On Beyond Zebra! - Exploring the Wild, Woolly, World Outside the Text

If Cleanth Brooks acknowledges the value of non-formalist approaches to literature - as he repeatedly does: "There is no reason...why he should not turn away into biography and psychology. Such explorations are very much worth making" (Brooks 27), "The various imports of a given work may well be worth studying. ...But such work valuable and necessary as it may be" (28), "I did not and do not now mean to deny value to other literary studies such as the biographical, historical, those describing the cultural setting of the work, etc. They may prove necessary to an understanding of the text...(30), - than why can't he admit it's literary criticism?Even in the note from which the final quote is taken, he refers to non-formalist approaches as "literary studies" (30) and saves "'literary' criticism" (30) for the formalism that is the focus of the article. This smacks of the semantics of Quintillian: he may be good at speaking, and he may convince a lot of people, but if I don't approve of him he's not an orator. It seems childish to deny the title of literary criticsm to these studies whose value he professes to recognize, unless because the critic doth protest too much we are supposed to believe that he is being politically correct and covering a divisive belief that these other "literary studies" (30) do not in fact measure up. It is perhaps telling that he denies any of them the right to "determine literary value" (30) implicitly saving this key ability for formalist criticism.

In one instance I must agree with Brooks despite his qualifiedly ungenerous attitude toward any theoretical approach not his own. Theory does inherently move the reader on beyond zebra, to discover new, strange and wild creatures that one can only find by going beyond the text. Structuralism has as its object "not [the] literary works themselves but their intelligibility: the ways in which they make sense, the ways in which readers have made sense of them" (100). Indeed in Culler's and Peckham's articles, if I understand them correctly (which is apparently impossible to determine [Peckham 108]), semiotics/structuralism functions almost as a theory of theories, or a study of theories searching for all the various semiotic matrices that might shed light on a text, none of which can singly "be successfully used to controlt he interpretation of a work of even slight complexity" (Peckham 111). These matrices simply equate to the limits we, as readers, place on the signifiers in the text. That is, the critical lens with which we study it. As those limits stabilize the possible meanings of the signifiers in the text (108-109) they shape what the user of a particular matrix will find in the piece. One who wears rose colored glasses will see the world with a pink tinge, and, just so, a marxist will see the vestiges of power structures running throughout everything everywhere. Structuralism, theory of theories and system of systems, seems to be the study of why all these various colors of glasses are formed from the same text.

If the matrices discussed here are indeed the nearly limitless variety of critical approaches that can be taken to a text, and all are equally valid (again Peckham 108) perhaps we are spending more time in academic game playing with no real purpose or benefit than I thought. I will not deny theoretical approaches the title of literary criticism, simply because their concerns are not limited to the literary the way formalism is. I prefer John R. Trimble's implicit definition of criticsm from his text Writing With Style and found in the chapter entitled "How to Write a Critical Analysis." While Trimble presents a very formalist approach to analysis in his examples, his definition of the critic's job implies the definition of criticism to be work that helps an already knowledgable reader to better understand a given text. This broader definition embraces all of Brooks' "literary studies" on an equal footing. However, as we travel off beyond zebra into abstract realms of pure thought, I am left to ponder what I took to be Brooks' key question: What happens to the text we've left behind?