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Towards a Poetics of Fiction: 4) An Approach through GenreAuthor(s): Robert ScholesSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1969), pp. 101-111Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345392

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Towards Poetics fTiction

4) An Approach through Genre1

ROBERT SCHOLES

In this "age of suspicion" the opening phrase of Aristotle's Poetics must provokea nostalgic sigh, as we contemplate the earnest confidence with which he began-that confidence born of almost Adamic innocence with which he prepared to

name the denizens of his circumscribed world: IIept 7rorCr7LKqs av7's re KaL rTv Cd&Lv

avr1~s ... (About poetry itself and the species of it .. .). How tentative, in com-

parison, is our timid "towards a poetics of fiction." And how nice it might be if

we could paraphrase Aristotle's entire opening paragraph in this manner:

About fiction itself and its various genres, with the characteristic function ofeach genre and the way it must be structured to succeed, and with the number

and character of the parts of a fiction and other relevant matters, let us inquire,

beginning as nature directs, with first principles.

But "nature" does not give us directions so plainly any more, and here we are,

arguing about first principles before moving hesitantly in the direction of a po-etics of fiction.

My own contribution to this argument will be to make the case for generic

study as the central element in a poetics of fiction. But before beginning my argu-ment, and at the risk of being stiflingly methodical, I wish to inquire into the

purpose of such a poetics. After all, fiction has got on without one fairly well forsome centuries; so why bother now? We feel the need for such a thing, I believe,

for reasons primarily pedagogical. The spread of higher education has resulted inmore and more teaching of literature to less and less interested students, byteachers less and less certain of what they are doing. At present the liberal arts-and especially literary studies-are under strong pressure to justify their exist-ence in terms of practical value to the student and social value to the community.This means we must choose between offering a pseudo-scientific justification ofwhat we are doing in literary studies-with all the deceit and dishonor that im-

plies-and offering a genuinely literary and imaginative justification of the studyof imaginative literature. Here is where we feel the need of a poetics. We need tobe able to say much more clearly what we are doing with such a thing as the

undergraduate major in English-and we need to do it better. My own feeling inthis matter is that we can no longer justify ourselves in an Arnoldian way. We

1 Robert Scholes' approach through genre was preceded in this series by Malcolm Bradbury's approachthrough structure (Fall 1967), David Lodge's approach through language (Winter 1968), and Barbara Hardy'sapproach through narrative (Fall 1969).



NOVELJWINTER 1969

cannot say that we are presenting "the best that has been thought and said" so as

to equip the student with moral strength and conservative values. Seen clearly,such a system amounts to a kind of brain-washing in which students are pre-sented with ideas about literary texts but never equipped to criticize those texts or

produce comparable ones themselves.

How, then, do we justify our teaching and study of literature? We do it partly

on the pragmatic grounds that we are teaching valuable linguistic skills, and that

literary works, being the most powerful and complex kinds of verbal experience,are appropriate and natural materials with which to develop such skills. And we

add to this our claims for literature as a developer of the imagination-the best

available means of encouraging sensitivity and enlarging sympathies. If the for-

mal study of English is to maintain its place as a liberal art, of value to a man ascitizen or as person and not just as a kind of professional training, it must take as

its end the equipping of its students to encounter literary works after graduation,in the midst of non-literary careers and other public and private distractions. Our

graduates in English should be, simply, literate-capable of making an adequate

response to the best contemporary literature and the literature of the past, and

capable of exercising real judgment in reacting critically to the works they read.

They should also be sincerely anxious to read-turned on, not turned off, bytheir education.

In recent years we have made some strides in developing a poetics for the

teaching of lyric forms. After I. A. Richards' Practical Criticism, a real revolutionin the teaching of poetry began-and though that revolution is unfinished and in

some aspects wrong-headed (in my view), it has placed poetry clearly ahead of

fiction in that many teachers of poetry know what they are doing when they teach

a poem, while very few teachers of fiction have an adequate idea of what they are

doing when they teach a novel. This, I wish to suggest, is why we feel so pressinga need for a poetics of fiction; and this is the need that a poetics of fiction should

fill. It should help us to teach fiction better, so that our students will read it better

after they have graduated and left our hands. Incidentally, it will have to make

better readers of us in the process.Now I want to argue that a poetics such as the one I have mentioned should be

essentially generic in character. And this means I want to argue that our instruc-

tion in the classroom should also be essentially generic. My argument will take uptwo aspects of the question: first, the reasons for basing a poetics on genre-study;and second, the nature of a generic study of fiction really adequate for the pur-

pose I have sketched out. In making my initial case for the study of fictional

genres and modes, then, I should like it understood that I am not advocating the

simple-minded, pigeonholing operation which has sometimes presented itself as

genre-study in the past.

To begin with, the notion of a poetics of fiction is already generic. We have as-

sumed, at least provisionally, that fiction does not work the same way that lyric

poetry does, and beyond that, that imaginative literature does not work the waythat certain other verbal constructs-which are not imaginative-do in fact work.

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ROBERT SCHOLES[GENRE

The very pressure for a separate poetics for fiction suggests that we feel it to be a

distinct genre, with attributes, problems, and possibilities all its own. I agree that

this is the case. And I would go farther. I would say that this is so because the two

essential things we are concerned with-the reading process and the writing

process-are fundamentally generic in nature.

The writing process is generic in this sense: every writer conceives of his task

in terms of writing he knows. However far he may drive his work into "things

unattempted yet in prose or rhyme," like Milton himself he must take his de-

parture from things already attempted. Every writer works in a tradition, and his

achievement can be most clearly measured in terms of the tradition in which he

works. The hack or journeyman-whether writing TV westerns in the 1960s or

Elizabethan romances in the 1590s-takes his tradition for granted and cranksout works according to formula. The master, on the other hand, makes a new

contribution to his tradition, by realizing possibilities in it which had gone un-

perceived, or by finding new ways to combine older traditions-or new ways to

adapt a tradition to changing situations in the world around him. A writer mayclaim, like Sidney, to look in his heart and write, but he will actually, like Sidney,see his heart only through the formal perspectives open to him. In Astrophel and

Stella, the Petrarchan sonnet sequence provided Sidney with the occasion to look

into his heart, and it lent its coloring to the picture of Stella he found there.

If writing is bound by generic tradition, so is reading. Even a little child must

come to learn what stories are before he likes listening to them. He has, in fact,to develop a rudimentary poetics of fiction before he learns to respond, just as he

develops a grammatical sense in order to speak. In the adult world, most serious

misreadings of literary texts and most instances of bad critical judgment are re-ferable to generic misunderstandings on the part of reader or critic. In his book

Validity in Interpretation, E. D. Hirsch has argued persuasively that

an interpreter's preliminary generic conception of a text is constitutive of every-thing that he subsequently understands, and that this remains the case unlessand until that generic conception is altered.

The context in which we read the language of a literary work, Hirsch insists, is

generic. As we begin reading we postulate a tentative genre, which we refine uponin the course of reading, as we approach the unique nature of the work by meansof its affinities with other works that use language in similar ways. For example, ifa word or a passage or an episode is to be taken ironically-in a sense opposed toits apparent meaning-the reader must perceive appropriate generic signals inthe text. Hirsch's view of the reading process finally persuades me because it

squares with my own sense of what happens when I read. It also casts some lighton the problems of literary evaluation.

A recurrent tendency in criticism is the establishment of false norms for theevaluation of literary works. To mention a few instances in the criticism of fiction,we can find Henry James and Co. attacking the intrusive narrator in Fielding and

Thackeray; or Wayne Booth attacking the ambiguity of James Joyce; or ErichAuerbach attacking the multiple reflections of consciousness in much modern

103



NOVELIWINTER 1969

fiction. The reasons for these critical aberrationsare most clearly diagnosablewhen we see them as failures in generic logic. Henry James set up his own kind

of fiction as a norm for the novel as a whole, because he was unable or unwillingto see the term novel as a loose designation for a wide variety of fictional types. In

a similar though opposed fashion, Wayne Booth set up eighteenth-century rhetori-

cal-didactic fiction as his norm. And Erich Auerbach set up nineteenth-centuryEuropean realism as his. The moral of these exempla is that unconscious monism

in literary evaluation is a real danger, capable of bringing the whole enterprise of

evaluation into disrepute-which is exactly where a vigorous branch of critics

led by Northrop Frye would like to have it. Frye argues that all evaluative criti-

cism is subject to distortion by personal prejudice and passing fashions in literary

taste; and is therefore fraudulent or sophomoric. From the same data and prem-ises I should prefer another conclusion: which is, that since even the very best

critics of fiction-men of sensitivity, learning, and acumen-can go wrong when

they seek evaluative principles that cross generic boundaries, we should con-

sciously try to guard against monistic evaluation by paying really careful atten-

tion to generic types and their special qualities. Among works that have real

affinities in form and content, a genuine comparative evaluation is possible.

Now I wish to turn my attention to the kind of theory that will answer to the

needs and possibilities that I have been discussing. Space is limited, but that can-

not stand as an excuse. Either the examples I am about to present will arguepowerfully for the uses of genre-theory in the teaching and study of fiction, or

my presentation must be counted a failure.

Traditional genre theory has two facets, almost two separate methods. In one,

specific works of literature are referred to certain ideal types, in which reside the

essence of each genre and its potential. In the other, a notion of general types is

built up from data acquired empirically, based on historical connections among

specific works, and traditions that can be identified. One is essentially deductive,the other inductive. An ideal theory of fictional genres should work toward a

reconciliation of these two approaches, which are equally necessary, and in fact

complementary. For clarification, I wish to call my theory of ideal types a theoryof modes, using the term genre in a narrower sense for the study of individual

works in their relationship to specific, historically identifiable traditions.

A theory of modes should work toward a general overview of all fiction, pro-

viding a framework for discussion of literary affinities and antipathies. It should

also prove amenable to historical perspectives, indicating broad relationships

among the specific fictional genres which have established themselves as literarytraditions. With an almost Aristotelian hubris, I will found my modal theory onthe notion that all fictional works are reducible to three primary shades. These

primary modes of fiction are themselves based on the three possible relations be-tween any fictional world and the world of experience. A fictional world can be

better than the world of experience, worse than it, or equal to it. These fictional

worlds imply attitudes that we have learned to call romantic, satirical, and real-

istic. Fiction can give us the degraded world of satire, the heroic world of romance,

104



ROBERT SCHOLESIGENRE

or the mimeticworld of history. We can visualize these three primarymodes offictionalrepresentationas the mid and end points of a spectrumof possibilities.Likethis:

satire history romance

If we think of history as representinga numberof fictional forms which takethe presentationof actual events and real people as their province (journalism,biography,autobiography,etc.), the basic fictional forms which existed beforethe rise of the novel can all be located on this spectrum.But where should thenovel itself be placed?Is it more satirical hanhistoryor more romantic?Clearly,

it is both. Thus, the novel belongs on both sides of the fictional spectrum-asatiricalnovel betweenhistory and satire,and a romanticnovel between historyand romance.Bringing our knowledge of the actual development of fictionalmodes to bear on this scheme,we can make one moreuseful subdivisionamongfictionalshades at this point. The satiricalnovel can be divided into picaresqueand comic forms. And the romanticnovel can be divided into tragic and senti-mentalforms.Thismoreelaborate pectrumwill looklike this:

satire picaresque comedy history sentiment tragedy romance

I I I I I

Here a word is no doubtnecessaryon the arrangementof these subdivisions.In using traditional ermsfor the modaldivisions,I run the risk of creatingcon-fusion because these terms are used in so many differentways. Let me repeat,then, that termslike tragedyandcomedyherearemeant to referto the qualityofthe fictionalworld and not to any form of story customarilyassociated with theterm. In this modalconsideration,what is important s not whethera fictionendsin a death or a marriage,but what that death ormarriagempliesaboutthe world.Fromthe relationshipbetween protagonistsand their fictionalsurroundingswederiveour sense of the dignityor baseness of the charactersand the meaningful-

ness or absurdityof their world. Our "real"world (which we live in but neverunderstand) s ethicallyneutral.Fictionalworlds,on the otherhand, are chargedwith values. They offerus a perspectiveon our own situation,so that by tryingto place them we are engaged in seeking our own position. Romanceoffers ussuperhuman ypes in an ideal world; satire presents subhumangrotesques en-meshed in chaos. Tragedyoffersus heroicfiguresin a world which makes theirheroismmeaningful.In picaresque iction,the protagonistsendure a worldwhichis chaoticbeyond ordinaryhumantolerance,but both the picaresqueworld andthe world of tragedyoffer us charactersand situationswhich are closer to ourown than those of romanceand satire. In sentimentalfiction,the charactershave

unheroicvirtues,to which we may well aspire;in comedy,humanfailings whichwe, too, may strive to correct.Comedyis the lightest and brightest of the lowworlds; it looks toward romancefrequently, offering a limited kind of poeticjustice.And sentiment is the darkest and most ordinaryof the high worlds. Itlooks towardthe chaos of satire,and it may see virtueperishwithoutthe graceof

105



NOVELJWINTER 1969

tragic ripeness. In a sense, comedy and sentiment overlap-in that comedy sug-

gests a world somewhat superior to its protagonists and sentiment offers us char-

acters somewhat superior to their world.

This modal scheme, crude as it is, can help us to perceive some affinities and

antipathies in fiction. For example, considering a crucial century of English fiction,

we could locate the names of some major figures on the spectrum in this way:

satire picaresque comedy history sentiment tragedy romance

i I I I I lSwift Smollett Fielding Boswell Richardson Scott

The anxieties that result from this pigeonholing are a measure of its inadequacies.They can be relieved somewhat by locating specific works more precisely. Field-

ing's Jonathan Wild, for instance, belongs well over toward satire; Joseph An-

drews, on the picaresque side of comedy; Tom Jones, on the historical side of

comedy, and Amelia well over toward the sentimental. Richardson's Pamela and

Clarissa have clear affinities with sentiment and tragedy respectively. But then,

what do we do with Jane Austen's blend of comedy and sentiment, or Sterne's

blend of sentiment and satire? Clearly this spectrum cannot be turned into a set

of pigeonholes, but must be seen as a system of shades that writers have com-

bined in various ways.

To facilitate a consideration of fictional mixtures, and for some other reasons,I would suggest one further change in this modal system, and that is a change in

its shape for graphic representation. If we bend the spectrum at its midpoint-

history-we can produce a figure shaped like a piece of pie:

satire\ /romance

picaresque tragedy

sentiment

history

o06




Using this scheme we can not only begin to designate more complicated fictional

mixtures, like that of Cervantes in Don Quixote, which seems to partake of all

the attributes named here; we can also trace certain interesting developments in

the history of fiction. Before the novel was developed as a fictional type, both

satirical and romantic fictions flourished. We can, in fact, see the rise of the novel

as a result of a flow of fictional impulses from both romance and satire, attracted

toward history by a growing historical consciousness in the later Renaissance and

the Age of Reason. In the course of this movement, the rogues and whores of

picaresque became the rakes and coquettes of comedy. The heroes and heroines

of romance and tragedy became the men of feeling and women of virtue who

populate sentimental fiction. (Fielding and Richardson drew from both sides of

the spectrum, but in different ways.) Realism as a fictional technique, then, canbe seen as the curbing of satirical and romantic attitudes in response to scientific

or empirical impulses, which were also taking shape as journalistic, biographical,

and full-blown historical types of narrative. In English fiction of the eighteenth

century, we can see persistent traces of one or the other of the pre-novelisticfictional modes. Sterne, for example, holds sentiment and satire in suspension;even though he mixes the two, they never unite in a single solution. In fact, this

persistence of primitive narrative modes continues in the English novel into the

nineteenth century and beyond. In a sense, a realism which really unites these two

broad fictional traditions never establishes itself completely in England. The dif-

ference between Stendhal and Balzac and their predecessors in both England andFrance-and their English contemporaries as well-is that Stendhal and Balzac

bring these two modal lines into a much tighter fusion than the others. We can

compare Stendhal's blend of sentimental and picaresque elements in The Red and

satire \ * /romance

picaresque

comedy

tragedy

sentiment

history

107



NOVELIWINTER 1969

the Blackwith Smollett's n RoderickRandom,for instance,to see the difference

betweenmerely mixing

andreally fusing

the two modes. Thereis,

Ithink,

a value

judgment mpliedhere, but a real value judgmentmust take into accountmanymore factors than a broadlymodal considerationprovides.

Because he novel as a fictionalformhas tendedto draw fromboth sides of the

spectrum,we can finally reintroduce t into the scheme by representing t as a

vague, dotted line slicing the center of our piece of pie (see diagram on p. 107).This will enable us to make a further interesting refinement or two. If realistic

fiction first established itself (in the form we now recognize as the novel) as a

result of a movement from satire and romance in the direction of history, we can

then see the subsequent development of the novel in terms of its movement away

from the initial point of conjunction. If the novel began in the eighteenth centuryas a union of comic and sentimental impulses which we may call realistic, in the

nineteenth century it moved toward a more difficult and powerful combination of

picaresque and tragic impulses which we have learned to call naturalistic. The

realistic novels tended toward stories of education, amelioration, integration. The

naturalistic novels have been concerned with alienation and destruction. The

novel reached its classic form in the nineteenth century when it was poised be-

tween realistic and naturalistic modes. We can represent the area of the classical

novel by shading a segment of the graphic scheme in this way:

novel

satireromance

\ naturalism /picaresque/ r / tragedy

/ / / / 7/ / / / // // // / /

comedy/ / /-/ sentiment

reaismtory

history

io8




Stendhal,Balzac,Flaubert,Tolstoy, Turgenev,and GeorgeEliotall worknearthecenterof this area.

Dickens, Thackeray,Meredith,and

Hardytend more toward

the edgesandcorners.In the twentieth century, fiction has tended to continue moving away from

realism,going beyond naturalism.In this development,the novel has had diffi-

culty holdingtogetheras a form in the face of such extremelydivergentsatiricaland romanticpossibilities.If this schemehas any historicalvalidity, the naturalcombination or our erawould seem to be preciselythose two divergent poles of

fiction,satire andromance.Herewe would expecta combinationof the grotesquein characterizationndthe arabesque n construction.Allegorywould be a likelyvehicle for fictionbecause it traditionallyhas offeredways of combiningsatire

and romance. In fiction of this sort the world and its denizens would appearfragmentedand distorted,and languagewould be tortured n an attemptto holdthe satiric andromanticviews of life together.Is this, in fact, the presentliterarysituation?

I thinkit is. I think the descriptionI have just set forth representsthe state offiction as practicedby our best writers from Joyce and Faulknerto Barth andHawkes.This modalscheme,then, canhelpto tell us wherewe are andto explainhow we got there. In doing so, it shouldserve to make us more sympatheticand

opento the varieties of fiction,old and new. It can also serve us pedagogicallyasa way of teachingliteraryhistory as a living and ongoing process,and as a wayof puttinghistorical earningin the serviceof interpretation.A theory of modesandgenresis, in fact, the naturalmeeting placeof scholarshipand criticism,sinceboth areabsolutelyrequiredby it.

So much,for the moment,for fictionalmodes. To come down from the heady,conceptualwheeling and dealingof modal criticismto the painstakinghistorical

study of generictraditions s a descent indeed. It is so demeaning,in fact, that

manytheoreticiansnevermake it. The weaknessesin Northrop Frye'sclever dis-cussions of fictionalgenres and modes-both of which are modal in the sense

used in this discussion-seem to me clearlytraceable o his reluctance o face theintractableactualitiesof specific types and historicalrelationships.My own con-siderationof fictionalmodes is intended to be superiorto Frye'sparalleltreat-ment (fromwhich I have learneda good deal)becauseit is moreawareof specificandhistoricalgenericconsiderations.But this does not solve the problemof ade-

quatelyillustratinggeneric procedure n a poeticsof fiction. Modal criticism,be-cause it starts at the center of things with a limited numberof ideal types, is

readilydemonstrable.Genericcriticism,on the otherhand,begins in the thick ofthe phenomena,trying to organizethem in such a way as to make a glimpse ofthose ideal types possible,without doing injusticeto a single individualwork. In

theidealactof criticalreadingwe passthrough nsensiblegradations roma modalto a genericawareness,to a final sense of the unique qualitiesof the individual

work, as distinguishedfrom those most like it. Genericcriticismfinally requiresmorelearningandmorediligencethan modalcriticism,a deeperandmoreintensekind of scholarship.No student has finished a properinitiation into a generic

o109



110 NOVEL] WINTER 1i969

poetics of fiction until he has experienced the gap between generic knowledge and

modal ideas, and has some notions of his own about how to reshape modal theoryto close that disturbing space.As an example of refined and subtle generic theory in action, I wish to turn to the

country which has given us the word "genre." Northrop Frye, in chiding us for

our failure to develop a useful theory of literary genres, pointed out that "'theveryword 'genre' sticks out in an English sentence as the unpronounceable and alien

thing it is." Perhaps we can learn something about how to domesticate the term

from those who pronounce it naturally. One of the nicest-in both old and new

senses of the word-examples of generic criticism that I have encountered is con-

tained in the modern tdition Gamnierof Pre6vost's ragi-sentimental novel, Manon

Lescaut.The editors of this work, Fre6dericDeloifre and Raymond Picard of the Sor-

bonne, include in their introduction a section called "Sources Litte6rairet Histoire

du Genre." In it they draw upon earlier work by C.-1. Engel and M. H. Rodier to

place Pre6vost incidentally along with Richardson whom he translated) in a tradi-

tion exemplified by a lesser writer of fiction named Robert Challes, in a work

called les Illustres Francaises, which was translated into English in 1727 by Pene-

lope Aubin (and softened and sentimentalized in the process) under the title: The

Illustrious French Lovers, being the histories of several French Persons of

Quality.. ." The editors document with care and skill Pre6vost's

knowledgeof

both the English and French versions of this work in particular, and beyond that,

they trace the history of this specific genre from Boccaccio through Challes, em-

phasizing the way in which it was modified by acquiring attributes we now

recognize as realistic. This genre, which they call simply "l'histoire," received a

new impetus with the decline in popularity of fictions of the romantic and the

marvelous that became noticeable after 1670. Such "histories" of two lovers,

which had been a traditional feature in earlier Spanish fiction, usually appearingas separate narrative units inserted in longer works, became more popular and

almost took on a life of their own in collections like that of Challes, invariably re-

taining from their heritage in Boccaccio and Margaret of Navarre as well as fromtheir status as inserted tales, the apparatus of a frame which introduces the nar-

rator of the "'history" tself.

From their careful historical sketch-itself a summary of larger studies-which

I have clumsily tried to summarize here, they derive a list of attributes of the

tradition before Pre'vost's contribution to it, which they call ""theunformulated

rules of the genre." In summary the attributes are:

:1. The framing of the tale.

2. The presence of a narrator whose character lends resonance to the style,

radically affecting its texture.3. The development of a narrative prose which has the familiarity of conversa-

tion-especially important in a country where the elegant aims of a vigilant

academy acted as a barrier to the use of living language in serious writing.




4. Selection of ordinary characters-of "condition moyen."

5. Exactness in the rendering of dates, places, and manners ("moeurs").6. Plausibility in the incidents.

The editors conclude their generic investigation with these words:

If we add the influence exerted by les Illustres Francaises in showing [Prevost]what degree of emotion the genre could attain in its better productions, we will

have defined the preliminary conditions which made possible the chef-d'oeuvre.

It remains to examine the work itself in order to recognize its richness and

originality.

And they devote some seventy additional pages to an exploration of this origi-nality and richness, examining texture and structure with care and sensitivity.Their generic study was merely the indispensable preliminary to a consideration

of the work itself-indispensable because it provided the necessary backgroundfor perceiving and appreciating the richness and originality of Prevost's achieve-

ment.

In a similar fashion David Lodge, a vigorous advocate for giving consideration

of fictional language the primary position in a poetics of fiction, finds it indis-

pensable to establish Wells's Tono-Bungay as a "Condition of England novel" be-

fore demonstrating its stylistic effectiveness; and to refine on coarser notions of

"romantic novel" and "novel of manners" in order to treat the texture of JaneEyre and Mansfield Park; and to designate Hard Times a "polemical" novel which

is therefore especially dependent on Dickens' rhetoric of persuasion. Generic in-

vestigation is in fact the most precise and legitimate way into the vexed questionof the intentionality of a work. It makes possible not only the comparative evalua-

tion of works in the same tradition, but also consideration of the extent to whicha work succeeds in accomplishing what it suggests by generic signals to be its

aims.

Fromthe broad generalizations of modal theory to the precise discriminations of

genre study, generic theory provides a rigorous intellectual discipline, which can

hold its head high as an area of academic study, without compromising the es-

sentially personal and imaginative qualities of individual response to literarytexts. Considered pedagogically, genre-study has the great advantage of being a

clear and orderly procedure, teachable to the neophyte and infinitely perfectablefor the expert. It requires both learning and sensitivity, and, unlike some kinds of

literary study, it bends all its efforts toward the proper end of a literary educa-

tion-generating appropriate responses to individual works of literature.

III

scholes towards poetics of fiction

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