Keywords: Theory

Bishop, Wendy and David Starkey. Keywords in Creative Writing. Longan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2006. Print.

Bishop and Starkey offer a gentle, commonsense apology for theory to CW folk who are resistant. This more or less answers some of my questions from last post (how to address these issues to this audience?) by way of demonstration. I'll quote at length without comment:

Theory is political, particularly in the hierarchies of English departments where many writers now house themselves. To feel angry about or indifferent to theory, to lack a bit of theory knowledge and theory talk is to make oneself vulnerable and defensive. To do the reverse is to participate in what is—for now—the lingua franca of these departments.

Theory is rhetorical and there are any number of genre arguments in contemporary writing programs; knowing which genres have currency for which reasons can matter...//

Theory is practical and performative...for there are any number of moments...when writers have a need to articulate their practices, their beliefs, their field, their genre, and so on...

Practice into theory and theory into practice is the normal ebb and flow of excellent teaching. Teachers evaluate student texts and need to have understandings of/ability to articulate their theories of reading, their values and beliefs, their judgments...

Theory is a tool for thinking and innovation. There is no experimentation without convention. There is nothing to rebel against without a community to approach or retreat from. Without theories of writing and writers, there are no genre innovations, movements, schools of writing...

Theory can be serious but theory can also be play when a writer is not on the run, on the defensive...Theory is language and language is the grubstake of writing. (175-176)

As for the rest of the book, I didn't draw much from it. A nice discussion of identity politics, which I may want to revisit at a later date. So I guess this book counts as its own lead.

Literacy and CW

The paper I should have written last semester would have looked at bringing some of the insights from the discourse relating to issues of literacy over to the CW conversation. Creative Writing is still writing, even though it likes to pretend it belongs in a special class, apart from inventory lists and emails and such. Writing is writing, and the same (or at least many of the same) observations apply.

One way to approach this is to think about "creative writing literacy" as a type of literacy and to examine it as literacy has been examined generally. The questions at the end of Foucault's "What is an Author?" point toward this type of examination, in part.

Let me see if I can remember what I read:

We read Walter Ong on how writing transforms consciousness. If you take him at his word—and I think there is some of his argument that is salvageable without coming off like a bigot—then we could think about how that transformation affects storytelling and poetry. How does it change fiction, or, more appropriately, how we think fiction and poetry, to be able to write them down? How does it change the social dynamics of Creative Writing that it is no longer strictly an oral performance? Rereading him with these questions in mind might be productive. If speculative.

We read Brian Street and his Autonomous model vs. Ideological model of literacy. I'd have to reread to get exactly what the Autonomous model implied but the gist (as I remember it) is that anthropologists and others assumed that Literacy was a fixed thing, you had it or you didn't, and if you didn't you were less developed, less intelligent than cultures that did. The Ideological model suggests that literacy practices are multiple and are socially and economically determined. Street went to a rural town in Iran and looked at their literacy practices, demonstrating how they were related to economic changes in the region.

If we apply this to fiction, then we can say that the kind of fiction that gets written—the kind that gets published and read—is determined by social and economic forces as well. This takes us into Marxist critique territory. Was it Eagleton who said that literature is ideology? There may be some parallels to draw between these two. My choices as a writer, my freedom and success as a writer, are constrained by the economic and political conditions I face daily, including when I sit at the computer to write. How I write and who I write to are both choices that have economic and political consequences as well.

Brandt (Literacy in American Lives) interviewed 80 or so folks in Wisconsin for their personal histories with writing and found that these practices were very much determined by social and economic changes in America over the course of a century. Brandt's big concept was "sponsors" of literacy; she found that people who experienced success with literacy found favorable sponsors during the course of their lives, sponsors who introduced them to the writing skills necessary for success in a particular field.

The university has become a sponsor of creative literacy. It allows and also denies access to creative literacy practice. This is quite an impressive cultural power. Is the university the only sponsor of creative literacy? I'm quite sure it is the most powerful. The most widely influential. And so the discourse and practices in academic creative writing circles are now the very things that determine creative practice and written cultural production in the culture. We decide who gets to and who doesn't, and, perhaps more importantly, we decide why. The criteria we set for admission and success are standards we impose on the kinds of creative writing that happen in America.

Stuckey, who I didn't actually read but should, equated literacy with violence, suggesting that because literacy allows some access to privilege and denies others the same, and because access is unevenly distributed along lines of race, class, gender, that literacy itself is an oppressive force.
I gots to read this and draw on it. Seems like it would offer a serious critique of CW in the academy.

NAAL, The National Assessment of Adult Literacy, is mostly about reading skills, but it gives a good picture of who is capable of reading literary fiction. Not many people. And people who can are far more likely to be wealthy and white. So the choice to write literary fiction is a choice to write to a particular, privileged audience.

Gee's big idea was Primary and Secondary discourse. He also had a great, all inclusive definition of literacy. Primary discourse is what you get at home. Secondary discourse is what you have to pick up second-hand, and it is basically impossible to really fully acquire a secondary discourse. Middle class homes share a primary discourse with the educational institutions, so middle class kids take to the discourse at schools like fish to water. Lower class homes, minority homes, do not share the same discourse as their learning environments, and so are forever at a disadvantage in terms of gaining the literacy skills required to be successful in this economy.
Gee's stuff adds to the critique of CW in the academy, which by and large excludes lower class minorities from creative writing production.

His inclusive definition of literacy might make for an interesting examination of CW literacy. writing-reading-talking-feeling-thinking-believing...or something to that effect. It includes everything from body language to political views. What is the "literacy" of CW programs? What does it take to be a successful workshop participant? What are the unwritten, but still powerful, behavioral injunctions that guide workshop practice? We must examine these, since they represent more of what we actually teach than we realize; they, together, tell students: "A writer is someone who acts/thinks/speaks/critiques/writes/reads/gestures/positions him/herself like this."

The New London Group's pedagogy stated that literacy is not a singular thing. Multiliteracies was the term. And their approach to education was to go out into communities and ask what sorts of skills/knowledge people thought would be useful to them, and then they did their best to pass on those skills and/or that knowledge. Just came across a reference to a source from the 70s that suggested that CW students should be treated the same way. You find out what they want to do first, and then try to help them do it. Everyone who comes into the classroom has a different motivation, history, desired trajectory, etc. Each student has a different idea of what skills/knowledge would be useful and we could approach CW instruction as if it were a space where these resources are available rather than as a place where a particular aesthetic is imposed.

I know we read other stuff, but I'm going to have to go digging. And I'm not sure how to organize this and integrate it with the CW stuff I've been reading.

Writer's Chronicle

Just got the AWP rag in the mail and I have to say I'm disappointed. There's not much to it, and what there is...

I read "Odds on Ends," an article about "How to Stop Writing," by which the author means how to end a short story. Here she is being offensively dismissive of other writer's work:

The end of Ian McEwan's novels are all dreadful...Michael Ondaatje's endings leave readers hanging. No Country For Old Men felt like the first part of a two-part serial, and as for the last paragraph of The Road? Ridiculous.

Yikes. How can she get published, saying things like that? Maybe the endings are bad, I don't know, but to dismiss the work of authors without any discussion of the work, without any explanation at all...jeez.

And then there's this:

Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary soldier on long after their heroines have disappeared, to their detriment I might add.

It just strikes me as odd that the professional journal of writing programs would publish a paper that is so flagrantly dismissive of other writers. Without any analysis or argument even. Maybe she has a good point to make. We might even benefit if she explained herself. But she doesn't. And she doesn't have to. Apparently.

As for the last line of Joyce's "The Dead":

We would tear that apart in a workshop—too many adverbs, too much alliteration.

And it's honestly hard to say if there is any self-aware irony to that statement. Maybe just a glimmer. If so, she doesn't bother to stop and reflect on workshop practices that work against lyrical endings by imposing restrictive aesthetic standards on student work. There is nowhere in the article any pedagogical reflection whatsoever.

Her article, when not dismissing (or sometimes praising) novels in passing, consists mostly of "suggestions," which are supposed to help...who? Any other writer, apparently, although it's hard to imagine that the author really intends such advice for her peers.

Be careful not to end with a dream...readers tend to skip them.

We want our evil characters to be punished before they go and our good guys to be redeemed before they go.

Mirror-image your scenes.

Think circularly.

Aim for a beautiful ending.

Then, slipping from "craft" suggestions to "process" suggestions without apparently recognizing the distinction:

Meditate.

Keep a dream journal.

Be attentive to any ideas that come to you in the shower.

Find a stick and write in the sand.

Etc.

Missing from the paper entirely is any survey of critical literature that might help illuminate the question of what an "ending" is and what qualities make a "good" one. There's plenty she could draw from. But she doesn't mention any of it. Hasn't read it by all appearances. Her "lit review" covers only "how to" manuals. And these she quotes without even citing them or providing references. It's just not even remotely academic. I guess that's what's so shocking to me. Maybe I just have to get over it.

But I can't let this one go without comment:

This, by the way, is why I think we say that writing can't be taught. So much of it is based on the body's physical response. If you don't feel that sick twitch of shame, even when the sentimental or manipulative is pointed out to you, no one can teach it to you. This doesn't mean your work won't sell or be popular. I just means it won't be any good. If you don't hear that little "click" when the end snaps into place no one can teach that to you either...there is no other way for me to describe it—you hear "click" and the treasure box opens.

The passage assumes a special intuition belonging only to great writers (like the author of course) that can't be taught (even though the author makes her living teaching CW). It also sets the author up as arbiter of "good," which strikes me as the foundation of really bad workshop pedagogy. Writing instructor as guru of goodness. I don't think I want to look inside that "treasure box."

Her article does shed light on the state of the current conversation in CW. It suddenly makes sense to me that so many folks who actually are writing academically about CW pedagogy and theory argue for the value of formalist criticism. Judging by the AWP's publication, the scholarly conversation is at square one and will have to be moved forward one step at a time.

No wonder there is so much negative feeling toward Theory. People are working toward tenure without having to be academic, and any push in the direction of scholarly discourse must feel like a threat. Much safer to publish "advice" in the Writer's Chronicle and call it a day.

This means to participate in the conversation, I have to be really, really careful about how I make my points. I'm going to have to keep reading this thing and thinking about ways to make a bridge between the unconsidered stance of writers like the one I quoted above, and the hyper-considered work in Theory.

How do you convince these folks that Theory matters? That there actually are things you can teach beyond "suggestions"?

Anticipating Barthes

I've not read more than "Death of the Author" and a few online secondary sources, but it seems to me that a deeper study of Barthes would be most productive. For folks like Mayers (and Dawson, too, I think) who feel that Theory is essentially theory of interpretation, Barthes presents a compelling alternative. Not that he didn't have a bit to say about interpretation, but he did write quite a bit about writing. And it seems he may provide a way into a more fully developed CWT.

The responses I've seen to Barthes "Death" from CW scholars (Wandor and others) seem to take his title more seriously than the rest of the essay. Yes, he declares the author dead, but what he means by "Author" is something most actual authors don't relate to anyway. His idea of the "scriptor" is something that we should be taking seriously, considering its implications for the writing process and CW pedagogy.

There's a very nice wiki on Roland Barthes, which includes a discussion of some of his key terms, like readerly/writerly texts and author/scriptor. And an excellent bit on "neutral and novelistic writing" that gives some nice leads into his work as it bears on questions relevant to creative writers.

A solid essay on Barthes at third factory gives a great overview of the work, with notes on its relevance to poetry in general and American poetry specifically. Good leads from this one.

From what I glean, if I want to go big on Barthes this semester, I should pick up The Rustle of Language, Writing Degree Zero, and The Pleasures of the Text at minimum. S/Z might need a skim as well.

His distinction between doxa and para-doxa, a distinction I'm not quite clear on yet, promises to be rather useful in discussing the social/political aspects of CW. The doxa is language limited by social pop-culture norms??? And para-doxa is use of language that somehow escapes those limitations. Something like that. Seems like this discussion would be useful for helping writers think about how to write given the social and political aspects of all writing.

Anyway, this could be a good direction to go. Maybe Barthes and Fish this semester. With a quick look at New Criticism? ...still sorting it out.

New Criticism and CW

After reading the "fallacies" I've come to the conclusion that CW folks who advocate for a workshop and pedagogy informed by New Critical theory can't be totally serious. Or fully informed. One or the other.

To ascribe to New Criticism is to adopt untenable distinctions between "internal" and "external" aspects of poetry, between what a poem "is" and what it "does." It also means ignoring the social, political, rhetorical dimensions of creative writing. It's not just "Theory," some abstract French import, that suggests these dimensions can't be ignored; it's also Comp theory, contemporary life, common sense. Or what has become common sense in the Global Age. We can't afford anymore to ignore the social and environmental impact of anything we do, not even poetry.

Sure it makes sense to sit around and talk about how to make stories better, but better by what standards? Better for what purpose? There is no objectively better poetry. Aesthetic standards, like all cultural norms, are culturally relative. Relativity might have smelled like a bad egg some years ago, but these days it goes without saying. How can anyone write relevant poetry or fiction when he/she is stuck in the 50s? How can such work expect to speak to the needs to today's readers?

Besides, the folks who talk up New Criticism in CW don't really mean (I don't think) that the fully theorized version of New Critical dogma should be applied at all times in the discipline. They mean, I'm fairly sure, that they like CW as is, and don't want to monkey around with Theory. They want to continue with the "close readings" and the focus on the text without the intrusion of social or political considerations. But they don't want to have to defend the practice, either. For to defend the practice might mean having to fall back on New Critical dogma in a way that just won't work.

It's sort of a "it ain't broke so don't fix it" attitude. And that's not such a bad thing. I figure that when it comes to Theory, every writer has to be, at some level, a pragmatist. (Maybe even a Pragmatist, capital P. But that's another post.) Writers must go on writing no matter what's going on in Theory. Perhaps next year some hot new philosophy will come across the Atlantic from France and convince every last American academic that language *qua* language is not only unstable but impossible. We can't make words. This post does not even exist. All the major journals would buzz with activity. Left and right academics speaking and writing to one another about the non-existence of language. English departments enraptured. Many papers written on the non-being of Shakespeare's work. The impossibility of literature at all. And still, the Creative Writing department must go on with its job, teaching writing, suffering the criticism that they are "anti-intellectual" or "outmoded" or what have you.

For some in CW, this farce approximates the current state of things. Theory is so distant, so counter-intuitive in so many ways. One can read it and play with it, but to take it seriously in terms of pedagogy and the actual practice of the craft strikes these writers as ludicrous. Theory and CW represent different epistemological methods, different ways of knowing. The CW epistemology is and untheorized one, and it is meant to be. It is simply intuitive. Creative. Something like that.

The point is that a writer's yard stick for the validity of any axiom is whether or not it produces good prose. If I'm publishing novels on a regular basis, whatever "theory" or "untheory" I've got is the one I want to keep, call me what you will. The fact that successful literary authors have had many different ways of approaching the writing process and conceptualizing their craft is only further evidence that what a writer thinks about writing (concept) is less important that what he or she actually does when writing (precept). Even the most theory minded writers, those with avant garde manifestos and such, are generally interested in their theories mostly for the results they produce. Concept is second to precept every time. That's a Pragmatist. That's a writer.

Maybe it's different for some. I suppose there may be writers that "do" fiction or poetry simply as proof of their theoretical stance...Or who feel the two are equal partners; that's more likely.

In any case, those of us who think there is some pedagogical value to introducing theory into CW practice have the burden not of proving a need for Theory (no "proof" could ever be sufficient) but of demonstrating that Theory, taken seriously and taken properly, produces results. At least, this seems to be the case in the States, and to some extent in the UK. Australia may be in a somewhat better position (I confess I skimmed that chapter of Dawson).

The very loosely "New Critical" status quo won't change, and shouldn't change, until Theory becomes Practice in a way that produces writing and writers in a way preferable to what we've got now. Show us how it works. Inspire us. Get our creative juices flowing. Introduce us to Theory in a way that makes it workable.

That's what the discipline wants, I think. They want something they can put on the page.

affective fallacy

Wimsatt and Beardsley balance the intentional fallacy with an affective one, thus attempting to hold focus on the poem itself:

The Affective Fallacy is confusion between the poem and its *results* (what it *is* and what it *does*)...It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism...the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear (1388).

At the same time, they do not deny that poetry does affect its readers:

The report of some readers, on the other hand, that a poem or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be refuted nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic to take into account. The purely affective report is either too physiological or it is too vague. (1397)

If the affective critic...ventures to state with any precision what a line of poetry *does*—as "it fills us with a mixture of melancholy and reverence for antiquity"—either the statement will be patently abnormal or false, or it will be a description of what the meaning of the line *is*: "the spectacle of massive antiquity in ruins." (1398)

I can't help but agree with their example. It presumes too much. But W&B list Tolstoy and Aristotle and Longinus and Colridge as affective critics without ever admitting their theories for direct discussion.

It strikes me that the distinction between what a poem "is" and what it "does" is as difficult to maintain as that between what is "internal" and what is "external" to a poem. A poem is made of language. All uses of language are social, are an action of one party toward another. If they are "well-wrought" it is because some critic finds them to be so. The poem is "doing" well-wrought-ness for that critic. Or the critic is doing well-wrought-ness with that poem... Or something.

W&B draw an interesting distinction on the same page. They want to be able to talk about emotion as, in some sense, a part of poetry without slipping into the affective fallacy, so they offer two statements about the same passage, one fallacious, one valid.

This is a no-no:

"The second stanza...gives us a momentary vivid realization of past happy experiences, then makes us sad at their loss."

This is okay:

"The conjunction of the qualities of sadness and freshness is reinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol—the light on the sails of a ship hull down—has been employed to suggest both qualities."

I have to agree. The former, again, is presumptuous. The latter is more sophisticated, but still suggests that the poem has the power to move its readers in a particular way. Not so easy to make a distinction between these, either. Yet the authors feel there is an important, if faint, difference between "translatable emotive formulas" and "physiological and psychologically vague ones" (1389).

And then W&B seem to undo themselves with this number:

The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an account of what the pome is likely to // induce in other—sufficiently informed—readers. It will in fact supply the kind of information which will enable readers to respond to the poem...[by speaking of] shades of distinction and relation between objects of emotion...The critic's report will speak of emotions which are not only complex and dependent upon a precise object but also, and for these reasons, stable. (1399)

So there are emotions caused by poetry of which it is appropriate for the "objective critic" to speak. These emotions are somehow still "in" the poem itself, since they are attached to or elicited by (I'm not sure which is better) "objects" that are themselves contained by the poem.

How is this not affectively fallacious? The object is the thing, so let's look more closely at that:

There are two kinds of real objects which have emotive quality, the objects which are the literal reasons for human emotion, and those which by some kind of association suggest either the reason or the resulting emotion:—the thief, the enemy, or the insult that makes us angry, and the hornet that sounds and stings somewhat like ourselves when angry; the murderer or felon, and the crow that kills small birds and animals or feeds on carrion and is black like the night when crimes are committed by men. (1400)

Simile and metaphor are methods of bringing these two kinds of emotive objects together. Duncan's murder by Macbeth, for example, is made a richly emotive object by the play's artful combination of these types:

Set in its galaxy of symbols—the hoarse raven, the thickening light, and the crow making wing, the babe plucked from the breast, the dagger in the air, the ghost, the bloody hands—this ancient murder has become an object of strongly fixed emotive value. (1402)

W&B conclude their essay with a valorization of poetry as "the most precise emotive evaluation of the customs" of any culture, giving invaluable data to historians and sociologists, etc. An odd ending for such an essay. It seems W&B give more time and care to treating emotion as an aspect of poetry than to demonstrating why such treatment is fallacious. Or why it is not quite fallacious and other, similar things are.


leads:
Look up Tolstoy's "contagion theory." And Longinus "On Sublimity" which W&B point to as examples of affective theory. They put Aristotle's catharsis on the list, too. And Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief." They have the same problem, apparently, with all of these.

Intentional Fallacy

The editors of the Norton collection had this to say about the fallacies:

As with many key New Critical precepts, one of the appeals of "the intentional fallacy" is pedagogical. A teacher and a class can concentrate on the text at hand without feeling that the students' interpretive work needs the support of information about the author and the historical period in which the text was composed. Wimsatt and Beardsley have a convenient rule of thumb: if information about the author or period is relevant, it will be in the poem; if it is not realized in the poem already, the it is not relevant. Thus they regard as extraneous all reference to psychology, social history, and anthropology... (1372)

This is very much like the approach of many CW instructors. In some workshops, the author is instructed to remain silent unless the instructor asks him/her a direct question. The author's questions, opinions, defenses, explanations and intent are all "external" and therefore irrelevant. This often leads to wasted class time, in my opinion. Workshopers spend their hour finding ways to "fix" the poem or story at hand in ways that are entirely foreign to the author's interests. This is too strict an application of New Critical ideas. Wandor or someone commented that you can't simply transfer critical tools meant for finished works to works in progress without misreading the unfinished work. Tools can't simply be shifted from interpretive to productive ends w/o attention to the differences between these two orientations.

The intentional fallacy works on finished poems, but not so much on poems in progress. It seems to me that asking the author "What did you hope to accomplish?" assures efficient and effective workshops. The distance between intent and effect must be measured if the author is to know how to revise.

I suppose that is the distance between the two fallacies...

To the essay:

Wimsatt and Beardsley define intent like so: "Intention is design or plan in the author's mind" (1375).

While they consent that "a poem does not come into existence by accident" they still feel that there ought to be a distinction drawn between assigning cause to the author and adopting intention as a standard for criticism.

How is [the critic] to find out what the poet tried to do. If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.

Then, famously:

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.

I suppose a pudding "works" if it tastes good and has the right texture, no? So a poem works if it tastes good and feels right in the mouth.

Interestingly:

poetry differs from practical messages,which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are more abstract that poetry. (1375)

And we always thought poetry was the most abstract. Very clever, W&B.

I think this point represents an important development of their idea of intent:

If there is any sense in which an author, by revision, has better achieved his original intention, it is only the very abstract, tautological, sense that he intended to write a better work and now has done it. (In this sense every author's intention is the same.) (1376)

They don't say what "better" means, and so it would seem that they mean it in the commonest of senses. "More good." I like my poem, says the author, but I think it could be better somehow. He/she doesn't really know exactly what they mean, maybe, but trial and error reveal a poem that is more good. Ahh, says the poet, there it is, just as I intended.

Here's a bit that feels quite contemporary:

The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. (1376)

It seems to anticipate a lot of Theory, especially reader response, but only because I come to it after reading Fish and others first. They mean "public" as in "not private," for the author's intent is a private thing. Things public are things "in" the poem, oddly enough. But we're getting to that.

Cute but irrelevant:

From A.E. Housman they draw the following formula for writing poetry:
Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular, look at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own soul, listen to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraie verite. (1380)

How romantic. But W & B maintain that "psychology of composition" is a field separate from criticism. "Judgment of a poem is different from the art of producing them" they say (1380). Although, they seem open to the possibility that one day (has the day yet come?) criticism may one day be able to unify itself with the psych of comp; I have to say the terms by which this union would be made possible are not clear to me from reading their brief treatment of the matter....any way, it's beside the point.

Beside the point except for one thing: they seem to miss a move that a contemporary critic would not. In reviewing Housman's recipe, it should be clear that many poets do not arrive at their poems by way of "intent" as many critics understand it. Housman doesn't "design" or "plan" his poems. He has a beer and goes for a walk. And I think his process is not completely idiosyncratic. Even if the "inner voice" and "true truth" stuff rings false these days, the idea that you can arrive at a poem without really designing it will resonate with many poets. This strikes me as a good argument against reading poems for the author's intent. Maybe poems arrive more by "accident" than W&B wanted to admit. At least for some authors.

In order to make the intentional fallacy work as a fallacy, W&B make a distinction between "internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem" (1381). Internal evidence is "public" as discussed above. This evidence is "discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of these dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture." Clearly, such a statement can no longer stand. To think that "all that makes a language and a culture" is some how "inside" a poem strikes us now (I think I can speak for all of us, right?) as rather silly. Everything on the list is outside a poem. Or, with Derrida, the reverse: nothing is outside the text. Which has essentially the same effect for the distinction between public and private evidence.

So the thing can't stand, can it?

The Norton folks list Kenneth Burke, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Harold Bloom, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar as critics who worked in various ways to challenge the intentional fallacy, especially in terms of its distinction between internal and external evidence.

In an effort to hear them out, we can pay closer attention to what W&B call external: "external is private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations...about how or why the poet wrote the poem" (1381). So, really they aren't trying to draw ontological distinctions about "inside" and "outside" of poetry. They are saying, once again, that there are somethings that should be excluded from criticism. Language is in, poets are out.

But then there is a third category, which W&B have to admit for discussion. Poets, like anyone, have each a private language, a way of thinking about and using particular words that is special to their own history or to a group of fellow poets. To do work that unearths the particular meaning of a word for a particular poet is "an intermediate kind of evidence." Both public and private. Right up Derrida's alley. In fact, he likes the Levi Strauss for the same thing: demonstrating the untenability of his own oppositions. And Derrida had similar tastes as well: language was "in" for him as well. And nothing was out.

A final note on intention:

There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, especially for the intellectual objects, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context—or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about. (1382)

Though there is a cause of a poem, it is unknowable, even through the best scholarship. Even with the author's own report. In context, they are discussing Road to Xanadu which tries to piece together the sources of Coleridge's poems. And they conclude with the above. The poet's own brain cuts off the roots of the poem so that it can be a poem, an object separate from the wash of language and dreams and whatnot that burbles about in the poet's brain. Again, they point to the "intention-less intentionality" that is often poetic creation. By stating that the final cause of the poem is unknowable, they make a strong case against relying on intentionality as a guide for criticism.

Here's the rub: if so much of what we know as the CW workshop rests on this New Critical stuff, and if New Critical ideas can't really hold up to the pressure of even casual contemporary readings, then what are we doing in CW?

When workshops only allow discussion of what is on the page, they are working to make the same distinction as W&B, that between internal and external evidence. There is what is already "in" the poem and there is everything else, irrelevant and external. But there isn't anything in the poem. The poem is language; language is social; society is political; therefore, the poem cannot be excused from larger considerations. It is never just what is on the page, because what is on the page only exists as a social and linguistic act.

Sitting quietly while classmates haggle over a word choice issue on page five of a 8,000 word story is not a productive use of a writer's time. Is nothing like an education. But to challenge that author and ask: "How does this fit? Where does this fit?" this is a beginning. What is the poem in the context of "all that makes a language and a culture?" How does it participate in that "all"?

Maybe that's the connection. The New Critics instructed us to pay close attention to language and to leave authors be. Much of Theory does exactly that. But in paying close attention to language over the years, certain features of language that were not apparent to the New Critics have become evident to us.

I am totally rambling. What's my point?

1) intention ought to be allowed into the classroom since the texts there are still under development.

2) we can take from this essay the idea that what is "in" is all that makes language and culture.

That's pretty much it.