®ow of things; he took a poetic technique of reproduction, as it were, that
corresponded to the industrial age and applied it to the conventional roman-
tic archetypes, but he did not ¤nd archetypes of modernity”?^22 How can the
student, who has probably never read either Heine or Baudelaire, tell?
Thus, the dominant cultural studies paradigm, combining, as it does,
heavy doses of undigested European theory with American “minority” ex-
emplars, can do little but confuse the student who would like to understand
speci¤c artworks and their relationship to one another. What is urgently
needed—and here again Internet possibilities may lead the way—is a more
“differential” and inductive approach to literary study, indeed to the hu-
manities in general. This does not mean “covering” all periods of English (or
whatever) literature or making one’s way through as many canonical works
as possible. But the wider one’s reading in a speci¤ed area, the greater the
pleasure of a given text and the greater the ability to make connections be-
tween texts.
It is interesting in this regard to see how pragmatic the premises of clas-
sical theory were. Plato’s notion of what poetry does to move its audience
was based on all the examples available to him, especially the example of
Homer, who, so Plato thought, represented quintessential poetry more fully
than any of his rival poets. Similarly, Aristotle’s famous de¤nition of tragedy
in the Poetics (“A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is heroic, com-
plete, and of a certain magnitude”) is based on the examination of virtually
dozens of compositions calling themselves “tragedies,” which exhibited par-
ticular features. It is, for example, because Greek tragedy did invariably in-
clude music and dance that Aristotle listed melos and opsis among its six ele-
ments and believed he had to examine their function.
I am well aware that Plato and Aristotle, Longinus and Horace had a much
smaller corpus to deal with than does the Adorno of “On Lyric Poetry and
Society.” And indeed the literary ¤eld is now so vast, heterogenous, and eclec-
tic that it is obviously impossible to make universal choices as to which art-
works to examine and how to organize meaningful curricula. But students
can be taught—and here the question of expertise comes in—what the issues
of analyzing poetry are; they can be taught narrative modes and lyric genres,
the tropes and rhetorical ¤gures to be found in any written text, the possi-
bilities for rhy thm and meter, “poetry” and “prose.” In musicology and art
history such study is taken for granted: no one who cannot read a score or
know the parts of the orchestra is likely to make pronouncements about a
particular symphony. But in poetics we tend to assume that there is no vo-
cabulary to master, that anyone can—and does—read.
The ¤rst step, then, would be to teach the student that reading, whether
16 Chapter 1