THE STATE OF CRITICISM
425
partly, in my comments, was trying to reinforce distinctions when I
said that structuralism, as I understand it, does not claim to
be
an
interpretive or hermeneutic activity, but rather
to
illuminate ques–
tions of poetics and rhetoric. That is, how genres work, and how the
language works, and so on. I would say, and here we would have
to
have a historical argument, that that is at least as old and noble a
tradition in the study of literature, as evaluative criticism.
If
you go
back
to
neoclassical critics, one of the interesting things is that the
rules they are using are both normative and poetic. They are
normative, they are also recipes for the way a tragedy, for instance, is
put together: I just think what you are doing is taking one province
of what has been known in the study of literature and claiming this
is all that's valid. I am saying that that needs
to
be informed by study
of some of the larger issues raised in the other branches. I don 't mind
if you want to call them rhetoric, poetics, whatever, rather than
literary criticism, but I don't think you have exclusive claim to your
kind of criticism as the on ly kind of literary criticism.
