Literary Theory Assignment and Othello

Class, Gender, Pleasure, and Criticism Author(s): Norman N. Holland, Lawrence Hyman, James O'Rourke, Daniel W. Ross, Richard Levin, Alan G. Gross and Susan Winnett Source: PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), pp. 130-136 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/462833 Accessed: 01-12-2018 17:48 UTC

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Class, Gender, Pleasure, and Criticism

To the Editor:

Richard Levin's "The Poetics and Politics of Bardi-

cide" (105 [1990]: 491-504) makes wicked fun of what this reader-response critic terms the text-active position. Levin points out the absurdities of critics' claims to the "real meaning" of a text. He shows the pretentiousness of the pretense to an absolute, god's-eye view of what a text does or is. He punctures the claim that we can step out of the mortal psychological processes of per- ception and interpretation that necessarily produce any critic's reading. Levin targets those who premise The Death of the Author and substitute an active, project- ing, strategizing, revealing, concealing text for the lost bard. I think he makes it clear, however, that the same anomalies and pretensions appear when more tradi- tional critics claim "objective knowledge of the real meaning of a text" (499).

Levin's critique thus calls down-I hesitate to say it-a Shakespearean plague on both houses. He leaves us with the ever-daunting question, Where do we go from here?

I suggest that the beginning of wisdom is frankly to acknowledge a different "project of the text." The real purpose of all these readings, formalist-humanist or anti-formalist-humanist, is that their authors may pub- lish and not perish. (From this point of view, Levin might note, the authors he cites are very much in exis- tence, indeed somewhat frantically so.) We can begin by granting that the primary aim of literary criticism as we know it today is publication and all the rewards that publication brings.

If so, then what might we publish if we were to give up our claims to superhuman objectivity? We would, of course, have to acknowledge our own activity in our criticism, but greater critics than we have done so. In- deed it was customary until recent decades. We might, for example, express opinions. We might point to things to admire or condemn. We might conduct a dialogue with a text. We might parody, we might contest the text,

or we might engage the author in a conversation as some historians today engage their subjects. In short, we might try for a little more imagination in our publish- ing than either the old or the new New Critics show. Levin's witty expose points, if not the only way, one way.

NORMAN N. HOLLAND

University of Florida

To the Editor:

By using their own words, for the most part, Richard Levin clearly shows us how neo-Marxist and feminist Freudian critics have reduced Shakespeare's plays to parables of the consequences of domination by a class or a gender. For these critics, every one of Shakespeare's plays, no matter how diverse the surface action, con- ceals the same economic or social conflict. They con- tend that "no matter how 'silent' the text may be about elements of this conflict, it must really contain them" (499). Nor is the conclusion in any play a real resolu- tion of these conflicts; it is merely an attempt to ration- alize the patriarchal or upper-class values: "[N]o matter how satisfactory the resolution may appear, it must really be 'imaginary' because the contradictions it seems to resolve are by definition unresolvable ... " (499).

But as successful as he is in pointing out the absurd lengths to which neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian critics go to reach their conclusions, Levin is less successful, it seems to me, when he explains just what causes these critics to arrive at such absurd conclusions. For Levin, the cause is The Death of the Author. Bypassing the author allows critics to find in every play their own ideas

rather than Shakespeare's and to judge the success of a play by how clearly it demonstrates their own values. To avoid such solipsistic criticism, we should, Levin con- cludes, repudiate not only the particular biases of these neo-Marxists and feminist Freudians but also the con-

cepts of the intentional fallacy and irony associated with the New Critics of a previous generation, and we should adopt in their place the kind of interpretation that would be limited to the author's intentions.

Levin's mistake is the obvious one of not question- ing the assumptions that the meaning of a literary work is the reflection of the author's intentions, that we can discover these intentions, and that no matter how much

an interpretation might increase our understanding and enjoyment of a work (and even if it came from the pen of a brilliant critic such as Coleridge, Bradley, Knight, or Frye) the interpretation can only be justified by evi- dence that Shakespeare wanted us to see it. But what is more important in this context, although not as obvious, is that Levin's focus on the intention of the author, as well as his distrust of ironic meanings, pre- vents him from recognizing the real source of the ab- surd conclusions of the neo-Marxist and feminist

interpretations-namely, their failure to distinguish what happens on the stage from the real event. Thefons et origo malorum, what allows criticism to see failure (particularly in the conclusions) in plays that most readers find to be among the greatest works ever writ- ten, is that politicized (or moralized) criticism does not

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recognize the autonomy of the literary experience. Levin gets very close to noting this weakness when

he points out how suspicious these critics are of plea- sure. He cites one author who wants us to deny the "aes- thetic satisfaction" in King Lear because if we allow ourselves to enjoy the play, we would be endorsing its "ideological position" (503n13)-and the play's posi- tion is, of course, not in accord with the critic's values. Levin is equally caustic of those who argue that there can be no resolution in Othello as long as the play does not resolve "the same impotent dialectic of [male] vio- lence . . . that caused its rupture" or in Macbeth "so long as the ... ideology of restoration prevails" (qtd. on 496). But when considering just why critics who cer- tainly show evidence of a literary sensitivity far above that of the average reader nevertheless seem to derive little pleasure from the plays, Levin merely repeats the critics' viewpoint: "[P]leasure is seen as a kind of bait offered by the text . . . to make us complicit in its ideo- logical project" (496).

But to see the play as an "ideological project" has nothing to do with The Death of the Author but stems from the tendency of some critics, from Plato through Tolstoy to those of the present day, to see art only as an instrument for the inculcation of religious, politi- cal, or moral values and feelings. And to the extent that these neo-Marxist and feminist Freudian critics follow

this tradition and so refuse to find at least some delight in literature that may "shock the virtuous Philosopher" (whether the virture is Christian, feminist, revolution- ary, or conservative), their writing will lead to the ab- surd conclusions cited by Levin. Until we realize that the problem is not the displacement of the author by the text but rather the idea of literature as instrumen-

tal rather than autonomous, we will not be able to go forward with the kind of criticism that deepens our understanding and enhances our enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays.

LAWRENCE HYMAN

Brooklyn College City University of New York

To the Editor:

The reappearance in PMLA of Richard Levin's bash- ing of the new historicism will no doubt be the occa- sion for another round of outraged protest (see "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," 103 [1988]: 125-38; Forum, 103 [1988]: 817-19, 104 [1989]: 77-79). Before Levin's defenders once more claim the moral high ground of the oppressed minority struggling for freedom of speech against a fantasized hegemony

of the left, let me try to clarify why the response to Levin's essays is so much more heated than any response to Edward Pechter's critique of the new historicism in these same pages ("The New Historicism and Its Dis- contents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama," 102 [1987]: 292-303).

I will focus on one characteristic passage in Levin's essay:

One does not ask how or why the text gave itself, or was given, this project-that is treated as a donn6e. The proj- ect is always bad since it involves the reproduction or reaffirmation of some aspect of the oppressive and decep- tive ideology (in the Marxist sense of "false consciousness") that dominated the Renaissance world.... (492)

The first sentence implies that the assumption that the

text is carrying out an ideological project is of some mysterious origin. The second sentence at least partly dispels the mystery; Marxist literary critics follow Marx's critique of the social formation of conscious- ness, in which one's beliefs reflect one's place in a par- ticular class and in which the dominant ideas of a

society are a veiled representation of the interests of the

ruling class. Marxist critics do in fact ask how and why

texts carry out the work of ideological mystification, and there is a clear continuity from the theoretical for- mulations of Marx and Marxist theorists on this issue

to the use of those ideas in Marxist literary criticism. One might wish to question whether Marxist princi-

ples are sometimes applied to literary analysis in an overly positivistic fashion, and that critique could be carried out at both the theoretical and the practical levels. That is what Pechter does, but that is not what Levin does. Levin takes gratuitous potshots ("One does not ask . . .") that he should know are wrong. The connection between the first and the second sentences

from Levin that I have quoted is loose enough to allow two possible interpretations of Levin's misrepresenta- tion of the grounds of Marxist literary criticism. Either Levin, in order to launch some gratuitous sarcasm, sup- presses his knowledge of a theoretical basis for assum- ing that a text is doing the work of ideology or else he simply did not do any reading into the theoretical back-

grounds of Marxist criticism before he set out to prove its errors. If his reading in the subject is insufficient, I would suggest that he begin with The German Ideology.

The opposition to Levin's appearance (and reappear- ance) in PMLA does not proceed from an intolerance for contrary viewpoints. It arises from the sense that his essays are critical gossip and not serious scholar- ship. It is difficult to believe that anyone's intellectual

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horizon is expanded by them. Those who agree with Levin simply have their prejudices confirmed, and they are set free to follow their leader in deploring new direc- tions in criticism without going through the bother of learning anything about them. Those who are angered by Levin's reappearance in PMLA might wish to put the whole matter in historical perspective by recalling Virginia Woolf's caricature of Professor Von X in A Room of One's Own:

His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained ..

I knew that he was angry by this token. When I read what he wrote about women [feminism, Marxism] I thought, not of what he was saying, but of himself. When

an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the ar- gument; and the reader cannot help thinking of the argu- ment too. If he had written dispassionately about women [feminism, Marxism], had used indisputable proofs to es- tablish his argument and had shown no trace of wishing the result should be one thing rather than another, one would not have been angry either. One would have accepted the fact, as one accepts the fact that a pea is green or a canary yellow. So be it, I should have said. But I had been angry because he had been angry.

I couldn't have put it nearly so well myself.

JAMES O'ROURKE

Florida State University

To the Editor:

Seldom can one see more clearly how the battle lines of contemporary criticism have been drawn than in the juxtaposition in the May 1990 issue of two articles: Richard Levin's "The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide"

and Susan Winnett's "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure" (105 [1990]: 505-18). Each critic represents what the other despises: Winnett is a "neo-Freudian," a revisionist reader of masculine paradigms both in primary texts and in criti- cism, while Levin is an "androcentric" reader who, like Peter Brooks, would see Winnett's effort as little more than a new version of thematics. Yet each, I believe, could learn something from the other.

Winnett polarizes the issue of the pleasures of read- ing, saying that there are masculine and feminine ways of reading. But her discussion of feminine pleasure offers (for me, at least) new ways of reading male as well as female texts. I take as my example a poem widely

regarded as "masculine": Yeats's "Among School Chil- dren." The speaker, conscious of aging and mortality, wonders what adoring mother, if she could see her in- fant son become "that shape / With sixty or more winters on its head," would consider that image "A compensation for the pang of his birth / Or certainty of his setting forth?" (37-40). Yeats's question antici- pates Winnett's revisionist perspective of narratologi- cal pleasure. As she puts it, "[B]oth childbirth and breast feeding force us to think forward rather than backward" (509). Unlike Winnett, however, Yeats seems to have realized that such looking ahead will not neces-

sarily produce pleasure. Also, Yeats's poem contradicts Winnett's broad generalization that in "the erotics of oedipal transmission, the woman is always a stage (in both senses of the word) for or in the working out of a problem of paternal interdiction, toward the moment of 'significant discharge' when the son frees himself from the nets of paternal restriction and forges a self- creation-however ironized this process may be" (512; my italics). In "Among School Children" woman does not appear to be a stage, in either sense of the word. Rather, Yeats uses woman as a symbol to free himself from the "restriction" of masculine philosophy: neither Plato nor Aristotle nor Pythagoras offers Yeats a satis- factory answer to his questions about origins and mor- tality in the poem. The images of woman offer Yeats a new way to conceive of experience-a way that cir- cumnavigates the masculine tendency (so evident in Freud's "masterplot" of the death drive) to view life as linear, an unbroken progression from birth to death. Yeats, instead, adopts the more feminine (and for many readers more satisfying) image of "labour" that is "blos- soming or dancing / Where body is not bruised to plea- sure soul" (57-58). The cyclic pattern suggested by this image is more consistent with the pattern of mother- hood than with the linear vision of life that pre- dominates in so much of the masculine, meditative verse written by Donne, Wordsworth, and others. Yet one feels that for Yeats (and, ostensibly, for many readers) this image also adheres to the "pattern of tension and reso- lution ('tumescence and detumescence,' 'arousal and sig- nificant discharge')" that Winnett rejects (508). We need not insist on a choice of masculine or feminine plea- sures. This text, like many others, might satisfy the var-

ious forms of desire as defined by Brooks, Scholes, and Winnett.

Levin's argument raises other problems. Both his recent PMLA articles use remarkable subtlety in analyz- ing contemporary approaches to Shakespeare. Levin correctly sees how Marxist and feminist-psychoanalytic views have politicized Shakespeare studies, yet I am not convinced that he represents those approaches fairly.

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As one who has learned much from the feminist-

psychoanalytic critics especially, I agree that their strategy may be defined as a version of thematics, but I do not believe that this strategy is inherently bad. Nor do I think Levin's system of fragmented quoting gives readers an accurate picture of the method.

Ultimately, Levin's best point has to do with the style of recent criticism. As he shows, the new methodolo- gies, with their emphasis on passive-voice constructions and personified indirections (e.g., "the text has a proj- ect" and "the text conceals"), obscure interpretation ab- surdly. The quotations I have taken from Winnett make this point well enough. And yes, these critics do have their own agendas, as the "formalist-humanist" critics do, and those agendas are frequently moral. But I am disturbed that Levin finds so little use in, for example, the absent-mother theme in Shakespeare; surely, to a critic as perceptive as he the repetition of this theme in so many plays must "reveal" something significant (and very moral) about Shakespeare and his society.

I believe that both critics have something to teach us about the limitations and opportunities that various forms of criticism offer. But I also believe that Win-

nett and Levin emulate the pattern of too many critics today, those who write hostilely and who are so deeply entrenched in their own positions that they cannot see what others have to offer. And that, I think, is the most

important lesson to be derived from the politics of con- temporary criticism.

DANIEL W. ROSS

Columbus College

Reply:

Since these four letters come from four different

directions, I cannot in my allotted space give each one the attention it deserves and so will limit myself to some major points. Holland is wrong in saying that I object to the concept of "the real meaning of a text." I object to the inconsistency of critics who reject this concept in principle but violate their principle in their own prac- tice. I think that the attempt to determine the real mean-

ing is legitimate and does not assume a "god's-eye view," as he contends. It is what all normal human beings do hundreds of times daily, whenever they are at the receiv-

ing end of a verbal communication. They try to infer the real meaning of the words coming from the sender, which is the meaning that the sender meant, and they are usually successful. Otherwise communication would be impossible. Inferences from a literary text are more difficult, but the process is the same-that is, if we are trying to interpret the text's intended meaning.

Hyman misconstrues my position in the opposite

direction by having me insist that interpretation should be "limited to the author's intentions." I never say that. I am a pluralist and believe there are several valid critical approaches. One of these approaches attempts to find the intended meaning, as the New Critics did (Hyman is wrong about them); but that is not the only thing one

can do with a text. This also applies to his main concern, the "autonomy" of literature. No human artifact is really autonomous, but it is possible to interpret a liter- ary text as if it were, in certain respects, which is again what the New Criticism did. And again I would say that this is just one of the valid approaches to interpretation.

I agree with Holland that critics should try to evalu- ate literature, a very important function that was poorly performed by most New Critics (who thought their task was to prove that every work they interpreted was per- fectly unified) and has now virtually disappeared, in part because evaluation poses such difficult problems for both Marxists and Freudians. And I agree with Hy- man that The Death of the Author is not the sole cause

of the practices I examine; I should have made this clearer, although I mention that some of them are em- ployed by "weak" intentionalists like Snow. I also agree with Ross's conclusion that every mode of criticism has

"something to teach us" and that we should learn from one another. This is the rationale of my pluralism, and I have certainly learned from the feminists, as I state in my earlier article, and (less) from the Marxists, as I should have stated in this one. I have not learned, how-

ever, that the recent proliferation of absent-mother figures in Shakespeare "must 'reveal' something signifi- cant" about him. It only reveals that critics are now searching for these figures with a method that guaran- tees success since it has no negative test-no way of de- termining if any play does not contain an absent mother. The same applies to the proliferation of Christ figures and of appearance-versus-reality themes in the older criticism. Does Ross think they revealed something about Shakespeare or about the critics who sought them?

O'Rourke's only specific criticism of my article in- volves one sentence on the text's acquisition of a proj- ect. The sentence is sarcastic, but it raises a serious issue

about critics evading the problem of agency. O'Rourke evades it too by shifting to the next sentence to charge me with concealing my knowledge of Marx's theory of ideology or revealing my ignorance of the theory. Now I never claim to be an expert on Marxist theory, since my concern is the practice of the new Marxist critics, and I do not know if some statement of Marx's sup- ports their conceptions of ideology and the text as personified agencies that do things by themselves. But all his writings known to me assume that ideology is

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produced by human minds (The German Ideology, which O'Rourke suggests I read, says, "Men are the producers of their conceptions") and that literature is produced by authors, who have various relationships to the dominant ideology (see Literature and Art by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selections from Their Writ- ings, New York: International, 1947; this was also the assumption of almost all Marxist criticism of Shake- speare until recently). I will let O'Rourke decide whether Marx or Stallybrass is the better Marxist, a judgment that is not relevant to the issue raised by my sentence. If O'Rourke wanted to face that issue, he should have explained how a text can acquire an ideological proj- ect without the help of any human agency-a matter that, contrary to what he seems to think, is not the same

as a text's "carrying out an ideological project." O'Rourke's other criticisms of my article are so

generalized that it is hard to answer them. He compares it unfavorably to Pechter's article because Pechter did not provoke as "heated" a response; but in fact that article, which I admire, provoked plenty of anger that never reached the PMLA Forum. (Michael Cohen reports that in a 1988 Folger Shakespeare Institute Semi- nar some members "talked about the Pechter article

with disgust and horror" and "someone wondered aloud how PMLA could have published such a nasty piece of work" [Shakespeare Newsletter 38 (1988): 38].) O'Rourke also claims that those who agree with me will "simply have their prejudices confirmed" without having to study the new approaches; this observation is probably true of some readers, but it is equally true that some of those who disagree with me will simply be confirming their prejudices about the perfidy of the enemy and will dismiss my article as "gratuitous sarcasm" and "critical gossip," as he does, without having to deal with it. I do not think I should be blamed for either of these responses, which are obviously not what I aimed at. And at the end he uses Woolf's carica-

ture to relocate the anger in me rather than in the re- action against me. But I do not feel at all angry at the critics I discuss, some of whom I like, and I leave it to disinterested readers (if there are any left) to judge whether my article or his exhibits more anger.

RICHARD LEVIN

State University of New York, Stony Brook

To the Editor:

Susan Winnett's "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure" asserts that the study of the structure of narrative would benefit from a feminist perspective. Winnett quotes with approval

Scholes's contention that narrative form is essentially determined by the tumescence and detumescence of the male sexual cycle. But, she suggests, is not this view fun-

damentally sexist? Does it not privilege the male sex- ual cycle over the rather different female one? In her provocative paper, Winnett asks us to consider the im- pact on fiction and its interpretation if the female sex- ual cycle were, to some extent, determinative of the pleasures of the text. As examples of what that deter- mination might mean to practical criticism, she ana- lyzes two novels by women-Frankenstein and Romola. Her analyses suggest that what are usually construed as narrative flaws may be, according to a feminist read- ing, alternative structures influenced by the sexual ex- perience of their authors.

I have two points to make concerning Winnett's the- sis, one methodological and epistemological, the other political. My first concern is with the matter of evidence

and arguments. I do not mean that Winnett owes to her skeptical readers the actual evidence and arguments that might found her claim. Her paper is frankly specula- tive; she intends, she tells us, only to arrive at "the giddy

brink of an alternative" cultural paradigm (505). Still, I think she does owe readers a sketch of the kinds of

evidence and arguments that might support so radical a claim. If I found such evidence, what would it look like? If I invented such an argument, what would be its form?

It might be thought that her analyses of Frankenstein and Romola not only suggest but actually constitute the sought-for evidence and argument. The grounds for her claim, then, are as simple as they are effective: her hypothesis constitutes an explanation of these works at least as compelling as any alternative sponsored by the representatives of patriarchical dominance. But Winnett gives no hint that she wishes to ground her claim in these analyses. Rightly so; novels are fictions so extended and complex that one might almost believe that they would sustain a coherent reading on the basis of any interpretative scheme, no matter how outland- ish. Winnett is quite right to discount such easy victo- ries. A causal hypothesis such as hers needs firmer buttressing.

It is important not only to substantiate a preferred claim but also to accommodate its plausible alterna- tives. The alternatives to Winnett's claim form two

classes. The first counters Scholes's general assertion that "[t]he archetype of all fiction" is the sexual cycle (qtd. on 506). This alternative holds that the archetype is some other human or natural cycle or some combi- nation of natural and human cycles, a combination that might very well differ as we move from fiction to fic- tion. The second class of alternatives rejects the very

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notion of an archetype of fiction. It asserts rather that

every fiction is sui generis; indeed, in its strongest form,

this class reverses the causal arrow, contending that fic- tions may themselves be the cause of our interpretation of the various human and natural cycles of which we are aware. Winnett recognizes and respects these alter- natives (506, 508), but recognition and respect are in- sufficient; it is also necessary to avoid a benign and empty pluralism under whose protection any set of be-

liefs can garner its faction and found a critical school. My second concern involves the political implications

that must follow the truth of Winnett's claim. In the

literature of feminism, it has been repeatedly asserted that the patriarchal rationalizations that have barred women from full participation in social and political life are powerfully distorting of that life; in supporting unfairness to women, such rationalizations make our society less humane, less viable for everyone. In the dis- ciplines, the particular concern of academics, these ra- tionalizations infect the very structures that constitute knowledge. In short, these rationalizations are danger- ous nonsense; differences between men and women have been manufactured to suit a narrow ideology. It follows that equal participation of men and women will lead to a more humane and viable society and polity and to a firmer, more durable form of knowledge. The implications of this claim seem wholly progressive.

But this claim must not be conflated with Winnett's

very different claim. Hers seems rather a version of the

general claim that women qua women have something special to offer society, that there is something remark- able, something unique in their point of view. Accord- ing to Winnett, storytelling and story understanding are

not, as we might have thought, social capacities gener- ated by our common humanity; they are instead psy- chological capacities founded on our (generally) irremediable sexual biology. Such biological deter- minism suited well an archconservative and social pes- simist like Freud, and it may well suit contemporary neoconservatives of whatever stripe; but it can hardly be attractive to a movement that depends heavily on progressive and meliorist assumptions. If true, the claim that women possess unique, biologically determined qualities seems to serve, not the women's movement, but its opponents. Why not argue, instead, that a spe- cifically female pleasure is itself a patriarchal construct, an interested valorization of physical differences that ought to be insignificant socially and politically?

I hope that it will not be asserted in reply that my separation of methodology and epistemology from pol- itics is itself political, that the division itself affirms a male "logocentrism" that must be abandoned in the in- terest of authentic intellectual progress. Whatever the

eventual nature of our intellectual society, those mak- ing claims will have to assume a genuine burden of proof. When they do, they must deploy evidence and make arguments; moreover, that evidence and those ar- guments must be capable of close characterization.

ALAN G. GROSS

Purdue University, Calumet

Reply:

At the end of Henry James's novel The SacredFount, the narrator concludes that the reason his antagonist has unstrung the interpretive system he has pursued is not that he "hadn't three times her method" but rather

that he "too fatally lacked . . . her tone." I don't for a moment doubt that Gross and Ross have at least three

times my method, but both seem to have had consid- erable difficulties reading my tone.

Gross begins his commentary with the observation that I quote "with approval Scholes's contention that narrative form is essentially determined by the tumes- cence and detumescence of the male sexual cycle." Only a total misunderstanding of the tone of my essay could lead him to read "approval" into my examination of Scholes's readerly approximation of the sexual act. More serious for Gross's argument than the issue of whether or not I "approve" of Scholes is Gross's view that I would agree with any "essentialist" notion of what determines narrative form. One of the major goals of the article is to demonstrate how any discussion of nar- rative determinants depends entirely on the conscious or unconscious ideological position of the critic as well as on the text that the discussion is supposed to illumi- nate or that is to "prove" (as Gross puts it) the viability of the theory. My introduction of possible female coun-

terparts to the images of male "tumescence and detumescence" invoked by Brooks and Scholes is, from the outset, intentionally perverse. (I am not aware of having discussed either the male or the female "sexual cycle"; here, as in Gross's contention that I "suggest that what are usually construed as narrative flaws [in Frankenstein and Romola] may be ... influenced by the sexual experience of their authors," I am troubled by his assumption that experiences of the body-and indeed experiences of pleasure-are necessarily sexual. I allude to Shelley's "maternal" experiences but to nei- ther her "sexual experience" nor Eliot's.) The wording of the article makes my limited stakes in the narrative model I devise fairly clear, which doesn't mean that I haven't put considerable care into constructing the model and thinking about its implications: my purpose is to show that even if we retain Brooks's and Scholes's

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preferred images for narrative incipience and resolution and seek to derive a narratology from whatever analo- gies we can find in the experience of the female body, we will come up with a model that diverges from and challenges a (male) narratology that is insufficiently (if at all) aware of its own arbitrariness. But a reader who demands "evidence and arguments that might support so radical a claim" is going to have missed my tone of serious play. I'd be slightly less hard-pressed to think about possible "proof" of my "radical . . . claim" if Gross had made it clearer to which claim he is refer-

ring and-since readings seem not to be "proof" enough-what kind of proof he would accept.

Having missed much of the point of my essay, Gross proceeds to deem my "biological determinism" reac- tionary; there is a serious philosophical and scientific debate about whether maleness and femaleness are bi-

ological categories, a debate to which I consider my- self, as neither a philosopher nor a scientist, unprepared to contribute. I do believe that being born with two X chromosomes tends to initiate an experience of female- ness that differs substantially from the experience of maleness that usually follows being born with an X and a Y chromosome. Of course these differences are con-

structions, but it is nonetheless true that constructed

females have something to offer that differs from what constructed males have, and I find much of what constructed females say when they read narrative "re- markable" and "unique." Any talk of our "common humanity" can only rest on the common denominator of a dominant, patriarchal culture.

I have no objection to "learning something" from Levin's article, as Ross suggests, and I find his assump- tion of my hostility to Levin a bit presumptuous. It is interesting that Ross conflates my tone and Levin's; "[e]ach critic represents what the other despises" sug- gests that both articles are informed by a tone of an- ger. I hope my affection for Brooks and my sense of the real importance of his work on narrative is as evi- dent in my article as is my serious criticism of his work.

Levin's criticism of passive constructions in contem- porary criticism is indeed illuminating, and I plead guilty to the occasional claim that "the text has a. ..." But I find very few such constructions in "Coming Un- strung" and none in the passages Ross cites in his let- ter. Again, a problem of tone?

I am touched that Ross finds that my discussion offers new ways of reading male as well as female texts, but I do not see that the mother figure in "Among School Children" is anything but another fantasy stage on which, as Ross himself puts it, "Yeats uses woman

preferred images for narrative incipience and resolution and seek to derive a narratology from whatever analo- gies we can find in the experience of the female body, we will come up with a model that diverges from and challenges a (male) narratology that is insufficiently (if at all) aware of its own arbitrariness. But a reader who demands "evidence and arguments that might support so radical a claim" is going to have missed my tone of serious play. I'd be slightly less hard-pressed to think about possible "proof" of my "radical . . . claim" if Gross had made it clearer to which claim he is refer-

ring and-since readings seem not to be "proof" enough-what kind of proof he would accept.

Having missed much of the point of my essay, Gross proceeds to deem my "biological determinism" reac- tionary; there is a serious philosophical and scientific debate about whether maleness and femaleness are bi-

ological categories, a debate to which I consider my- self, as neither a philosopher nor a scientist, unprepared to contribute. I do believe that being born with two X chromosomes tends to initiate an experience of female- ness that differs substantially from the experience of maleness that usually follows being born with an X and a Y chromosome. Of course these differences are con-

structions, but it is nonetheless true that constructed

females have something to offer that differs from what constructed males have, and I find much of what constructed females say when they read narrative "re- markable" and "unique." Any talk of our "common humanity" can only rest on the common denominator of a dominant, patriarchal culture.

I have no objection to "learning something" from Levin's article, as Ross suggests, and I find his assump- tion of my hostility to Levin a bit presumptuous. It is interesting that Ross conflates my tone and Levin's; "[e]ach critic represents what the other despises" sug- gests that both articles are informed by a tone of an- ger. I hope my affection for Brooks and my sense of the real importance of his work on narrative is as evi- dent in my article as is my serious criticism of his work.

Levin's criticism of passive constructions in contem- porary criticism is indeed illuminating, and I plead guilty to the occasional claim that "the text has a. ..." But I find very few such constructions in "Coming Un- strung" and none in the passages Ross cites in his let- ter. Again, a problem of tone?

I am touched that Ross finds that my discussion offers new ways of reading male as well as female texts, but I do not see that the mother figure in "Among School Children" is anything but another fantasy stage on which, as Ross himself puts it, "Yeats uses woman

as a symbol to free himself from the 'restriction' of mas-

culine philosophy." Does it matter that the fathers are Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras and not M. Sorel and Baldassare Calvi?

Both Gross and Ross seem to want first to "correct"

ny style of argumentation or writing (to bring it more in line with their senses of what academic writing or academic debate should be) and then to appropriate for "common humanity" what(ever) is left. When Ross writes, "We need not insist on a choice of masculine or

feminine pleasures" (my emphasis), he writes from the position of someone who thinks he has a choice. My point is that women have long had this choice thrust on them and that, now that they (or at least some of them) can choose, they are likely to want to claim their own pleasures as their own.

SUSAN WINNETT

Columbia University

"Universal Americanisms" in PMLA

To the Editor:

As a member of the Modern Language Association I feel that I must object to the "universal American- isms" that occur in PMLA. Allow me to mention two cases. The first has to do with the issue of fetal-tissue

use that was put forth by the MLA some time last year. In urging its members to contact President Bush about this issue, the MLA did not discriminate between its American members and those (like me) who are Cana- dian. Does the association, like Walt Whitman, consider that Canada is just an extension of the United States of America? I came to the conclusion that this must

be the case when I received the May 1990 issue of the journal. David Kaufmann, in his article "The Profes- sion of Theory" (105 [1990]: 519-30), states that "a sur- prising number of us in this country think our colleges and universities are caught in a crisis" (519). Which country does Kaufmann mean by "this country"? I pre- sume that he means the United States of America.

Please remember that not all your members are from the United States or from the "Third World" countries

that have become patronizingly trendy to write about. Perhaps you could reflect this with the publication of an article dealing with the literature of Canada or Mexico.

as a symbol to free himself from the 'restriction' of mas-

culine philosophy." Does it matter that the fathers are Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras and not M. Sorel and Baldassare Calvi?

Both Gross and Ross seem to want first to "correct"

ny style of argumentation or writing (to bring it more in line with their senses of what academic writing or academic debate should be) and then to appropriate for "common humanity" what(ever) is left. When Ross writes, "We need not insist on a choice of masculine or

feminine pleasures" (my emphasis), he writes from the position of someone who thinks he has a choice. My point is that women have long had this choice thrust on them and that, now that they (or at least some of them) can choose, they are likely to want to claim their own pleasures as their own.

SUSAN WINNETT

Columbia University

"Universal Americanisms" in PMLA

To the Editor:

As a member of the Modern Language Association I feel that I must object to the "universal American- isms" that occur in PMLA. Allow me to mention two cases. The first has to do with the issue of fetal-tissue

use that was put forth by the MLA some time last year. In urging its members to contact President Bush about this issue, the MLA did not discriminate between its American members and those (like me) who are Cana- dian. Does the association, like Walt Whitman, consider that Canada is just an extension of the United States of America? I came to the conclusion that this must

be the case when I received the May 1990 issue of the journal. David Kaufmann, in his article "The Profes- sion of Theory" (105 [1990]: 519-30), states that "a sur- prising number of us in this country think our colleges and universities are caught in a crisis" (519). Which country does Kaufmann mean by "this country"? I pre- sume that he means the United States of America.

Please remember that not all your members are from the United States or from the "Third World" countries

that have become patronizingly trendy to write about. Perhaps you could reflect this with the publication of an article dealing with the literature of Canada or Mexico.

ANDREW WILLIAMS

Repentigny, Quebec ANDREW WILLIAMS

Repentigny, Quebec

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