Twenty-First Century: Would consist of five interlinked fields of activity: infrastructure (preparation of texts, corpora, etc.), ethical criticism, description, naturalist criticism, and computational criticism.

Appendix 1: A short chronology of career events: From 1972 (my master’s thesis at Hopkins) through the present; this chronology can be used as a means of linking events described in “The failure of structuralism and linguistics” with events in a related working paper, Crisis Among HUMANITIES DISCIPLINES in the Twenty-First Century.

Appendix 2: Cognitive science and literary theory, 1948-1999: A parallel list of significant texts in the two intellectual domains.