of a legal brief or the newspaper or even of an Internet ad, takes training.
And that the methods learned, applied to one’s own literature for starters
and then to the really exciting literature of the past—allowing that past to
be ®exible, not con¤ned to a narrow canon—will make the student see how
language works in a given poem or play or novel. For language—which is,
after all, the material of literature as well as the means to its ¤ctiveness—
will be the central object of study, a study that involves all four of the para-
digms outlined above. Such study, I believe, will come back into favor for the
simple reason that, try as one may, one cannot eliminate the sheer jouissance
or pleasure of the text. Thus, just at the moment when the common wis-
dom was that Marcel Proust was passé, what with his longeurs, his irritating
snobbery and elitism, two new monumental biographies (by Jean-Yves Tadié
[1997] and William H. Carter [2000]) appeared. Proust study groups sprang
up in various cities. Newspapers talked of a Proust “revival,” but of course it
is more properly a Proust “survival.” Proust won’t go away, because A La Re-
cherche du temps perdu is an encyclopedia of narrative forms, of complex
language constructions, of historical and cultural ironies, as well as a psycho-
logical analysis of love and jealousy incomparable in its richness and passion.
There may be little blips on the Proust radar screen—now he is up, now
down—but the oeuvre is there, continuing to challenge and fascinate readers.
In chapter 4 of the Poetics, Aristotle discusses aesthetic pleasure, speci¤-
cally the two pleasures he takes to be associated with artworks in whatever
medium—the “pleasure of representation” and the “pleasure of recogni-
tion”:
Speaking generally, poetry seems to owe its origin to two particular
causes, both natural. From childhood men have an instinct for repre-
sentation, and in this respect man differs from the other animals in
that he is far more imitative and learns his ¤rst lessons by representing
things. And then there is the enjoyment people always get from repre-
sentations. (#1448b)The pleasure of representation is the basic human instinct one can observe
most directly in young children who “play” at being someone else, who make
up a story and pass it off as “true.” It is the pleasure of invention, of ¤ctive-
ness. The twin pleasure, that of recognition, is its mirror image, the plea-
sure of taking in the impersonations, ¤ctions, and language creations of oth-
ers and recognizing their justice. When, for example, Prufrock concludes his
“love song” with the line, “Till human voices wake us and we drown,” the
most un-Prufrockian of us will recognize the aptness of the metaphor.
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 17