in the Formalist tradition would today concede that the distinction between
literary and ordinary language is not hard and fast, they would argue that it
is useful to concentrate on difference rather than similarity. “Do not forget,”
as Wittgenstein put it in his box of notes called Zettel, “that a poem, al-
though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the
language-game of giving information.”^13
(4) Formalist theory has often been accused of excessive technicality and
aridity: in the politicized post-Vietnam era, it came under sharp attack from
those who take poetics to be essentially a historical or cultural formation.
Indeed in this fourth paradigm, formalism becomes a dirty word, a smoke-
screen for ignoring the ideology and political ethos of a given work. For the
cultural critic, the only real justi¤cation for literary study is the concession
that poems and novels can do “cultural work.” From this perspective, a po-
etic text is primarily to be understood as a symptom of the larger culture to
which it belongs and as an index to particular historical or cultural markers.
Literary practices, moreover, are taken to be no different in kind from other
social or cultural practices. A poem or novel or ¤lm is discussed not for its
intrinsic merits or as the expression of individual genius, nor for its expres-
sion of essential truths, nor for its powers of persuasion, but for its political
role, its exposure of the state of a given society. In this scheme of things,
questions of value inevitably take the backseat, there being in fact no rea-
son why Henry James’s novels are a better index to or symptom of the cul-
tural aporias of turn-of-the-century America than are the best sellers of the
period—or, for that matter, early-twentieth-century domestic architecture,
popular periodicals, or medical treatises. Read the list of topics currently be-
ing studied in university courses or at humanities centers and you will ¤nd
that “literature” functions almost exclusively in this way.
Poetry as rhetoric, poetry as philosophy, poetry as an art, poetry as cul-
tural production—what is at stake in adopting one of these classi¤cations to
the exclusion of the others? Interestingly, the ¤rst three inevitably incorpo-
rate the fourth into the discipline, in that they examine the history and cul-
tural position of the different poetic, rhetorical, philosophical, and generic
forms as well as the history and culture of their philosophical reception.
But history of is very different from the transposition that views literature
itself as history—the position of contemporary cultural studies, which is
committed to the demolition of such “obsolete” categories as poetic au-
tonomy, poetic truth, and formal and rhetorical value. Since cultural studies
currently dominate the arena of literary study, I want to focus here on this
particular approach.
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 9