Wow. The anti-cultural-theorists! Until this moment, I actually thought I was alone. Reading Joe’s post and the responses to it gives me hope for the state of literary studies. It seems to me that the counter-revolution has begun.

I was an undergrad at McMaster in the middle of the cultural studies movement that swept through that English department. Except for a few professors who remained rather quiet, I felt like the lone objector in the middle of an ill advised coup d’etat. I was always much more intrigued with structuralism than with how to apply ideologies to literary texts, based on an overwhelming sense that there is a structure present within all literature. It is the repetition of these structures over time that represents our connections to one other; our like-mindedness. That is why texts written hundreds of years ago can fit into a model set out by a cultural theorist today. If this is the case, then many cultural theorists that argue vehemently against the existence of structure — or in Frye’s case, myths — would in fact be invalidating their own arguments. I find that funny. But humor aside, I think more literary arguments need to be structured by logic. We marvel at the dialogues of Plato, but then fail to see that if we structured our arguments using the same kind of logic, we may actually find some common ground with theorists of differing opinions. The lens through which the cultural theorists attack a literary work tends to filter out the fact that it is the repetition of myths that enable texts to remain relevant to current ideologies.

On the matter of logic and mathematics as they relate to literature: Is it not simply a matter of logic that if you believe in a mythical structure, as Frye suggests, then the logical extension is to be able to represent those structural constructs with numbers? That is, if there is a structure, then that means there also exists a relationship between constructs, and it would be no great task to represent those relationships numerically. I think this would in fact enhance the wonder to be found in literature, not detract from it. Physicists describe light waves with numbers all the time, but a sunset does not become any less sublime because they can describe the structure of it. In fact, the opposite is true. Being able to describe a sunset scientifcally makes the experience of it even more intense. I believe the same to be true of literature. Being able to describe the constructs of literature —  as an “objectiv(ish) ’science’ ”, as Clayton Chrusch puts it —  would only enhance the wonder of how we are moved by the written word.

If my thinking is correct and cultural theory is enabled by the structure and myths found in literature, then the insistence that there is no structure in literature by the same theorists would turn out to be a pretty obvious contradiction; and, if this is the case, I would be even more amazed if we could represent that relationship with an equation that manifests this logic. I believe that it would take our understanding from a belief to a fact. And, if Joe is correct that cognitive scientists could in fact benefit from the literary theorists’ understanding of phenomena such as metaphor, then we need to be able to bridge that gap and explain our subject in terms they can understand. This means logic, structure, and to some extent axiomatic thought. The onus is on the literary theorists to prove their own worth, if in fact the aim is to have a meaningful discussion with scientists. Science has established axioms and methods that have been in practice for thousands of years and, being that language is our business, we would do well to do the same.

Viva la counter-revolution!

Responding to Bob Denham’s earlier post.

Since my Frygian orientation is based on the Anatomy, this is certainly a new and exiting schematic for me. I wish I could have cited my source for that comment on etiological theories of language, but I have had no luck finding it. There is always the possibility that it was a sort of excluded initiative during my reading that became a center of concern when I wrote my post.

Is there a term Frye used for the movement of the excluded initiative into its subsequent center of concern (I may not be using the term “concern” correctly)? If reversed, it seems to resemble the displacement of myth into descending modes in the Anatomy – “Reading forward in history, therefore, we may think of our romantic, high mimetic and low mimetic modes as a series of displaced myths, mythoi or plot-formulas progressively moving over towards the opposite pole of verisimilitude, and then, with irony, beginning to move back” (pg. 52, the final sentence of ‘Comic Fictional Modes’).

Also, is there any circular thrust to this model, adopted, as it seems, from De Lubac’s Medieval Exegesis? From what I know of De Lubac, his adapted categories were more or less static modes of interpretation. The model adopted from Vico has its implied ricorso, but what modulation is in the second seems to be without recurrence.

But as an applicative theory of language, it is just the thing that dovetails into my interests. I am interested in theories of language that apply to literature as an order of words, even if such theories do not apply much to linguistics as the discipline stands. My complaint, that comparative literature made me into an amateur expert on everything except literature, may apply in its own way to Prof. Adamson’s lament on the extraliterary.