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Books 291 dence. In contrast, the author of a piece of ‘artistic’ writing is likely to be displeased if someone gives it a paraphrase that is good enough to be interchangeable ; for in artistic writing the author aims to endow every aspect of the sensory presentation with meanings that are integral with the total structure of meaning. Insofar as he succeeds, the statistical chances are heavily loaded against any interchangeable paraphrase being possible. The existence of anything that is interchangeable with his work may be taken as evidence of weak artistic sensibilityin that work. It seems to me likely that these two attitudes to the written word are concurrent developmentsfrom a more primitive,undifferentiated attitude. Perhaps primitive language was both more poetic than modern scientificlanguage and more scientificthan modern poetic language. Vico’s contention ‘that the earliestform of languagewaspoetry,fromwhich the discursive form of speech is an evolution’ (43) has, Ithink, a littlemoretruth than Wollheimallows it. My purpose in describing these alternative attitudes to language in the present place is to draw attention to the possibility that perfect instances of the artistic use of language (as of the scientific use) may be found to precedethe socialacceptanceof the concept. It seems reasonable to suppose that some of these instances would be somewhat accidental but that some would result from an impulse to use language specificallyin this way. Iwould suggestthen, that whileour understanding of what the artisticimpulseconsists dependson our experienceof a culture havinga conceptand institution of art, we may be able to identify the existence of this impulse in cultures or age-groups that lack the concept and we may recognize the impulse in both positive and negative instances-both where it manifestsitself successfully,despitethe absenceof institutional support, and where the absence of this support leads to its perversion into other channels. 4. Worksofart identijedby meansof canonicalworks plus derivations (60) ‘Enough has already been said in this essay .to suggestthat our initial hope of elicitinga definition of art, or of a work of art, was excessive.’ Wollheim proceeds to suggest that ‘a general method for identifying works of art’ might take the following form: ‘that we should, first, pick out certain objects as original or primary works of art and that we should then set up some rules which, successively applied to the original works of art, will give us (within certain rough limits) all subsequent or derivative works of art.’ He continues, ‘a strong analogy suggests itself between such a recursive method of identifying works of art and the project of a generative grammar in which all the wellformed sentences of a language are specified in terms of certainkernel sentencesand a set of rewrite rules.’ I think this is a rash speculation in an otherwise realistic assessment of actualities and possibilities. That art should be defined ostensively by pointing attypicalspecimens-if thiscanbecalleda definition -seems to me admirable. But having pointed and having perhaps analysed our specimens in some detail, I think we can only say that works of art are ‘things like these’. I doubt whether ‘those things’ can be generatedfrom ‘thesethings’, unless the class of ‘these’is made extremelylarge. In no casewould I think that derivability, by any rule that may be suggested, could be a necessary or sufficient condition for identification as art. Unlike the other points that I have criticized, this idea seems to run counter to the generaltenor of Wollheim’sthought. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Renato Poggioli. Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, Mass., 1968. 250 pp., $6.50. Reviewed by: Joseph Acheson* Renato Poggioli,the distinguishedItalian scholar and teacher, at the time of his death in 1963 was Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard. This book, his major work, was published in Italy in 1962and has beenjustly praised by scholars and critics throughout the Western world. The Harvard edition is the first to be published in English in its entirety. Written before 1962 in the calm and dignified surroundings of ‘Ivy League’ Harvard, it predates the violent upheavals of the closing years of the decade. Its tone is one of scholarlydetachmentand toleration. One can only speculateas to whether he would have reached the same conclusions had he writtenhis book after the Springof 1969,which saw...

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