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From Mimesis to Irony: Writing and Print as Integuments of Voice Vision, Content, and Voice 10 The present study grew out of an assignment to consider the subject "Response to Vision: Judging the Value of Literary Content ." This is a vast subject. In one or another guise, questions concerning the value of literary content have woven their way through most of twentieth-century Western poetics and literary theory, from the Russian Formalism of the first third of this century through the succeeding Prague Structuralism, the American New Criticism of the second third of the century and its British connections , and the French Formalism running from Ferdinand de Saussure, with late detours through Claude Levi-Strauss, down to Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and others, to intersect with the hermeneutic of Paul Ricoeur. Inevitably, over the years the avenues of discussion have often become intricate mazes, not always made more negotiable by specially contrived, sometimes fanciful, concepts and terms posted along the route. Instead of working into or within or out of this maze, I propose to skirt it, without losing sight of it, and to discuss the value of literary content against the background of the spoken word, in which literature has its pristine and its permanent roots. My reflections will be sketchy, for in taking up the problem of judging literary content, I am taking up more than I or anyone else can possibly handle comprehensively even in treating the subject at far greater length than is possible here. From Mimesis to Irony 273 Literature consists of words, at times with some admixture of other elements. It is impossible to have real words without a real speaker or writer and without a real-life, existential situation in which speaker or writer performs. A story has aesthetic distance, but it always is told or written at a given place in a given moment of history. These axioms can provide one way to frame a discussion of the value of literary content, and they are the ones I shall use to frame these reflections. I shall not undertake to define here the exact meaning of "literary content." The term "content" shows reliance on a spatial model for literature. Literature is taken to be like a box or other container, with something "in" it. All models are inadequate , and this is perhaps more inadequate than most. It is a relatively new model, dependent on the strong feeling for words as localized units encouraged by print and on modes of conceptualization useful for Newtonian physics. The model was developed largely under vernacular auspices. Short of some enterprising circumlocution, Latin had provided no way to think of literature or other utterance as having "content." Literature had not "contained" but simply "said" something. Nevertheless, despite the problems with the concept, we have enough tacit agreement about what the term "content" means to permit us to forego further discussion here, allowing the rest of this paper to clarify in more detail as need be what "literary content" comes to. The term "vision" in our thematic title shows a similar inclination to reduce verbalization to spatial equivalents, to reduce sound to sight. Again, the term is not without meaning. Perhaps it is even overmeaningful, for it indicates not only, to a degree, what we are talking about but also, implicitly, where we ourselves are who are doing the talking. Weare standing back, away, from literature. We have objectified it visually (with some help from the tactile). Literature "contains" a "vision," so it seems. Sight distances its objects. Eyeball-to-eyeball or eyeball-to-object vision is impossible. A vision is an experience of something at a 274 Closure and Print certain distance, something from which we stand off, something out there or over there. Literature was not always like this. And the oral performance out of which literature grows, and to which literature is permanently related and indeed attached, was like this hardly at all. In an oral culture, which of course has no literature, the oral performance out of which literature grows is not distanced from either performer or audience in the way in which literature is. I should like, therefore, to go back to the point in history, or the points in histories-for literature accrues to and grows out of oral performance somewhat differently in each culture and period-and to consider our subjects at a period when verbal utterance could not so adequately be conceived in terms of "vision" or...

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