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PETERBROOKS

Man and His Fictions:OneApproachto theTeachingofLiterature

LAST YEAR YALE COLLEGE inaugurated

a new program called "The Literature

Major." The chastity of the title is pos-

sibly significant:not

"comparativelit-

erature," which implies certain more or

less well-defined methodologies and pro-cedures; not "Western literature," or

any place-centered definition; the title

tends rather to point to the fact and

process of literature-a word which,Roland Barthes has noted, retains a sur-

prising modernity because of our re-

newed attention to the codes and struc-

tures of the written, to the "literality"of literature. At the risk of appearing

parochial in discussing a program no

doubt long since anticipated in other

universities, it may be worthwhile to

give some account of the genesis and

formulation of the Yale literature majorsince its existence and its concerns do

implicate many of the issues posed by the

teaching of literature today.

When a group of faculty, united inthe belief that Yale could put to better

profit its resources in the several litera-

ture departments, first met (in the spring

of 1969) to consider the possibility of a

new program, attention quickly centered

on what an introductory course to such

a program might look like. The hypo-

thetical introductory course seemed a

Peter Brooks teaches in the French Departmentand in the LiteratureMajor at Yale. He is au-thor of The Novel of Worldliness and is cur-rently a Guggenheim Fellow.

good first ground of contest in definingthe general perspective and methodo-

logical commitment of the program.And a basic

splitin fact

developedbe-

tween those who favored some version

of a "great books" approach, initiatingstudents first into the great Western

epic, tragic, comic and narrative tradi-

tions, Homer to Beckett, and those who,

partly from unsatisfactory experienceswith traditional "Humanities" courses,were restlessly looking for somethingelse. The latter group felt that current

high school "Advanced Placement" cur-ricula had often, in their imitations of

great books courses, taken the edge off

such an approach, making it difficult to

recapture the shock of recognition in

the standardtexts taught within the main

traditions. We also thought we detected

a more basic flaw, both pedagogic and

philosophical, in the approach through

the canonic texts of the great tradition.

In defining literature as an establishedtradition-as the Arnoldian canon of the

best that has been thought and known

-one risked making of literature some-

thing both distant and inert, a corpus too

often like a cadaver. One accepted as

givens, in reading, analysis and evalua-

tion, what ought in fact to be seen as

questions and problems. The academic

teaching and study of literature had in

general, we felt, too often taken forgranted-presupposed-what in fact

needed to be questioned, examined, and

40



Man and His Fictions:OneApproach o the Teachingof Literature 41

eventually-to the extent needed and in

the measure possible-proved: the placeand importance of literature in man's

life and history, and collaterally, the im-portance (and possibility) of studyingliterature. What seemed to us most nec-

essary was a return to the obvious, which

is so often repressed: the place of litera-

ture among other human activities and

functions, its connections with human

concerns, the problematics of its study.We needed a course that, far from ac-

cepting literature and its critical inter-

pretation as given and established, would

problematize and put them into question,and find a way to ask the basic, radical

questions: why do we have and need lit-

erature? What is literature? The ques-tions were not perhaps to be asked di-

rectly-literature tends to resist such

direct interrogations-but to be ap-

proached repeatedly in a multiplicity of

indirect sub-questions.

Our concern to problematize the

study of literature and to repair its sev-

ered connections to human concerns and

activities was not, I think, born of a

superficial obsession with "relevance."

"Relevance" (as a war cry of the recent

past) suggests a kind of playacting, a

pretense of concern; and on the level of

curriculum it has usually given "the-

matic" or "problem" courses ("Litera-

ture of . . . ," "Literature and . . .")

which proposed no rethinking of the

way into literature. We sensed rather

that the study of literature had itself be-

come increasingly problematical, diffi-

cult, and our role as pedagogues increas-

ingly uncomfortable. The causes of the

discomfort were in large outline appar-

ent to any teacher of literature. If the

old "positivistic" academic approaches,which tended to teach literature as the

history of an institution, and to conceive

literary pedagogy as the imparting of in-

formation about literature, had long been

moribund, the revolutionary successor to

such approaches, the New Criticism,

was also ailing. Partly because it had ac-complished its revolution so successfully,and propagated its analytical methods

and concerns in college curricula and

high school textbooks, the New Criti-

cism had achieved something of the

fixity of orthodoxy. In academic prac-

tice, especially in classroom detail, the

New Critical doctrine has lost much of

the sense of a basic interrogation of the

literary word that was implicit (oftenindeed explicit) in the essays of Eliot,

Ransom, Blackmur, Wimsatt. It has

given, at least in its degraded forms, an

autotelic study which sees the analysisof literature as self-contained and self-

justifying. The later trepidation of the

spheres wrought by Northrop Frye has

tended, in the hands of his disciples, to

make literature a kind of charnel house

for the classification of organs and dis-

jecta membra. Finally, the coming of

approaches to literature derived from

structuralist methodology in the "sci-

ences of man"-from linguistics, an-

thropology, semiology-with the prem-

ise that we need a science of literature,

has called into question the comfortable

stance of student and critic within lit-

erature.

For me, some of these issues were giv-

en strong articulation in a question asked

by Jean Cohen (author of La Structure

du langage poetique) at a colloquium on

the teaching of literature in 1969.1In es-

sence, Cohen argued that only "science"

could be taught; that logic, grammar,

rhetoric, poetics could no doubt be

taught, but that "literature," possessing

1The proceedings of this colloquium havebeen publishedas L'Enseignementde la littera-ture, ed. Serge Doubrovsky et Tzvetan Todor-ov (Paris: Plon, 1971). See pp. 590-91.



42 COLLEGEENGLISH

none of the characteristics of a scien-

tifically organized body of knowledge,was a false subject. I replied that this was

probably so, but that we could teach thereading of literature: we could guide an

apprenticeship in the form of attention

required for the study of literature. This

answer, of a New Critical coloration, is

one I still partly adhere to, but it seems

to me too limited, inadequate to the

problem posed: for what, in fact, are we

apprenticing students in attention to?

"Literature,"as Rene Wellek has pointed

out, once meant "learning," "knowledgeof literature."2 It has evidently lost that

meaning, and now refers, frighteningly,to "the body of the written." Can we

teach in such a way as to make literature

a form of learning, without reducing it

either to information (which it isn't), or

to the contemplation of perfection

(which is futile), or else displacing the

object of our study to the sciences which

speak of it? Is there a pedagogy whichwill lead us into the dynamics and the

project of literature?

These questions are not intended to be

rhetorical, for their answers are by no

means self-evident. Any teaching of lit-

erature today should consider them as

part of its problematics, built into its

enterprise. In an introductory literature

course for undergraduates, it is proba-

bly the subjacent question that must

form the basis of the problematics: the

question, what is literature? This ques-

tion cannot, I suggested, be faced head-

on at all times. It may rather be posed in

a variety of lateral manners. There can

be a constant approach to it through the

analysis of texts, the ways in which they

are put together, what they respond to

2"The Name and Nature of ComparativeLit-erature," n Discriminations(New Haven: YaleUniv. Press, 1970), p. 4.

and suggest, particularly how they de-

fine themselves in relation to other texts,

both written and potential. In most gen-

eral terms, what seems needed is an ap-proach that will permit grasping the text

in its project and function, that will in-

terrogate literature in its own interroga-tion of the world; that will confront the

text in its confrontations of what is not

itself.

A first step toward this confrontation

and this interrogation seemed to be to

place "literature" within a wider range

of human fictions. If literature is not tobe studied as, on the one hand, purelythe field of a scientific taxonomy, or on

the other hand as the Arnoldian study of

perfection, its human enterprise and

function can best be located in relation

to closely analogous human activities:

dreaming, day-dreaming, games, adver-

tising, role-playing, model-building-all

those activities which involve a play of

the hand and the mind in the creation ofimages which are not immediately util-

izable within reality, which represent

some kind of reformative or recreative

play in relation to it. The word "fic-

tions" recommends itself not only be-

cause it suggests a wider range of activi-

ties and products than "literature," but

also because its etymology in fingere

suggests both the "feigned" and the

"fabricated": the "made-up" in two

senses.3 It has the merit of directing at-

tention simultaneously to the object and

to the process: to, if you will, the poet as

daydreamer and the structures of the

dream work.

The attention of the course (which

still retains its first working title: Litera-

3The word "fictions"was,

Ithink,

forced onour attentionby Borges'Ficciones, and also byFrank Kermode'suse of the term in The Sense

of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,1968).



ManandHis Fictions:One Approach o the Teachingof Literature 43

ture X: Man and His Fictions) is di-

rected, then, both to man's fictions and

to the role and function of fiction-mak-

ing.4 I think it is the constant awarenessof the latter term-of the activity of

"writing the world"-that has enabled

us to be honestly problematical in our

approach. The analysis of specific texts

has usually been doubled by juxtaposi-tions and superimpositions of texts-

often using texts from "high" literature

and popular or subliterature, or from

literature and other kinds of fictions not

usually considered to fall within itsframe. This juxtaposition and superim-

position of products from different fic-

tional categories and strata has aimed at

making analysis more troubling and

more dialectical, oriented toward the

project of writing, the character and

effect of the play it engages. A form of

"intentionality" has in this way been

re-established in analysis: not a return to

the "intentional fallacy" exposed by

Wimsatt, but a recognition that texts in-

directly name their intentions in rela-

tion to what they are not. A text can be

conceived both as confronting the body

of the previously written-its transfor-

mative relationship to the tradition-and

as confronting the space of the unwrit-

ten: as an encounter with the possibili-

ties of language in a world of phenom-

ena, the confrontation of mind and

things.

4The course is currently (1973-74) in itsfourth year, and enrolls about 150 students: itsformat generally alternates small discussion

group meetings with lectures and panel dis-cussions.

A textbook anthology has been put togetherby three instructors of the course: Alvin B.Kernan, Peter Brooks, Michael Holquist, ed.,

Man and His Fictions (Harcourt BraceJovano-vich, 1973). We are painfully aware, however,that any suggestion of a "canon"of LiteratureX texts and categories is contradictory to thewhole enterprise.

This encounter has in fact become a

central issue and object of study in Lit-

erature X, and I will return to it in a

moment. It is perhaps logically the firstquestion that the course poses, but we

have found it useful to precede it by an

introductory section which endeavors to

raise the level of awareness about the

role of fictionmaking through fictions

which are themselves about fictionmak-

ing: to ask questions about the necessityand extent of fictionmaking, its relation

to lying on the one hand and to "scien-

tific" or "historical" truth on the other.If we seem by now to have established

an almost canonical starting point with

The ThousandNights and a Night, fol-lowed by Borges' Ficciones, it is because

these texts lay out in exemplary fashion

the full range of the fictionmaker's

stance and function. Sharazad invents

fictions ultimately to save herself, and

to right the balance of a disordered reali-

ty; and the multiple narrators and narra-

tives which fall between the first and

the last nights evoke almost all the possi-

bilities of story telling, from vicious ly-

ing to erotic arousal to the imparting of

that "wisdom" which Walter Benjamin

sees as the function of the storyteller.5

Borges' typical pose as the commen-

tator upon pre-existing, imagined fictions,

his imputation of imaginary planets

through the conjunction of an encyclo-

pedia and a mirror, forces a complex

critical stance toward fictionmaking, an

elaborate self-consciousness about "fic-

tionality," a sense of the potentially

vicious results when men mistake their

fictions for myths, and begin to believe

in them, to let the "inhuman" discipline

5See Walter Benjamin, "Leskov the Story-teller," in Illuminations,ed. Hannah Arendt,trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt,1968).



44 COLLEGEENGLISH

of Tlon become no longer the disciplineof chess players but of angels. These

questions can then be pursued in more

localized versions in such texts as PeterWeiss' Marat/Sade; Mailer's Armies ofthe Night; in The Winter's Tale; in On

Trial: the report of the Andrei Sinyav-

sky-Yuli Daniel trial by the Soviet State;in Freud's early investigations of the

tales told by hysterics, and the counter-

tales elaborated by the analyst, in his

Studies on Hysteria.

An important function of the intro-

ductory section is to question the inno-cence of storytelling: to articulate issues

raised by the critics of fictionmaking-from Plato through Rousseau to the

modern totalitarian state-who see cer-

tain fictions or the fictionmaking faculty

itself as a seductive and dangerous form

of lying and flight from reality. The

necessity of such an introduction is a

factor of the state of literary pedagogy

and criticism: the reduction, which onesenses in one's students as well as in the

pages of PMLA, of literature to the

status of an anodyne, an activity as

harmless as it is autotelic. Isolated within

the classroom as it is isolated, by criti-

cism, in a secular chapel, literature's

place within school and university has

often been purchased at the price of its

emasculation, the muting of its radical

interrogations in favor of a self-con-

tained and self-justifying analysis. It is

in fact very difficult to convince stu-

dents of the "impurity" of literature, and

the fact that men may be called to ac-

count for the dreams they have dreamed.

Even with explorations into propaganda

and pornography, we have found the

barrier of liberal tolerance difficult in-

deed to breach.

Our introductory section, then, starts

deep within the world of fictions, posing

questions about the nature, value, dan-

gers of fantasy and fabulation, and their

transformative role in relation to "reali-

ty." The second section, somewhat

clumsily entitled "Consciousness andThings," reverts to what is logically a

prior question, to something close to the

root impulse for fictionmaking, the start-

ing place of fictions, their generation ih

relation to the phenomenal world. It

starts from the confrontation of mind

and the world "out there," with the

postulate that man makes up in order to

make sense of, in order to get a grasp

on something that is other than himselfand remains alien and incomprehensiblewithout man's mental processing of it.

Evidently, one could debate what this

primary "otherness" is: in a Freudian

model, it would be the content of one's

own unconscious; in a Marxian model,

the means and modes of production. We

have worked from a simple and evident

model, a somewhat phenomenological

one, suggesting that the root situation isthat man is consciousness in a world of

nonconsciousness, that he is defined by

his essential difference from the world

he inhabits. He constantly uses this "dif-

ference" to process the world, in an at-

tempt to understand his place in it, its

meaning to him and his meaning to it.

The art work is compelled into being

from the fact that we are not what we

live amidst; that, as Wallace Stevens putsit, "we live in a place/That is not our

own and, much more, not ourselves."

The decision to write about phenomena

-the putting-into-language of things-is

a first step in assertingthe leverage of the

human on the non-human, making the

world assimilable to consciousness. De-

scription of the world provides a first lo-

cation of man in the world; and his

ability to describe the world suggests the

importance of that "free play" in the

mechanism of the universe which is



Man andHis Fictions:OneApproach o the Teachingof Literature 45

man's fictionmaking.The choice of texts here-Robbe-

Grillet, Wordsworth, Jean-Luc Godard,

George Herbert, Donne, Skelton, Gene-sis, Cinderella-is designed to suggest the

range of possible interpretations of this

encounter: from the refusal of the hu-

man imprint on the phenomenal world

proclaimed by Robbe-Grillet (and sub-

tly reestablished in his novelistic prac-

tice) to the insistence that the world,

properly contemplated and worked up-on by the visionary eye, reveals its deep

concord with mind, its ethical supportof human emotion and value. If the ab-

surd circumference of the sphere thus

established is Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy"

-examples of which can be culled from

advertising and children's literature as

well as late-Romantic poetry-the logi-cal center is no doubt simply man's ef-

fort to name the world, and finds its

mythic point of origin in Adam's name-

giving in Genesis. The consequences of

these juxtapositions may lead to some

interesting speculative considerations

about the root version of fictionmaking.

It is easy enough to detect that the

Wordsworthian relationship to things in-

volves the construction of a metaphor

referring to the perception of deep an-

alogies between the order of things and

the order of mind, a "transaction be-

tween contexts" (as I. A. Richards de-

fines metaphor) which permits mind to

discourse of the world. Pursuing this line

of argument, naming itself can be viewed

as the construction of metaphor, in that

it implies a transaction between the

realm of phenomenal existence and that

of linguistic significance, a transference

or carrying across (meta-pherein) of

things into the sphere of linguistic signsfor things which is the precondition of

any discourse of things. Language itself,

as Rouisseauso perversely and brilliantly

argued, is originally metaphor in that it

implies this displacement. We can per-

haps arrive at a useful definition of man

as homo signiferens, as the bearer ofsign-systems which are sense-making sys-tems. At the root of his principal sense-

making sign-system is the construction

of this metaphor. This renews our at-

tention to the further metaphors con-

structed in all his fictions, his effort to

make the world a text which he can then

proceed to decipher.With the establishment of this con-

text, the students' own subsequent ef-forts at decipherment should, and I think

do, take on a new urgency and value,

since the project of the literary word

has a restored importance. It is then

possible to move on to a consideration of

how fictions are put together, how on

the basis of the original metaphor fur-

ther organizing (rhetorical and gram-

matical) structures are formed. The

most obvious-and hence the first toconfront-may be the question of se-

quence, of beginnings, middles, and

ends: the construction of "plots." At

present, three successive sections are de-

voted to plot: Part I, "The Detective

Story"; Part II, "Forms and Functions";Part III, "Antiplot." The usefulness of

an approach through the detective story

is a product of that form's "purity": in

no other genre is plot more rigid and

dominant, in no other genre does the

process of plotting so rigorously embody

the text's meanings. All the details of

persons and phenomena in the detective

story are fully intentional, pointing to-

ward one end, which is also an origin:

the crime. In what has come to be a

classic Literature X juxtaposition, we set

a Sherlock Holmes story next to Sopho-

cles' Oedipus, in an effort to suggest the

pervasiveness of the pattern of disorder,

inquest, detection, and identification in



46 COLLEGEENGLISH

the construction of literary plots. When

one extrapolates to such permutations as

Conrad's Heart of Darkness, James' The

Aspern Papers or Freud's analysis of"Dora," the pattern of detection of an

ever more elusive "crime" which de-

termines the organization of reality, and

the identity of both criminal and detec-

tive, comes to appear as a kind of bed-

rock of fictionmaking, a clear instance of

its raison d'e"tre.

One can then move on to, or back to,the "microstructures" of plot-best em-

bodied, perhaps, in such forms as jokesand riddles-and to analysis of the di-

verse forms and functions of plot in a

medieval quest romance, in a picaresquenovel, in such a highly-plotted nine-

teenth-century novel as Dickens' Great

Expectations. These all raise questionsabout the relation of a plot to a life,about what generates beginnings, ex-

pands or compresses middles, satisfies

our "sense of an ending." "Antiplot"then faces the post-modern tradition-

Sartre, Barth, Beckett, Nabokov, and so

many others-which denounces "con-

ventional" plotting as a falsification of

contingency, and proposes new and sub-

tle grammarsto order fictions.

If this part of the course has been

concerned essentially with the Aristote-

lian mythos, the following section tries

to raise some preliminary questionsabout the still more problematical realm

of ethos: the literary creation of charac-

ter, self, role, the relation of self to

other, of face to mask. Here, such ma-

terials as creation myths, Superman com-

ics, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the

Apes, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, have

proved useful, along with more tradi-

tional texts on theemergence

of the hero

and his relation to the definitions of theheroic code. A final section then at-

tempts to face a question which has been

implicit throughout the course, and has

inevitably been articulated on more than

one occasion, the question of fiction and

myth. It is no doubt the most difficultquestion to face from within the context

(if fictionality, and the course has not

been able to treat it with total success.

If the syllabus has tended to suggest a

contrast between fictional thinking, in

which the exemplary fictionmaker will

retain a sense of the precariousness and

provisionality of his fabrications, and

mythic thinking, implying belief in the

explanatory and ritualistic value of cer-tain sacred stories, it is probably impossi-ble to think oneself back into the essen-

tially religious framework in which

myth did have this function. The prob-lem has also been blurred by much mod-

ern literature and criticism that would

persuade us of its renewed contact with

myth. On the other hand, fragments of

degraded myths lie all around us in the

contemporary landscape-myths in thesense of what Roland Barthes calls

"Mythologies": implicit, unacknowl-

edged ideologies latent in our advertis-

ing, sport, design, and indeed our whole

panoply of signs. These would seem to

demand de-mythification, return to their

status as fiction. The course may tend to

come out on this unresolvable and essen-

tial tension, placing literature between

play and belief, reasserting both the fra-

gility and the power of the reformation

of reality in language.

I have dwelt at some length on this

course because, first element in the build-

ing of a program, it seems in itself to

represent one realized version of a pro-

legomenon to literary studies recast. It

also, as the meeting place of seven teach-

ers from different literature departments,

has proved the ground for animating de-

bate, and creation of a diversified but

shared enterprise in curricular plan-



Man andHis Fictions:One Approach o the Teachingof Literature 47

ning.6 To Literature X was soon added

Literature Y: Theory of Criticism,which presents an ambitious and rigor-

ous conspectus of the most powerfulmodern critical theories, and particular-

ly the problems raised by hermeneutics.

Hence students who have been led in

Literature X into a speculative approachto fictionmaking in Literature Y are

given the elements of a more methodical

critical thinking about the ontology of

art and the nature of the critical lan-

guages exercised upon it.

With Literatures X and Y in place,constituting a common introductory ex-

perience in the study of literature, we

were ready to go ahead and construct a

major. In its current form, after the two

introductory courses (which students

normally have completed by the end of

their sophomore year) the major draws

on existing departmental courses, par-ticularly those of a somewhat broader

and less nationally-specified nature thanthe average, some of which have come

into existence in response to the Litera-

ture Major. The guidelines of the major

are designed to encourage the student to

shape his own program, with its own

emphases, which will include some at-

tention to the major traditions and

genres of Western literature while also

providing close study of a few writers,

or a literary form, or one period. The

guidelines require one or two courses in

non-Western literature, and one or two

6The teachers (each of whom is in charge ofa discussiongroup, all of whom share lecturesand panelson a rotatingbasis) have been drawnfrom Classics,ComparativeLiterature,English,French,German,Slavics,Spanish.The diversityof linguisticcompetenciesin the group has beena useful counterbalanceto the inevitable inade-

quacies of teaching texts in translation: therehas always been one member of the staff withknowledge of the text in the original language,able to measure the displacementsbrought bytranslation.

courses in the social sciences that seem

particularly pertinent to the analytical

study of literature. There is also a lan-

guage requirement which stipulates thatthe student be able to pursue the studyof one foreign literature in the original

language at an advanced level-a rigor-ous requirement which translated into

practice means that the student in the

Literature Major must, in addition to the

breadth of approach associated with Lit-

erature X, the theoretical thinking gen-erated by Literature Y, and the attention

to textual analysis found in most of theEnglish Department's courses, be able to

deal with a foreign literature at the

level of majors in that literature. Finally,all the students in the Major will againbe brought together during their senior

year in a Colloquium which centers on

the theoretical and practical problems of

interpretation. The topic of the Collo-

quium will presumably vary from year

to year-as will its teachers; for 1973-74,its inaugural year, the subject will be

Fictions of Confession, working with

texts, from Augustine onwards, that re-

interpret the project and language of

self-expression. The Major is adminis-

tered by a governing board whose mem-

bers represent all the different depart-

ments of language and literature.

Building a major becomes, inevitably,a mild form of empire building. The

first problem to arise with our first

group of some seventy majors has been

one of placement in the existing depart-

mental courses that most interest them

and would be of most value to them.

These are often the junior seminars of

existing departmental major programs-

especially English-which have limited

enrollment, and givepriority

to the de-

partmental majors. We hence face the

necessity of creating our own juniorseminars. One can look forward to a



48 COLLEGEENGLISH

time when the Literature Major will

provide a considerable number of courses

for its students, who might, conceivably,

spend half their time in courses devisedby the Literature Major, and half in

existing departmental courses. The bind

here is the shortage of manpower: es-

pecially with the shrinkage of junior

faculty occasioned by several years of

stringent budgets, competition for the

services of faculty members has become

intense.

This competition can no doubt be

counted as healthy if it leads towardgreater cooperation and more supple in-

teraction among the various literature

departments-which is of course not a

certain outcome. The resistances to the

Literature Major, though they have not

so far been presented in such a way as

to block its coming into being or im-

pede its functioning, are both serious and

sincere. A statement in our original pro-

posal of the program to the facultywhich brought an unexpectedly violent

reaction from some was the phrase,

"men everywhere tell the same stories."

An imprudent remark, no doubt, which

was intended to stress the universality of

fictionmaking. The reaction to it ac-

cused its authors of "arid scientism,"

suggesting that literary studies were be-

ing reduced to anthropology, to the

search for a totalizing system of struc-tural analysis, with a consequent neglect

of verbal structure and linguistic speci-

ficity. Our emphasis on literature in

transcendence of national and linguistic

boundaries, and on fictions beyond the

specific institution of literature, does

pose at least an apparent threat to the

traditional curricular presentations of lit-

erature. The attention paid to popular

literature, to film, to extra-literary texts,

and the emphasis on the fictionmaking

function, have been seen as a lowering

of standards and a waste of student's

time; even, almost, as a degradation of

the teaching of literature. To which we

have replied that what we have proposedis a wider context for the study of lit-

erature, one that will not lead students

away from literature but back to it, that

will make them more informed and

aware in their more closely analyticalstudies of texts.

If this answer has not reassuredall the

critics, it is no doubt because the enter-

prise of the Literature Major does, and

should, implicitly contest a teachingwhich makes of the classroom a secular

chapel for the celebration of the cult of

literature. To ask questions about the

place and role of literature, about what

it is and how it can be studied, is to some

a nearly impermissible enterprise because

a cult needs and wants no justification

beyond its own rituals. More important,

however, is the concern, both intellec-

tual and "political," for the future ofthe departmental programs in the several

literatures. It is no secret that at least

most of the foreign literature fields face,

nationwide, a slow but fully ominous

decline in numbers of students-certain-

lV in numbers of majors, if not in num-

bers of students who enroll in their

courses. There may tend to be more and

more a reaction of resistance, the affir-

mation of the inviolability of the depart-mental authority and program, a ten-

dency to see undergraduate programs as

ever more closely linked to the produc-

tion of candidates for graduate programs

in the field.

The other possible reaction is to look

toward a confluence of all the depart-

ments currently concerned with the

teaching of literature, toward the con-

struction of new frameworks that would

permit closer cooperation, elimination of

duplicated efforts, and, especially, train-



Man and His Fictions: One Approach to the Teaching of Literature 49

ing of students in a sense of literature as

a whole-its structures, its means and

modes, its project, and the range of pos-

sible approaches to it-without sacrificeof attention to the rhetorical and stylis-tic structures of individual works, and

without sacrifice of training in foreign

languages. If a Literature Department is

probably as undesirable, politically, as

the Tower of Babel, it may prove im-

perative to have some sort of a central

literature brokerage house, or switching

platform, to hold joint authority with

the departments, to judge needs in hiringand curriculum from the viewpoint of

the whole literary field. For it is the

whole field of literary studies, with all

the competencies necessary to it, that

matters and that is at stake. With imag-

ination, it should be possible to do great-er justice to the universal fact of litera-

ture and its relation to other human

sign-systems without sacrificing any of

the competencies now housed in thedepartments.

Without yielding to the terrorism of

many of the "sciences of literature" cur-

rently offered us, those concerned with

the survival of literary studies must bring

renewed attention to the premises of its

study. While the "Humanities" may still

insist that they are the realm of value and

judgment, it can be argued that they

have, especially in the literary domain,

become too exclusively concerned with

belles lettres, and have given up too

many of the estates of knowledge whichthey historically encompassed. To reaf-

firm their claim to attention, they must

insist upon taking back from these

estates-largely in the social sciences-

what they need to validate their claim to

speak cogently of the importance of the

world imagined. If the Humanities are

to survive as a major component of un-

dergraduate education, they need not

necessarily become more "scientific," butthey do need to be as interesting and as

problematical as other fields. In terms of

the study of literature, this does not

mean that the critic should let himself

be swallowed by the anthropologist or

the linguist, but rather that he should

eat of their banquet and then insist that

he has the right to use their totems since

literature includes all totems. As litera-

ture speaks of everything, so its studentmust be allowed, and enabled, to speak

all languages about it, and to speak of

everything through it. If man is in some

basic sense the homo signiferens, the

bearer of sense-making sign-systems,

what field of study promises a closer

approach to the human function than

literature?

Brooks, Peter. 1973. Man and His Fictions- One Approach to the Teaching of Literature College...

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