Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding by Michael Steig (review)

102 LETI'ERS IN CANADA 1989 rivalry on the topics of love, nature, and music, and then hear a decision; and how he then put more and more non-Theocritean and non-pastoral material into that bucolic framework (e.g. the political prophecy in 4 and the evictions in 1) until it ceased to be offurther service. Then we find him taking over another framework, from Hesiod, and exhausting that; and finally adopting the biggest framework of all, from Homer himself. The successive transformations of these three genres represent the development of Rome's greatest poet. Father Lee's study 'is not a book for scholars'; it is meant for 'the reader who wants both an introduction to the Eclogues and an interpretation of them.' For writing such a book Lee has a most important asset: he loves the Eclogues. He is sensitive to that world in which joy and beauty are so fragile and precarious; unlike more prosaic interpreters who have complained about 'artificiality,' he appreciates the symbolic nature ofthe shepherd and his landscape; he writes in a warm and lucid style; and he is characteristically generous to other critics. Some reservations are in order. The parallel with nostalgic pieces like Leacock's Mariposa, Housman's 'Into my heart an air that kills,' and Yeats's Innisfree has already been queried. The general use of the name 'Arcadia' is of doubtful validity. (That country of the mind was not fully discovered before Sannazaro, as Jenkyns argues in Journal of Romance Studies 1989). A few of the sound effects detected by Lee seem somewhat fanciful. And his summary of the eclogue collection on page 112 must surely be an oversimplified construct. So while the student will certainly be attracted, he or she may well find, on reading more deeply, that questions begin to arise ('What's his evidence for that?' 'Does this follow from that?' 'Can that really be right?'). Yet a wise and sympathetic teacher like Father Lee will not mind these questions. For he will know that, thanks to his stimulus, the student is now on the road to becoming a scholar. (NIALL RUDD) Michael Steig. Stories ofReading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding Johns Hopkins University Press. 261. us $32.50; $12.50 paper Stories of Reading is predicated on the assumption that it is impossible to locate meaning exclusivelyin either the textor the reader. Steig's aim is to connect response and interpretation by demonstrating 'the social role of the communication of personal responses in the understanding of literature on the basis of classroom experience.' Making sense of a text, Steig maintains, involves 'the affective as well as the cognitive, the unconscious as well as the conscious.' The text, however, places some 'constraints upon what a given reader takes from it in meaning, feeling, and understanding,' though such constraints are always relative to the HUMANITIES 103 experiences, expectations, and beliefs df the reader. Understanding, then, is 'a temporary condition of satisfaction arrived at subjectively,' but this 'subjective state of understanding may, underthe right conditions for communicating it, be made intersubjective.' Despite his valorization of subjectivity, Steig admits that 'conceptualization of many kinds of knowledge extrinsic to the text ... is for some readers an important aspect of literary understanding.' Such knowledge might include the reported perceptions of other readers or the inferred intentions of the author, as well as information about the author's life and times, about his or her other works, or about the literary influences he or she has absorbed. This seemingly extrinsic knowledge, however, becomes part of the reader's subjectivity and provides no objective foundation for validating any particular interpretation, interpretation being largely determined by the perceptions, affects, and associations of the reader. In order to situate Steig's position within the file of reader-response criticism, I shall divide the field into three categories: text-active, biactive, and reader-active. At one end of the spectrum are text-active theories. Their proponents assume that the author's willed verbal meaning is embodied in the text itself; that extratextual and extraliterary factors can be identified and avoided; and that the ideal reader is a tabula rasa receptive to the impingements of the text but...