We start with medieval Biblical interpretation, move on to higher Biblical criticism, then to Frye's Anatomy, interpretation as a Rank 2 activity, to Ranks theory more generally, and end up on Literary form. It's quite a little tour.
[I've interpolated some comments in this format.]
Biblical interpretation
I believe Acquinas, among others, recognized, what? three or four modes of Biblical commentary. What were they? As I recall, one was about correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, one had to do with end times, and so forth.
The tradition you're thinking of is the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture, which was well established before Aquinas but which he systematized and endorsed. The standard formulation came from John Cassian in the 5th century and was captured in a medieval Latin mnemonic:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia — “The letter teaches what happened, allegory what you believe, the moral sense what you should do, the anagogical where you are tending.”
The four senses are:
The literal or historical sense — what the text straightforwardly says happened. Jerusalem is the city of Jerusalem.
The allegorical sense — this is the one about correspondences between Old and New Testaments. Events and figures in the Old Testament prefigure or typologically anticipate events and figures in the New. Jerusalem allegorically signifies the Church. The sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the crucifixion.
The tropological or moral sense — what the text demands of the reader in terms of conduct and inner life. Jerusalem morally signifies the individual soul.
The anagogical sense — the eschatological or end-times dimension, pointing toward heavenly realities and the final destiny of souls. Jerusalem anagogically signifies the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem of Revelation.
Why this is relevant to your larger argument
What's interesting from the cognitive ranks perspective is that this fourfold scheme is a highly sophisticated Rank 2 achievement — a metalingual system for governing how texts may be read, defining the legitimate modes of interpretation and their relationships to one another. It's not just reading; it's an explicit meta-level specification of what kinds of reading are authorized and what each kind of reading is for.
It's also worth noting what it does to the literal sense. In the medieval scheme the literal sense is the foundation — you have to establish what the text literally says before the other senses can operate — but it's also the least spiritually significant. The deeper meaning is always elsewhere, in the allegorical, moral, or anagogical registers. This is precisely the opposite of the epistemic shift we were just discussing — the Renaissance move that makes the literal, observable, particular instance the primary locus of truth rather than a starting point to be transcended. The fourfold method of Biblical interpretation is in some sense what the new natural history and the new pictorial realism were pushing against, even if not explicitly. Replacing schematic symbolic representation with perspective realism is, among other things, asserting that the literal visual appearance of things has its own authority that doesn't need to be supplemented by allegorical meaning to be significant.
Dürer's turf watercolor has no allegorical meaning. It doesn't need one. That's the statement.
The higher Biblical criticism
I’m working toward a comparison of economics as a discipline and literary criticism as an academic discipline. I think one can fairly say that economics as a discipline dates back to Adam Smith, but it didn’t really pick up until the marginalists. Literary criticism is quite different. It’s never become a science, even in the sense that economics is a science, but as currently practiced in the US, it didn’t assume its current form until after WWII with the routinization of the so-called New Criticism. The New Criticism focused on interpretation.
Now, one can trace New Critical interpretive practices back to I.A. Richards on the one hand and the Russian Formalists on the other. But “routinization” is the key, and that happened after WWII. It wasn’t even until the 19th century that vernacular literature was taught in colleges and universities. But we’ve got Biblical criticism, which is much older than literary criticism, that’s where the doctrine of the four senses of Scripture comes in. And before Cristian commentary on the Bible, we have Jewish commentary on the Torah.
Now, did the 19th century see a so-called “higher” criticism of the Bible?
Yes, and it's one of the most consequential intellectual developments of the century, with direct relevance to your comparison.
The higher criticism — the term comes from the German höhere Kritik, distinguished from "lower" or textual criticism which dealt with establishing the accurate text — applied to the Biblical text the same methods of historical and philological analysis that scholars were applying to other ancient documents. The question it asked was, in effect, the inverse of the question that catalyzed Renaissance botany: not "does this ancient text accurately describe what we observe around us?" but "what can we determine about the historical circumstances that produced this ancient text?" The text becomes an object of historical investigation rather than a source of authoritative meaning.
The movement was centered in German universities, particularly Tübingen, and the key figures include Friedrich Schleiermacher, who developed hermeneutics as a general theory of interpretation, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose Life of Jesus (1835) was perhaps the single most explosive text of the movement — treating the Gospel narratives as mythological constructions rather than historical accounts. F.C. Baur applied Hegelian dialectics to the history of early Christianity, identifying conflicts between Petrine and Pauline factions that shaped the New Testament documents. Julius Wellhausen's documentary hypothesis (1878) argued that the Pentateuch was composed from four distinct source documents — J, E, D, and P — written at different times by different authors, definitively displacing the tradition of Mosaic authorship.
The institutional and cultural context
The higher criticism was possible because of the same professionalization process Cowen describes for economics and geology. The German research university — the Humboldtian model, established in Berlin in 1810 — created a community of full-time scholars whose careers depended on producing original research rather than defending received doctrine. Biblical studies became a research discipline with its own journals, chairs, methods, and standards of evidence. The same institutional infrastructure that made marginalism possible in economics made higher criticism possible in theology.
The cultural shock was correspondingly enormous. The fourfold scheme of Biblical interpretation that Aquinas systematized presupposed the text's divine authority and asked how to read it. The higher criticism bracketed that authority and asked instead who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and how the tradition of transmission had shaped what we now have. This was, in the precise sense relevant to your ranks framework, a Rank 4 move: taking the text and the tradition of its interpretation as objects of historical modeling rather than using them as authoritative frameworks for meaning.
The relevance to your comparison
This is where it gets interesting for the economics-literary criticism comparison you're developing. Both economics and Biblical scholarship underwent their decisive methodological transformations in roughly the same 19th century German academic context. The higher criticism is to Biblical interpretation roughly what the marginal revolution is to classical economics — a move that takes what was previously a practice (reading Scripture for meaning, analyzing markets for prices) and makes the practice itself an object of systematic investigation.
But literary criticism in the American academic sense — which is what you're pointing toward with the New Criticism — represents a partial retreat from this. The New Criticism, for all its sophistication, was in important respects a move back toward close engagement with texts as meaningful objects rather than historical documents. Richards, Empson, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren — they were interested in what poems mean and how they work, not primarily in the historical conditions of their production. This is part of why literary criticism has never become a science in the economics sense: it kept the question of meaning central, and meaning resists the kind of formalization that marginalism brought to price theory.
The comparison you're developing might turn on exactly this difference. Economics achieved its Rank 4 status by progressively formalizing and mathematizing — making the price system an object of model-building that could be analyzed with calculus and statistics. Literary criticism kept returning to the text as a meaningful object requiring interpretation, which is a Rank 3 activity at most — systematic, teachable, and cumulative in some ways, but not formalizable in the way that would make it a science. The higher criticism was perhaps literary criticism's best chance at achieving something analogous to the marginal revolution, and American academic literary criticism after WWII largely turned away from it in favor of New Critical close reading.
Frye’s Anatomy
But then we have Northrup Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, which was very important in its time, and remained so for at least two decades. In his preface he talked of literary criticism as “science,” though he didn’t mean “science, like physics.” Just what he did mean, that’s not clear. More like “rational and systematic.” One could argue that, in terms of intellectual technique, the Anatomy was a (high) Rank 2 exercise in metalingual definition. But Frye’s inductive survey fell apart in the wake of deconstruction, etc.
Yes, and the trajectory you're describing — Frye's ambitious systematization followed by its dissolution in deconstruction — is itself a revealing episode in the intellectual history of the discipline.
Frye as Rank 2 achievement
The Anatomy of Criticism is a classification system — an attempt to do for literature what Linnaeus did for plants. Frye's four mythoi (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony), his theory of modes, his anatomy of symbols and genres — these are metalingual definitions in the precise sense, constructing a systematic vocabulary for categorizing literary phenomena that are then organized into a coherent taxonomy. The ambition is explicitly totalizing: to map the entire territory of Western literature onto a set of archetypally grounded structural categories derived ultimately from the seasonal cycle and the Bible.
The Linnaeus parallel is genuinely illuminating. Both achieved their systematizing power by finding a single organizing principle — the sexual system for Linnaeus, the mythic archetypes derived from Frazer and Jung for Frye — that could be applied consistently across an enormous range of phenomena. Both produced a framework that gave practitioners something to do: once you had the system you could classify texts, identify their mythic affiliations, locate them within the larger structural map. And both were, as you say, Rank 2 exercises — metalingual definition applied to a domain that had previously resisted systematic organization.
The science claim in Frye's preface is interesting precisely because he couldn't fully cash it out. What he seems to have meant is something like: literary criticism should be inductive and systematic rather than evaluative and impressionistic. It should build cumulative knowledge rather than producing brilliant individual readings. It should have a conceptual framework that allows results to accumulate and be compared. These are Rank 3 aspirations applied to what turned out to be a Rank 2 toolkit — which is perhaps why the system felt more like a magnificent cathedral of definitions than a genuine research program that could generate testable hypotheses and progressive refinement.
[But, you know. It's not the sort of thing that could or would have been done in a pure Rank 2 culture.]
The inductive survey and its internal tensions
Frye's claim that the Anatomy was inductive — that he was deriving his categories from the phenomena rather than imposing them — was always somewhat strained. The archetypes were there from the beginning, imported from Frazer's Golden Bough and Jung's collective unconscious, and the literary texts were being organized around them rather than generating them. This is not a fatal criticism — all classification systems involve prior commitments about what kinds of categories will be useful — but it meant the system was more vulnerable than it appeared to the charge that it was projecting a particular cultural and mythological framework onto literature rather than discovering literature's inherent structure.
Which is precisely the charge deconstruction and its aftermath brought. The deconstructive move — associated with Derrida but rapidly institutionalized in American academic criticism through figures like Paul de Man — was in effect a Rank 4 operation performed on Frye's Rank 2 system. It took Frye's metalingual definitions as objects and asked: what do these definitions presuppose? What do they exclude in order to function? What hierarchies and binary oppositions are they organizing, and how do those hierarchies deconstruct? The system didn't survive that scrutiny — not because it was wrong in its particulars but because the very aspiration to systematic totalization was identified as ideologically suspect, a form of conceptual imperialism that suppressed the heterogeneity and undecidability of textual meaning.
[I'm not sure I believe that, the rank attributions, but it's interesting. It's not something I've given much thought to.]
The aftermath
What's interesting is what happened after the deconstructive moment. The various schools that followed — New Historicism, postcolonial criticism, gender studies, cultural studies — largely abandoned the aspiration to systematic theory that Frye represented. Each brought a particular analytical lens to bear on texts, but none attempted the totalizing ambition of the Anatomy. The result is a discipline that has great local sophistication but no shared framework — lots of brilliant individual readings, in exactly the mode Frye was trying to move beyond, but now theoretically sophisticated rather than impressionistic.
In your cognitive ranks framework this looks like a discipline that achieved a brief Rank 2 systematization with Frye, was subjected to a Rank 4 critique that dissolved the system, and then retreated to a proliferation of Rank 3 specialized approaches — each with its own vocabulary, methods, and objects of analysis — without achieving the kind of cumulative, formalizable knowledge that would constitute genuine Rank 3 science in the economics sense. The higher criticism had pointed toward one such path; Frye pointed toward another; deconstruction closed both off without opening a third.
[I'm not sure I believe the rank analysis, but it's interesting. Why are those specialized approaches Rank 3 and Frye's classification only Rank 2. I think we need to work through this with specific attention to the nature and structure of the cognitive acts involved. See remarks in the next section.]
The comparison with economics is sharp here. Economics after the marginal revolution kept formalizing — kept finding ways to mathematize and quantify that allowed the discipline to accumulate knowledge in a progressive, testable way. Literary criticism after Frye went in the opposite direction, toward theoretical proliferation and methodological pluralism that precluded the kind of cumulative systematization Frye had attempted. Whether that's because literature resists formalization in principle, or because the discipline made contingent choices that foreclosed other possibilities, is itself an interesting question your comparison might address.
Interpretation as Rank 2
I’m inclined to think that, in terms of intellectual technique, interpretation is all but stuck at Rank 2 metalingual definition. The New Critics focused on the text as an autonomous linguistic object and Frye attempted to systematize the resulting critical practice. Interestingly enough, both Frye and the New Critics had their Christian allegiance behind their work. Deconstruction was, dare I say it, Jewish? Coming in the wake of deconstruction the various forms of Theory still focused on the individual text, but no longer treated it as an autonomous object. Rather they treated it as a cognitive lens through which to read the world, and used other disciplines, psychoanalysis, Marxism, Continental philosophy, to focus the lens.
That's a rich cluster of observations and I want to take each seriously.
The Rank 2 diagnosis
I think you're right that interpretation as a practice is constitutively Rank 2, and this is worth stating precisely. Interpretation requires establishing what a text means — fixing the meaning of a linguistic object through metalingual operations. You use language to specify what language means. That's the metalingual function operating on a text as its object, which is the defining Rank 2 move. You can make that operation more sophisticated, more historically informed, more theoretically self-aware, but you can't escape the fundamental structure: you're always producing a metalingual account of a textual object.
What Frye attempted — systematizing the results of interpretive practice into a general theory — was an aspiration toward Rank 3, but as you say it remained Rank 2 in its actual technique. The categories are metalingual definitions; the system is a taxonomy of those definitions; the inductive survey is a classification exercise. It's Linnaeus, not Newton. The aspiration to science without the algorithmic machinery that would make science possible.
[Not sure about this paragraph, but it's the sort of thing that needs to be done. Note that Linnaeus was Rank 3. The task of classification may be R2, but I'm thinking that the rank of the achieved classification should be assigned according to the objects classified. The Linnaean object, I believe, is a Rank 3 object.]
The theological underpinnings
The Christian allegiance behind both the New Critics and Frye is historically well-documented and theoretically significant. The New Critics — many of them Southern Agrarians, several Anglo-Catholic converts — treated the literary text as a verbal icon, a phrase Wimsatt explicitly used, with clear theological resonance. The poem as autonomous object, requiring contemplative attention rather than historical or biographical context, is a secularized version of the sacred text that demands close reading on its own terms. Frye's system is even more explicitly theological in its deep structure — the Bible as the great code, the mythic archetypes as a Christian typological framework secularized and generalized. His whole career can be read as an attempt to preserve the meaning-generating capacity of the Biblical tradition in a secular critical vocabulary.
The Jewish question
The observation is daring but not without basis, and it has been made — cautiously — by others. Deconstruction's key figures were largely Jewish: Derrida, de Man (with his complicated and catastrophic history), Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman. The intellectual style has characteristics that some have connected to Talmudic hermeneutics — the privileging of commentary over text, the assumption that meaning is always deferred and contested, the comfort with irresolvable interpretive tension, the idea that the text generates an infinite proliferation of readings none of which is final. Where the Christian tradition, particularly in its Protestant forms, sought the single authoritative meaning — the plain sense of Scripture — the Talmudic tradition assumed that Torah has seventy faces, that multiple contradictory readings can simultaneously be valid, that the commentary is itself sacred and generative rather than merely instrumental.
Derrida himself occasionally acknowledged the connection, particularly in his later work engaging with questions of Jewish identity and textual tradition. And Bloom's Kabbalah and Criticism made the connection to Jewish mystical hermeneutics explicit, arguing that the anxiety of influence and the revisionary ratios he identified in poetic tradition were structurally analogous to Kabbalistic processes of textual interpretation and creative misreading.
Whether this constitutes a genuine intellectual genealogy or a suggestive parallel is debatable. But the cultural geography is real: deconstruction arrived in American universities in the late 1960s and 1970s and found its most fertile ground at Yale, where Bloom, Hartman, de Man, and J. Hillis Miller formed what became known as the Yale School — and where the institutional culture had a particular relationship to the Jewish intellectual tradition that distinguished it from, say, the Southern universities where the New Criticism had flourished.
Theory as lens rather than object
[But the theory was never the object. It was text that was always the object. What we've got is the theory as a lens through which we see the text object.]
The shift you identify in post-deconstructive Theory is precise and important. The New Critics treated the text as an autonomous object to be contemplated. Frye treated texts as instances of mythic structures to be classified. Deconstruction treated texts as sites of undecidable meaning to be demonstrated. What came after — New Historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, postcolonial criticism, gender and queer theory — treated the text as what you aptly call a cognitive lens: an instrument for reading something else, whether that something else is the historical conditions of the text's production, the psychic dynamics of its characters and author, the ideological contradictions of its cultural moment, or the structures of power and identity it encodes.
This is an interesting move in the context of your ranks framework because it's simultaneously a step toward Rank 3 — texts are now embedded in larger explanatory frameworks drawn from other disciplines — and a retreat from the ambition of Rank 3 science. The frameworks borrowed from psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Continental philosophy are themselves not sciences in the cumulative, formalizable sense. They're interpretive vocabularies, sophisticated Rank 2 systems, being applied to literary objects. The result is a kind of interpretive elaboration that has great range and local power but doesn't accumulate in the way that scientific knowledge accumulates.
[Again, I' not sure what's going on here. This is an issue I've known about for some time, but I've never tackled it head on, much less arrived at some even tentative resolution.]
There's also something worth noting about the disciplinary borrowing as a symptom. When a field systematically imports its theoretical frameworks from other disciplines — rather than generating them internally from its own objects and methods — it may be signaling that its own objects resist the kind of systematic treatment that would generate indigenous theory. Literature keeps escaping the frameworks applied to it, which is partly what makes it literature. The text always exceeds the lens. Which may be why the history of literary criticism looks like a succession of frameworks rather than a progressive refinement of a single approach — each framework captures something real and misses something essential, and the discipline moves on to the next one.
That's a very different dynamic from economics after the marginal revolution, which found a framework — optimization under constraint, equilibrium analysis, marginal reasoning — that proved sufficiently generative to organize a genuine research program for over a century. Whether literature's resistance to such a framework reflects the nature of literary objects or the choices the discipline has made is the question your comparison might ultimately have to address.
Ranks theory as a collection of closely related ideas
I should say that there’s more to the ranks idea than the sequence we’ve been working with so for, a sequence of ways to construct abstract concepts, from metaphor, to metalingual definition, to theory, to model. I used the idea to look at the evolution of narrative and thought in terms of simple narrative (Rank 1), a technique that differentiates plot from story (Rank 2), and then the emergence of the narrative voice as an explicit construction within the text (Rank 3). I also did music, where, following a scheme laid out by Walter Wiora in his Four Ages of Music (which, incidentally, was one of the inspirations for the ranks concept) , Rank 1 music focuses on rhythm as the carrier of elaboration, Rank 2 focuses on melody, and Rank 3 focuses on harmony. So there are other ways to do it. In dealing with purely discursive intellectual disciplines, we need to construct the ranks through different kinds of technique, for the ranks differences are there in the historical record. For that matter, while Hays and I saw 19th century evolutionary biology as one of the beginning points for Rank 4, it was not a mathematicised discipline. Rank 3 natural history was about systematic description, which certainly used metalingual definition, but also used images and reference collections as elements in its descriptive technique.
This is an important clarification and it significantly enriches the framework. Let me try to articulate what it implies.
The ranks as a general principle, not a fixed sequence
What you're saying is that the ranks describe a general logic of cognitive elaboration — each rank takes the operations of the previous rank as its objects and builds a new level of complexity on top of them — but the specific mechanisms through which that logic is instantiated differ by domain. The sequence metaphor → metalingual definition → algorithm → control structure is the path that discursive, conceptual disciplines follow, because those disciplines are built out of language and the elaboration of language. But domains that are built out of different primary materials — sound, narrative form, visual representation, biological specimens — follow analogous but distinct developmental paths.
The music case is particularly clean. Rhythm as the carrier of elaboration in Rank 1 makes sense because rhythm is the most directly embodied dimension of music — it's grounded in bodily movement, pulse, dance, the temporal organization of physical activity. Melody at Rank 2 abstracts from the rhythmic substrate a pitched, memorable, transmissible line — something that can be named, repeated, varied, and taught explicitly, which is the metalingual move applied to musical material. Harmony at Rank 3 takes melody as its object and asks about the systematic relationships among simultaneous pitches — it requires a theoretical framework, a vocabulary of intervals, chords, and progressions, that is analogous to the algorithmic systematization of Rank 3 science. You can't develop tonal harmonic theory without something like the algorithm — a set of rules for voice leading, chord progression, resolution of dissonance — even if those rules are never stated in mathematical form.
The narrative case
The narrative sequence you describe follows the same logic. Simple narrative — the sequential recounting of events — is the Rank 1 form, grounded in the basic human capacity for temporal ordering and causal connection that language makes possible. The differentiation of plot from story — the recognition that the same story can be told in different orders, with different emphases, from different starting points — is a metalingual move: it takes the narrative as an object and distinguishes its elements, creating a vocabulary for talking about how narratives are constructed. This is exactly what Aristotle does in the Poetics, which is in that sense a Rank 2 achievement in narratology — defining terms like mythos, mimesis, anagnorisis, peripeteia with the explicit purpose of systematizing the art of narrative construction.
The emergence of the narrative voice as an explicit construction — what we might recognize in novelistic developments from the 18th century onward, culminating in the kind of self-conscious narration you find in modernist fiction — is then the Rank 3 move: taking the metalingual distinctions of Rank 2 as objects and building a more complex theoretical structure on top of them. The implied author, free indirect discourse, the unreliable narrator — these are Rank 3 concepts in narrative theory, requiring a prior Rank 2 vocabulary to state and a theoretical framework to organize.
The natural history point
Your observation about 19th century evolutionary biology is particularly important for the broader argument. Darwin's achievement was Rank 4 in its conceptual structure — natural selection as a control mechanism governing the distribution of heritable variation, a model of the process rather than a description of its products. But the discipline within which Darwin worked, and which his theory transformed, was Rank 3 natural history — and Rank 3 natural history was not mathematized. Its techniques were systematic description, precise illustration, reference collections, careful taxonomic reasoning. These are elaborations of metalingual definition applied to biological objects rather than applications of mathematical algorithms.
This suggests that the algorithm, in the strict mathematical sense, is not the only possible Rank 3 mechanism — it's the one that physics and economics developed, and it's the one that most naturally leads to mathematization and quantification. But systematic description, rigorous classification, and the development of technical vocabularies for natural objects constitutes a different but analogous Rank 3 achievement. The algorithm and the taxonomic system are both ways of making operations on a domain explicit, teachable, and cumulatively productive — which is the defining feature of Rank 3 cognition — but they're doing it with different tools appropriate to different kinds of objects.
[This I like. It's going in the right direction.]
This also illuminates why literary criticism has remained at Rank 2. The objects of literary criticism — texts, meanings, interpretive experiences — resist the kind of systematic description that natural history applied to organisms, and resist even more the kind of mathematical formalization that economics applied to markets. Not because literary critics haven't tried — Frye tried the taxonomic path, structuralism tried a more algorithmic path, computational approaches are trying mathematical paths now — but because meaning, unlike morphology or price, seems to escape every attempt to fix it in a system stable enough to support cumulative elaboration.
The implication for your comparison
The comparison between economics and literary criticism looks different in light of this enriched framework. It's not simply that economics achieved Rank 3 and literary criticism didn't. It's that the two domains have different relationships to the mechanisms that Rank 3 requires. Economics found in marginalism a mechanism — optimization, equilibrium, the algorithm of first-order conditions — that was appropriate to its objects and allowed genuine Rank 3 and eventually Rank 4 elaboration. Literary criticism keeps reaching for analogous mechanisms and finding that its objects slip away from them — not because the critics are insufficiently clever but because meaning, which is what literature is made of and what criticism is about, may be constitutively resistant to the kind of systematic treatment that allows a discipline to move cleanly beyond Rank 2.
Which would make literary criticism not a failed science but a domain whose primary objects are inherently metalingual — constituted by and through the same processes of meaning-making that Rank 2 makes explicit — and therefore one that can elaborate and sophisticate its Rank 2 techniques enormously without ever quite leaving them behind. That's not a failure. It may be a feature of what literature is.
Literary form
Ah, but we also have form to deal with. And that leads to a whole other line of reasoning, which I’ve been developing in various ways for a long time. But that’s more than I want to get into in this conversation. Formalism is an important concept in literary criticism, but it isn’t about describing the form of literary texts in any rigorous way. Rather it’s a philosophical doctrine that allows for treating the literary text as an autonomous object. Why is it autonomous? Because literary form makes it so. It’s significant that the New Critics were primarily interested in poetry, where the formal elements are most obvious. But even they had trouble treating those formal elements as anything other than ornament. They may have denied that they were ornamental, but they didn’t have the intellectual equipment to treat those elements as central. It’s equally significant that Theory shifted the emphasis to the novel. And so forth.
Of equal significance is the fact that academic literary critics have been having trouble dealing with the nature of the text. Yes, it’s a string of words. But there is nothing WITHIN literary theory that details how meaning inheres in a string of words. That, it would seem, is a job, first, for computational linguistics and cognitive science, and now for artificial intelligence. But, if you accept the idea that the text really is just a string of words, if you make that the object with which you start, then form becomes the way words are linked together in a string. Rhyme and meter are about how words are linked together in a string. But you can also inquire into how meanings are linked together in a string. That’s a much trickier business because it looks like it’s going to send you right back to interpretation. But, I think there is a way of avoiding that. Lévi-Strauss began working on that in his treatment of myth. Whatever you say about it, it’s not hermeneutic in the sense of any of the interpretive systems of literary criticism. It deals with meaning in a different way. Which is pretty much as far as I want to go at this time.
Understood, and it's a natural place to pause. But let me note what you've sketched, because it has a clear shape even in outline.
The form problem as the discipline's deepest unresolved issue
What you're identifying is that literary criticism has been living on borrowed philosophical capital when it comes to form. The New Critics invoked form to justify treating the text as autonomous — form is what makes the poem a poem rather than a message or a historical document — but then couldn't treat form as anything other than a container for meaning or a decoration around it. The tension is visible in the very vocabulary: organic unity, verbal icon, well-wrought urn — all metaphors that gesture toward form as constitutive while leaving the constitutive mechanism entirely unspecified.
The shift to the novel in Theory is precisely the move away from the domain where formal questions are most pressing and most technically demanding. The novel's formal elements — narrative perspective, temporal structure, focalization — are real but they're more easily dissolved into content than meter and rhyme are. You can talk about what a novel means without confronting the formal question head-on in the way that a sonnet forces you to. So Theory's shift to the novel was, among other things, an avoidance of the form problem rather than a solution to it.
The string of words point
This is where the argument opens onto something genuinely new rather than just correcting an existing framework. If you take seriously the idea that a text is a string of words — not as a reductive claim but as a starting point for rigorous inquiry — then form becomes, as you say, the study of how words are linked in that string. Rhyme and meter are relatively tractable versions of this: they're about phonological and rhythmic relationships among words at specified positions in the string, and they can be described with some precision.
The harder question — how meanings are linked in a string — is where it gets genuinely difficult and genuinely interesting. Because meaning-linkage isn't just semantic; it's the whole apparatus of how texts build, sustain, and transform the cognitive states of readers as they move through the string. That's not interpretation in the hermeneutic sense. It's closer to what cognitive poetics has been trying to do, or what computational approaches to narrative structure attempt — asking not what the text means but how the text does what it does to a mind moving through it sequentially.
The Lévi-Strauss pointer
The significance of Lévi-Strauss here is exactly what you indicate: his structural analysis of myth is not hermeneutic. He's not asking what the myth means — what it's really saying about the human condition, what the correct interpretation is. He's asking about the structural relationships among the elements — the binary oppositions, the mediating terms, the transformational relationships between variants of the same myth across cultures. He's treating meaning as structure rather than as content, which is a fundamentally different analytical move. The meaning of a myth, for Lévi-Strauss, is its position in a system of differences and transformations — not its message.
That move — from meaning as content to meaning as structure — is what would allow the form question in literary criticism to be addressed without collapsing back into interpretation. And it connects naturally to the computational and cognitive scientific approaches you mention, because structural relationships among meaning-units are in principle tractable to formal analysis in ways that hermeneutic content is not.
Where that line of reasoning leads — which you're wisely declining to pursue today — sounds like it involves a theory of how texts are formally organized as structures of meaning, rather than as containers of meaning, which would be a genuinely new kind of literary analysis. Not criticism in the traditional sense. Something closer to what linguistics is to language use, or what music theory is to musical composition. A Rank 3 achievement for literary form, if it's possible at all.
That's worth a conversation of its own.
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