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  • Texts and Lumps*
  • Richard Rorty

Like most other disciplines, literary criticism swings back and forth between a desire to do small-scale jobs well and carefully and a desire to paint the great big picture. At the moment it is at the latter pole, and is trying to be abstract, general, and theoretical. This has resulted in literary critics taking more of an interest in philosophy, and philosophers returning the compliment. This exchange has been useful to both groups. I think, however, that there is a danger that literary critics seeking help from philosophy may take philosophy a bit too seriously. They will do this if they think of philosophers as supplying "theories of meaning" or "theories of the nature of interpretation," as if "philosophical research" into such topics had recently yielded interesting new "results."

Philosophy too swings back and forth between a self-image modeled on that of Kuhnian "normal science," in which small-scale problems get definitively solved one at a time, and a self-image modeled on that of Kuhnian "revolutionary science," in which all the old philosophical problems are swept away as pseudoproblems and philosophers busy themselves redescribing the phenomena in a new vocabulary. The field presently called "literary theory" has profited primarily from the latter sort of philosophy (which has lately been fashionable in France and Germany). Unfortunately, however, it has often tried to describe itself as if it were profiting from philosophy of the former sort. It has employed the scientistic rhetoric characteristic of the early period of analytic philosophy. One often finds critics using sentences beginning "Philosophy has shown . . ." to formulate a justification for taking a certain favored approach to a literary text, or to literary history, or to literary canon-formation.

I think critics would do better to realize that philosophy is no more likely to produce "definitive results" (in the sense in which microbiology can show how to create immunity to a certain disease, or nuclear physics how to build a better bomb) than is literary criticism itself. This should not be viewed as undesirable "softness" on the part of either discipline, [End Page 53] but simply as an illustration of the fact that there are lots of areas in which desiderata are not as well agreed upon as they are in medicine or in the munitions industry. It would be better for critics to simply have favorite philosophers (and philosophers to have favorite literary critics)—favorites picked by consonance with their own desiderata. If a literary critic wants to see the great big picture, tell a great big story, then he is going to have to engage in the same sort of canon-formation in respect to philosophers as he does in respect to novelists or poets or fellow critics.1 As Geoffrey Hartman sensibly puts it, "Theory itself is just another text; it does not enjoy a privileged status."2

The need to have a general theory (of something as grand as "interpretation" or "knowledge" or "truth" or "meaning") is the sort of need which James and Dewey tried to put in perspective by insisting, with Hegel, that theory follows after, rather than being presupposed by, concrete accomplishment. On this pragmatical view, a "theoretical" style—the "Aristotelian" style which depends heavily on definitions and the "Galilean" style which depends on generalizations—is useful principally for pedagogic purposes, to provide succinct formulations of past achievements. When applied to literary criticism, pragmatism offers reasons why critics need not worry about being "scientific," and why they should not be frightened of the appearance of "subjectivity" which results from the adoption of an untheoretical, narrative style. It suggests that we neither be afraid of subjectivity nor anxious for methodology, but simply proceed to praise our heroes and damn our villains by making invidious comparisons. It urges that we not try to show that our choice of heroes is imposed upon us by, or underwritten by, antecedently plausible principles. For pragmatists, telling stories about how one's favorite and least favorite literary texts hang together is not to be distinguished from—is simply a species of—the "philosophical" enterprise of telling stories about the nature of the universe which highlight all the things one...

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