Friday Fotos: Epiphany on the Hudson

Demographic anxiety is not racism

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Ezra Klein:

COWEN: Absolutely. Now Putman, let me ask you about Putnam, and how Putnam relates to Donald Trump. As you know, Robert Putnam at Harvard, he has some work showing that when ethnic diversity goes up that there’s less trust, less cooperation, less social capital.

If you think of yourself in the role of an editor, so you have an American society, diversity has gone up, and a lot of people have reacted to this I would say rather badly — and I think you would agree with me they’ve reacted rather badly — but there’s still a way in which the issue could be framed that while diversity is actually a problem, we can’t handle diversity.

Putnam almost says as such, and do you think there’s currently a language in the media where you have readers who are themselves diverse, where it’s possible not to just be blaming the bigots, but to actually present the positive view, “Look, people are imperfect. A society can only handle so much diversity, and we need to learn this.” What’s your take on that?

KLEIN: I strongly agree. We do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism. And we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it’s been a problem, particularly this year. It is clear, the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about “economic anxiety.”

COWEN: A bit, but not mainly, I agree.

KLEIN: That said, I think that the way it’s presented is a choice between economic anxiety and racism. And one I don’t think that’s quite right, and two I don’t think that’s a productive way of having that conversation.

Jamie’s Investigations, Part 1: Emergence

Example 1: Overall

This is the first in a series of posts about the art of Jamie Bérubé, who has Down syndrome. He is the son of Michael Bérubé, who has just published a book about him: Life as Jamie Knows It: An Exceptional Child Grows Up (Beacon Press, 2016). I will be reviewing the book over at 3 Quarks Daily. Michael–I can call him that, as he is a friend–wanted to include a generous selection of Jamie’s art in the book, but, as you know, color reproduction is expensive. Instead, he put it online. I took a look, became fascinated, and decided to write a series of posts about it before posting my review.

This first post is about images based on colored dots. Here’s what Michael says about these images:

I have included only 18 of his “dots” series here, mostly because he does these less often than towers, geometrics, swirls, etc. but partly because they are self-explanatory. The color of the dots is usually random, but I have included four pages on which he was very clearly experimenting with various color palettes– red, blue, yellow/green, red/orange.....

Here’s one of those images where Jamie is experimenting with various palettes:

Example 2: Three Palettes

What’s going on here is obvious, almost. Notice that, for the most part, there’s variation in shades from one dot to the next on each line.

By contrast, Example 1 (above top) is one of those random ones, as is Example 3:

Example 3: Overall

They’re not random, not if random means “no order whatsoever.” There’s order there, a rhythm; but it’s difficult to describe. Hence, “random.”

Let’s do a thought experiment. Remember those magical mythical monkeys that type away randomly and eventually produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet, not to mention Aunt Bessie’s recipe for omelets? The point of those monkeys is that, if their acts are truly random, then anything is possible and, in time, anything must necessarily happen. Hence Hamlet.

So, imagine an army of magical imaginary Jamies, dotting away furiously, but meticulously, on large pieces of paper, so large they can get, say, 4000 dots across. If their process is truly random, then sooner or later we’re going to see da Vinci’s Last Supper (in 4K) and a whole raft of Andy Warhol soup cans. But if the imaginary Jamies are doing what the real Jamie did then, no, we’ll never see any of those things. All we’ll see is dots, apparently at random. But not really.

Take a close look at one of those randoms. Start at the upper left, say, and scan along a row. As you move from one dot to the text, the color changes, perhaps not always (look at the right-hand side of Ex. 2, 3 and 4 from the right edge), but mostly. Look at dots in adjacent rows. Do you see same-color dots next to one another? Not often.

Japanese innovation on steroids: Robot babies

In The Guardian:

A baby robot designed to “invoke an emotional connection” has been unveiled in Japan, where plummeting birth rates have left many couples without children.

The Kirobo Mini was created by Toyota’s non-automotive department and is equiped with artificial intelligence and a camera so it can recognise the face of the person speaking to it and respond.

“He wobbles a bit, and this is meant to emulate a seated baby which hasn’t fully developed the skills to balance itself,” said Fuminori Kataoka, Kirobo Mini’s chief design engineer. “This vulnerability is meant to invoke an emotional connection.”

Toyota plans to sell Kirobo Mini, which blinks its eyes and speaks with a baby-like high-pitched voice, for 39,800 yen (£300/US$390) in Japan next year. It comes with a “cradle” that doubles as its baby seat designed to fit in car cup holders.

Notes on the Unreality of Fictional Characters

Another working paper is online. Title above, downloads, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/28941555/Notes_on_the_Unreality_of_Fictional_CharactersSSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2848422

* * * * * 

Abstract: We know that characters in fictions are not real but even as critics, we tend to talk about fictional characters in the same terms we use for real characters. This obscures the mechanisms by which fiction works. By looking at several Shakespeare plays and comparing them it becomes obvious that both characters and plot are subordinate to some as yet obscure higher level of organization. We need to develop a language and concepts for dealing with that higher level.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: They’re Not Real! 1

A. C. Bradley: Character in Shakespeare (Othello) 3

Norman Holland: Cues for the Reader 5

Analyze This: Three Shakespeare Plays 9

Much Ado about Simulation 12

Godshalk: Shakespeare and the Problem of Literary Character 17

Recapitulation 18

Theory of Mind, Not! 20

Introduction: They’re Not Real!

This is one of the topics I took up in my first year of blogging at The Valve, back in 2006, the unreality of fictional characters [1]. By that I mean that we tend to talk about them in pretty much the same way we talk about real people. We’re interested in and comment on their feelings, desires, and motives, we probe the depths of their minds, sometimes using psychoanalytic theory. These days we even worry about their Theory of Mind, as it’s called, and how they probe one another’s minds.

Yes, of course, we know they’re not real. But that’s an observation we make by stepping outside our theories and analytic methods. As Graham Harman has observed here and there, what matters is what our theories can account for, not what we as individuals may also know [2]. To a first approximation we talk about characters in fiction in pretty much the same way as we talk about people in histories and biographies, or newspapers and magazines, or neighborhood gossip. And perhaps that’s the point, gossip, we’re a gossipy species and it turns out we like to gossip about imaginary humans.

That’s find and good for readers, but not so good for critics, who are supposed to be figuring out how fictions work. As William Flesch remarked in Comuppance, in a footnote about literary Darwinists:

…they treat literary characters as motivated by the same things that motivate real humans, rather than as representations to whom real humans react. It’s our reactions that psychology can analyze, not the actions of literary characters. [3]

Right. But that’s tough to do. While there’s a school of reader response criticism–actually, schools–they’ve done relatively little empirical work (except, perhaps for some of the psychoanalysts, such as Norman Holland and others) on how real readers respond. For the most part, reader response criticism has been about idealized readers and their communities.

While I would love to analyze the reactions of readers to fictional characters, particularly in real time, it’s not clear to me that doing so would fully satisfy my misgivings in this matter. In “Much Ado About Simulation” I point out how our reactions to certain actions in Much Ado About Nothing depend on what we know prior to those actions. The characters are what they are do what they do independently of what we know and when we know it, but our knowledge affects how we react to their actions.

That patterning is important. The issue is not simply about characters as individuals, but their interaction. Is it not their interactions that tell us about them? That same issue is at the center of the previous piece, “Analyze This,” where I compare configurations of characters in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. What emerges in that comparison is a distinction between characters and the functions they play in the plot. For example, in Much Ado, the function of Deceiver is enacted by Don John; that function is taken by Iago in Othello. The Deceiver fools the Protagonist into thinking that his Beloved has been unfaithful. There is no independent Deceiver in Winter’s. In that play, the Protagonist deceives himself.

Those characters are what they are. We can analyze them to our heart’s content. But the only way to see what Shakespeare is doing with them, how he deploys them, is to analyze them in context. Not only that, but to look at the three plays together. That’s when you notice that two plays have Deceivers, one does not. At this point we’re certainly talking about these characters as creatures of the dramas they enact, puppets at Shakespeare’s bidding, if you will, but we’re still not where I want to be, conceptually.

Those two sections flesh this out in more detail, but the problem remains. It’s about something that happens between fictional characters, as a function of overall patterning. Whatever it is that we ‘discover’ when we analyze these characters in the same terms as we use for real people, THAT is subordinate to this overall patterning. That patterning is related to the plot, obviously, but cannot be reduced to it. In fact, whatever THAT is, both plot and character are subordinate to it. How do we talk about THAT?

That’s the direction of this set of remarks. In the first section I look at A. C. Bradley’s discussion of Othello’s character, which is pretty much in terms we would use in describing real people, though he doesn’t go so far as to imagine what Othello might have been doing in his life prior to the actions represented in the play – a practice L. C. Knights lampooned in his well-known essay, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”[4] This, of course, is something fans do all the time; not only that, but fans will create their own stories using their favorite characters, thus giving them life outside the originating fictions. After that I take a look at Norman Holland’s 1968 account of how it is that readers are justified in projecting (real) life into literary characters and, by implication, how it is that psychoanalytic critics are justified in plumbing the unconscious depths of imaginary minds.

That brings us to the two sections I’ve already discussed, “Analyze This” and “Much Ado About Simulation”. The next section is simply a pointer to an online article in which William Godshalk looks at discussions of Shakespeare’s characters from variety of thinkers ranging from Bertrand Russell to contemporary critics. I then recap the previous discussion and conclude with an appendix in which I rant against Theory of Mind.

References

[1] And here’s my first post on the subject, which generated a fair bit of comment: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/fictional_characters_1_a_c_bradley/

[2] For example: “Yet it is not a question of whether philosophers are personally 'aware' of this, but of whether their philosophies sufficiently account for it.” Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), 28.

[3] William Flesch, Comuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2007) 231.

[4] FWIW, you can find the complete essay, which I have not read, online at the Internet Archive as part of a collection, Explorations (1949), URL: https://archive.org/details/explorations030001mbp

Leaves of grass, really

Space, our destination, to boldly go...

Freeman Dyson reviews three books about space travel: The Green Universe: A Vision (NY Rev of books). He opens with a story about what he'll come to call Little Space and Big Space:

Robert Dicke was an experimental physicist at Princeton University. He liked to build things with his own hands. When NASA began making plans for landing astronauts on the moon, he thought of a scheme that would allow the astronauts to make a serious contribution to science. This would be good for science and also good for the astronauts. The scheme was to measure accurately the distance between two objects, one fixed on Earth and the other fixed on the moon. The measurements would give us improved understanding of the dynamics of the Earth-moon system.

The object on Earth would be a laser emitting very short pulses of light. The object on the moon would be a tray holding a hundred corner-cube glass reflectors. A corner cube is a piece of solid glass cut so as to reflect light efficiently. The corner cubes would reflect the laser pulses back to the laser. The timing of the reflected pulses would measure the distance between the laser and the tray. The astronauts would plant the tray on a firm piece of ground on the moon facing Earth. Because the corner cubes reflect light straight back to its source, the small variations in the orientation of the moon as it moves in its orbit do not disturb the measurement.

Dicke was a practical person. He went to the Edmonds Scientific Company toy store down the road from Princeton and bought a hundred high-quality glass corner-cube reflectors for $25 each. He asked the machine shop at the Princeton University physics department to attach the cubes to a metal tray with a stand to support it. The complete package, including materials and labor, cost a total of $5,000. Then he got in touch with NASA officials and told them he would be happy to supply the package at this cost for a moon mission. The NASA officials accepted his proposal enthusiastically, but they said, “You do not get to build it. We get to build it.” The proposal to build the package was put through the normal bureaucratic NASA acquisition process. According to Dicke, NASA paid $3 million to an industrial contractor for it. The reflectors were duly installed on the moon and are still reflecting laser pulses as Dicke intended. Doing things the NASA way increased the cost by a factor of six hundred.

NASA's way is Big Space while Dicke's way is Little Space.

Big Space still dominates,  but Little Space in the ascendant, and between the two we have companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX:

His company builds big spacecraft paid for by big NASA contracts in the Big Space style, but he tries to keep the design and manufacture cheap and simple in the Little Space style. In ten years he has built a launcher, Falcon, and a transfer vehicle, Dragon, which ferry unmanned payloads from the ground to the International Space Station. He intends soon to include astronauts in his payloads. The SpaceX culture is a compromise, using commercial competition to cut costs while relying on the government for steady funding. The twenty-first century is likely to see manned missions exploring planets and moons and asteroids, and possibly making spectacular discoveries. But this century is unlikely to see costs of such missions low enough to open space to migration and settlement by ordinary citizens.

The three books under review describe space activities belonging to the Big Space and Little Space cultures that are now competing for money and public attention. Each book gives a partial view of a small piece of history. Each tells a story within the narrow setting of present-day economics and politics. None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species.

Consult the text, the varieties of criticism: remarks from a dialogue between J. Hillis Miller and Zhang Jiang

Zhang Jiang and J. Hillis Miller, Exchange of Letters About Literary Theory Between Zhang Jiang and J. Hillis Miller, Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 53, No. 3, 2016, pp. 567-610.

J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature Emeritus at the University of California at Irvine. Zhang Jiang holds a PhD and is currently professor of literary studies and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The exchange was initiated by Jiang and is interesting throughout. Except for the very last passage, however, I am quoting from Miller as it is his views that interest me. In his first letter Jiang explained how Miller’s work is being received in China. Miller responds (p. 573):

The “various textbooks on my ideas in China” much overstress the presumed negative side of so-called deconstruction. Your sentences say more or less what the public media in the United States and Europe say about so-called deconstruction, which is a complex and by no means unified entity. A little citation from Derrida or de Man or myself or any of hundreds of other scholars, for example Andrzej Warminski or Gayatri Spivak or Barbara Johnson, would be helpful in characterizing deconstruction. Perhaps the Chinese textbooks you mention do make abundant citation. If I am or ever was a “deconstructionist” (which I never was if that means agreeing with the definitions you give from Chinese textbooks), I nevertheless never rejected reason, nor doubted truth (though I see it as often complex and even contradictory when it is a question of the truth of a given literary work), nor would I think of denying all previous criticism, which is often first-rate and helps me greatly in my own readings. I want to do my own readings with an open mind, however, no doubt with help from previous critics, for example without assuming that because Middlemarch is manifestly a good work it is going necessarily to be “unified.” Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. That remains to be seen and shown in a scrupulous “reading.” I can’t tell without reading the text carefully myself and without making citations that support what I say. I think others should do the same. [...] My procedures are “scientific” or a transposition of the scientific methodology I learned when I was for two years a physics major in my first years in undergraduate school at Oberlin College. I want proof for what I say about a given work, and in the case of literary study that means citations from the work, citations that, at least as I read them (I hope correctly), support what I say about the work. “Always go back to the text” is my motto.

Rhetorical readings vs. deconstructive readings (p. 575):

I should these days much prefer to call what I try to do not “deconstructive readings” (because the word deconstruction” is so often presumed to mean what your textbooks or what mass media in the United States say it means), but “rhetorical readings.” I mean by that, special attention to the implications of figurative language, including irony, in any text I am trying to read, teach, or write about.

“Deconstruction” is one of those many terms, such as “algorithm,” that started as a term of art within some intellectual enterprise and then devolved in meaning as it was borrowed from the original context and put to other uses.

Construction, One World Center

Deconstruction, as American as apple pie

Gregory Jones-Katz in The Boston Review:

If one had to pinpoint ground zero for the eruption of deconstruction onto the American stage, it would have to be Yale, where a group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature—Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller—executed deconstructive readings with great élan and to great intellectual and pedagogical effect during the ’70s and early ’80s. Barbara Johnson, a graduate student and then professor of French and comparative literature during this period, explained in a 1987 interview that Yale’s comparative literature department played a key role not so much in domesticating as in generating deconstructive practices in America, and it did so on distinctly American terms. By promoting a pluralism that undermined a national canon and aimed to increase the prospect of communication across cultures—quintessential mid- to late-twentieth century Cold War American values—the discipline of comparative literature itself nurtured deconstructive stances, both at Yale and elsewhere. The first deconstructive courses in U.S. departments of literature were offered in Yale’s comparative literature department, for example, beginning with a class on Nietzsche taught by de Man in 1971. By the early ’80s, several generations of American academics venerated de Man’s work, while their European counterparts were just beginning to discover him.

Yale’s institutional history and its relation to contemporary American politics and social life helped to disseminate deconstructive thinking throughout the United States. Until the mid-seventies, Yale had boasted several prominent New Critics, including the movement’s most recognizable figures: Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, and Robert Penn Warren. Their work, popular in American literature departments and high school English classes following World War II, stressed “close reading,” viewing works of literature as self-contained, self-referential aesthetic objects. The upheavals of the sixties, however, produced a younger generation of literary critics with a longing for an interpretive theory that emphasized the political and social dimensions of literature, as well as differences and divisions within it—precisely those aspects of prose and poetry that the New Critics fused into an autonomous and unified whole. By subverting the New Critical way of reading, the Yale Group—who in their distinctive ways considered great poetry not a harmony realized via paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities but a dissonance achieved by way of contradictions, inconsistencies, and uncertainties—tilled propitious soil in the American academy.

Shedding Light on those MacArthur "Genius" Grants

Writing in 3:AM Magazine, Steve Light has much the same view on the MacArthur Foundations "Big Mac" awards that I do: of macarthur grants, regimes of visibility and meritocratic orders. They give entirely too many awards to people who don't really need them, though these may, in fact, be bright and interesting folks. He mentions the he once heard an interview with a Cal Tech professor who'd just gotten his hit of special sauce on a sesame seed bun:

Yes, he said that he didn’t actually need this grant because as a professor at Cal Tech he already had all the institutional and foundational support necessary to carry out his work. He didn’t speak about professors in the humanities but I would add that although the institutional and foundational support for humanities research is much less than in the sciences, the paramount means by which an individual in modern and contemporary times can carry out research and writing in the humanities is precisely by obtaining a tenure track or tenured position at a research university or at a university or college in general. But in certain respects this was already true two centuries ago as the example of the primary exponents of German Classical Philosophy, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, shows. Many humanities recipients who have thus far been recipients of MacArthur Grants haven’t needed the grants either. [Note: When this essay was originally drafted I did not know that Heather McHugh, a superb and renowned poet and translator and also a professor in the English Department at the University of Washington, had received a MacArthur Award and that she had done something absolutely extraordinary with her award and, thereby, demonstrated precisely what the Cal Tech professor had stipulated, i.e. that he already had the infrastructure and support necessary to do his work. Heather McHugh, as a poet, works in a field with absolutely little or no remuneration for the vast majority whether esteemed and renowned or not, but as a professor at a research university she has a salary enabling her to live solidly within the middle class and to have lifetime security financially. What did she do with her award? She used her award money to set up a foundation, Caregifters, which provides caregivers respite and getaways from one of the more difficult of human tasks, respite (in the form of travels or journeys or vacations) from the tribulations, anxieties, exhaustion, and utmost stress that care-giving, particularly for the elderly, entails. What beautiful, truly beautiful and admirable generosity on Heather McHugh’s part! What a beautiful social conscience! Would that others would follow her example!].

At the end of the piece Light names a half-dozen or so people whom he thinks deserve support but who are not getting it.

Writing on the Rail redux

Theory of Literature and Theory of Criticism, Now Distinctly Different?

One of the things that happened during the 1970s and 1980s is that the distinction between the theory of criticism and the theory of literature collapsed and simply became Theory. In thinking of my recent essay, Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature [1], I’m wondering if it’s possible to distinguish them. Though I don’t talk of naturalist criticism and ethical criticism in that essay, the distinction is implicit in it [2]. And that distinction, it seems to me, belongs to the theory of criticism.

The three principles–Dynamic Form, Sharability, and Elasticity–from the second section (Form: Macpherson & Attridge to Latour) certainly belong to the naturalist theory of literature. As do the accounts of the text (section 4, Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Text) and performance (section 5, Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy as Performance) of Obama’s Pinckney Eulogy, which serves as an example. In the fourth section we see an example of dynamic form while the fifth section has the foundations for sharability and the sixth section (Coda: Form and Sharability in the Private Text) extends sharability to the world of private readers of written texts.

Of course, the account of ring-composition in the eulogy is also practical naturalist criticism, along with the account of the performance. The fragment of the cognitive account of of Sonnet 129 is also practical naturalist criticism. But the sixth section, Meaning, History, and Attachment, is mostly ethical criticism, with the suggested interpretations¬–theological, performance (Loury-McWhorter), attachment–being practical ethical criticism.

The theory of criticism, of course, is not about literature. It’s about how we study literature. When I assert that the literary work is both Latourian intermediary and mediator (second section) that assertion could be considered to be within the theory of literature, but, given the Latourian pedigree, it might be more natural to think of them as belonging to the theory of criticism. Certainly the juxtaposition of the naturalist criticism of sections 4 and 5 against the ethical criticism of section 6 belongs in the realm of theory of criticism.

Would we then say that explicating the distinction between naturalist and ethical criticism is one of the basic, if not the foundational, issues in the theory of criticism? Perhaps, perhaps. The four-way distinction between description, interpretation, explanation, and evaluation that Sharon Marcus makes in her Auerbach essay [2], that too belongs in the theory of criticism. More generally, recent interest in surface reading and description (think of the special issues of Representations) and various discussions of interpretation and critique, all betoken the rise of a new theory of criticism, as does the rise of computational criticism.

[1] Sharing Experience: Computation, Form, and Meaning in the Work of Literature, URL: https://www.academia.edu/28764246/Sharing_Experience_Computation_Form_and_Meaning_in_the_Work_of_Literature

[2] Some, but only some, of my various remarks on naturalist criticism can be found at this link: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/naturalist%20criticism

Most of my various remarks on ethical criticism can be found at this link: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/ethical%20criticism

Many of those posts will discuss both ethical and naturalist criticism. Here’s two of them:

The Key to the Treasure IS the Treasure: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-key-to-treasure-is-treasure.html

Ethical Criticism and Descriptive Criticism Online: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/10/ethical-criticism-and-digital-criticism.html

[3]Sharon Marcus, “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, No. 3 (2016), 297-319.

Writing on the Rail

Jonathan Culler on Literary Criticism at Harvard in the 1960s and Other Things

One of my interests here at New Savanna is the emergence of interpretation as the centerpiece of academic literary criticism. To that end I’ve quoted J. Hillis Miller on how primitive things were at Harvard when he did his graduate work there in mid-century: “None of these people, including Douglas Bush, really had any idea about how to talk about a poem, in my opinion.” Well, things were pretty crude in the early to mid-1960s, when Jonathan Culler his undergraduate work there and Miller was at Hopkins.

Here’s what Culler says about the early days:

I started at Harvard in 1962, so it was ’61-62 that I was in England. At Harvard I was majoring in history and literature, and I had a tutor my freshman year because I had sophomore standing. He was a grad student named Ricardo Quinones who turned out to be a Renaissance scholar, and he assigned exercises in which we were supposed to compare two critical treatments of a single poem and identify the arguments, which I found very interesting. That was the way I really got into New Criticism. It was a moment when New Criticism at Harvard was something a little bit dangerous, a little racy. Reuben Brower’s course, “Hum 6,” attracted the most ambitious students and was clearly an enclave at odds with the general ethos of the Harvard English department, with people like Walter Jackson Bate and others, who did much more intellectual history. Brower’s ethos was very serious, close attention to the text, not talking about biography, not talking about authors. He had a small group of very smart graduate students and assistant professors who worked with him and taught with him, people like Richard Poirier, Anne Ferry and David Kalstone.

So I worked with those people throughout my time at Harvard. Anne Ferry was my tutor one year, and David Kalstone was director of my honors thesis, so I was very much in the New Critical line of work. I took several courses with Anne Ferry and one year had weekly tutorials with her, and the New Critical reading did feel like a carrot that was slightly out of reach. I could never feel confident that what I did for Anne Ferry would get an A. I always knew there was going to be something crucial that I had missed. She would always find something that I had failed to grasp or some matter of tone that I had gotten wrong.

But by the end of my time at Harvard I came to feel that I knew how to do this sort of criticism.

But then my senior year Joseph Frank, the Dostoyevsky scholar from Princeton, came to Harvard as a visiting professor. He taught a graduate seminar on trends in contemporary criticism, which I managed to get into. That was the first course I had that was explicitly focused on criticism itself as a topic. They didn’t have things like that at Harvard in those days. We read Auerbach—it was mostly Continental—and Spitzer and Sartre, and some phenomenological criticism, Poulet, and we ended up at Hillis Miller’s Disappearance of God or Poets of Reality. That was what got me interested in thinking of this not just as a matter of method, but as a real subject that one could study and where there were trends. And for the first time I realized that there were philosophical implications and underpinnings and different sorts of criticism. So that’s what led me to go on to work on that kind of topic in graduate school.

That’s from a 2007 interview he gave to Jeffrey Williams, then editor of the minnesota review (now defunct). He goes on to talk about studying in England, which was much more gentile, and less professionalized, than American academia: “Even publication for many was thought of as vulgar. [...] But there was the notion, in the days when I was there, of literary studies as a kind of gentlemanly pursuit, and you chatted.”

He goes on to talk of Structuralist Poetics (1975), a rewrite of his dissertation. The chronology is interesting. He was teaching at Oxford from 74 to 77, but spent the fall of 77 at Yale: “I was getting all kinds of invitations to travel around the country and talk about ‘What is structuralism?’ That’s what people were interested in.” So we have the Hopkins structuralism conference in the fall of 1966, where Derrida brings down the house with his critique of Lévi-Strauss, and yet structuralism remains current through the 1970s.