ABSTRACT
What follows is an abstracted and hypostasised version of the old literary studies paradigm. Of course this was nothing like a completely unified or homogeneous set of beliefs about literature and how to teach it-but then you do not have to
have complete agreement to have a consensus and a sustainable paradigm. Even if F.R.Leavis holds up the consensus in his way at one side and Kathleen Raine in a very different way at another, they both can be claimed to participate in ‘the general will’ of paradigm-support until an explicitly different and opposed paradigm comes along. So, arguably, across variant positions literary studies was structured by five features:
1 Epistemological empiricism-that is, the assumption that the text was a given, a free-standing object, available more or less directly to unprejudiced observation and experience. An instance of this would be Leavis’s oft-cited willingness to describe his procedure as sustaining one side of a dialogue in which someone says, This is so, isn’t it?’, and your friendly interlocutor replies, ‘Yes, but…’ (It is a sign of the underlying arms of the consensus that Leavis never considered what would happen if you said, ‘No, absolutely not!’) Another would be the way, in a varied inflection, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley treat that which their famous title names as ‘the verbal icon’. A choice recent example was provided by James Wood in the Times Literary Supplement (7 June 1991), affirming that literature ‘is its own best theory’ and so the best criticism ‘would let, as it were, literature interpret itself’ (the momentary hesitation of that ‘as it were’ at the prospect of a copy of Hamlet walking past interpreting itself is one for real connoisseurs of critical cant). This epistemology was foundational for literary studies because it placed the reader-and the reading-outside and in subordination to the text. The reader’s job (R) was to respond imaginatively to or experience the text (T) as already given. Thus: T ← R.
