396
PARTISAN REVIEW
struction of a model. From the top of the Eiffel Tower everything
becomes pure model, pure grid, or pure structure. I think the
limitation of that, I mean the strength of that, is that it does involve
itself in a kind of defamiliarization. Much as I dislike the jargon–
riddled, pseudo-technical, pseudo-chemical mode of literary criti–
cism as much as everyone who's spoken here, it does involve a kind
of defamiliarization.
It
assumes that we have taken property of the
text too easily, that we 're too familiar with it, and by turning it into
a discourse very different from, and even very alien to, that of art,
that if insofar as you can apprehend what the critic is saying at all,
the process of defamiliarization occurs in which an apprehension, a
new kind of apprehension of the work, perhaps not an apprehen–
sion through wonder but a new kind of apprehension of the work,
can occur. I think the limitation of that is not an apprehension
through wonder or through experience, but it's an apprehension
that's, in a sense, perched so high, at such a distance from the work,
in a discourse so alien
to
the work, that we will often have a feeling
that it makes no connection to the work, that it becomes a kind of
distance for its own sake, a perspective that really has nothing to do
with the city below it.
