Mr. Arwin has just said, and I excerpt:
>
>In general there is nothing wrong with a psychoanalytic approach. Or should
>I say, in theory there is nothing wrong with a psychoanalytic approach.
>Many scholars and critics with no qualification whatsoever attempt serious
>discussions of a creative process that involve biology, psychology,
>culture, communication, sociology, history, phonology, linguistics, and so
>on. Usually however these scholars and critics only have any qualifications
>of note in perhaps one or two of these fields.
>
This sounds like a frank recognition of, and even justification for, the
"amateur" status of literary critics.  We are "eclecticians," and should
remain so, avoiding any attempt to scientize, because we don't need any
fundamental "theory" to justify our individual perceptions.  The best of us
are amateurs in the best sense: lovers of literature who explore, in
public, our full intellectual and emotional range of reactions thereto.  In
addition, the eclecticism of our experience maps the mental world of the
writer/artist better than the tunnel view of the specialist.  We should be
as educated as possible about as much as possible, but never take one
thread of our knowledge as the key to Truth (if you'll excuse the mixed
metaphor).
>
Arwin says:
 
>It is my belief that in current literary criticism the two major problem
>areas are improper delineations of the area of specialisation with regards
>to training and/or qualifications, and the use of old-fashioned theories.
>To begin with the latter, we will hardly accept a heart-surgeon to proceed
>on his patient using late 19th century developments and equipment, and yet
>that is exactly what most psychoanalytic literary criticism is doing today.
>That this is a very topical issue is evidenced by a similar discussion
>about the differences in qualification between "amateur" and "professional"
>psychotherapists and psychiatrists on the Pound-list (where only real
>difference should be that a psychiatrist is qualified to prescribe
>medicine, basically being a doctor, and a psychotherapist limits himself to
>alteration of thinking and behavioural patterns).
 
I disagree about the inapplicability of "old-fashioned theories" because
theories are always in conflict with each other, and if there happen to be
trends, e.g., away from Freudian sexism/determinism, nevertheless there is
much in old-fashioned Freud that is still indispensable to an understanding
of a broad range of social phenomena (mutatis mutandis for Jung).  The fact
that modern dream researchers have developed new "theories" about the dream
being the way the brain makes sense of experience, i.e., its homeostatic
function, does not invalidate Freud's way  or Jung's way of looking at the
symbolic structures dreams throw out.
 
Arwin says:
>
>In my view, the creative process is, in theory, simple and the areas of
>research clearly definable: at the centre of the research is the text; on
>the left is the writer, on the right is the reader. The text is a form of
>communication between the writer and the reader.
 
Well, I can't think of anything more rawly scientistic, in the worst sense,
than to regard the creative process as simple.  That would mean that the
human brain is simple.  (Some are, of course. ...)
>
... Where are the works which study, not endless particular instances
>and details of literary history, but attempt to ask fundamental questions
>on the meta-level? And once that has been done (an easy task, because all
>the knowledge is there as well as endless particular instances to build
>meta-scholarship on), a solid scientific method ought to be developed.
 
There have been plenty of "theory of literature" books!  Where ya been?
But no practising critic needs such generalizing in day to day
applications.  ... I am sure that the most incisive and insightful
psychological criticism of specific authors and works I have read was
written by total "amateurs," as they would have to be called, rather than
by diplomaed psychological specialists.  The great critic has the artistic,
i.e., synthesizing sensibility, and you find little of that in the
analytic, reductivist approaches of most specialists in the more
respectable, big-grant-attracting disciplines, like Sociology.
 
Arwin further says:
>Surely, once some of this more serious work has been done, we can start
>taking ourselves seriously.
>
Is Arwin suggesting that none of us poor-schmuck literary critics can be
taken seriously until the defining "Literary Theory of Everything,"
equivalent to the physicist's Holy Grail, the TOE, or GUT, comes
out--written by some genius who has finally seen how Simple it all is?
Come on, Arwin guy, give us a break.
 
==Dan Pearlman
 
P.S.: Arwin, Melitta is a brand of coffee-filter.
Dan Pearlman                    Office: Department of English
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