French Structuralist Theories
RUDl CARDONA: The sessIOn this afternoon is devoted to French
structuralist theories. The main speaker is Denis Donoghue, for–
merly connected with the University College at Dublin, at present
with New York University . You no doubt know his books on Yeats
and for the Masters Series,
The Sovereign Ghosts: Studies in
Imagination ,
among others. The commentators will be Peter
Brooks from Yale University, author of
The Melodramatic Imagi–
nation
and
Novel of Worldliness.
and Edith Kurzweil from Rutgers
University, author of
The Age of Structuralism.
Denis Donoghue
It
has often been assumed that a serious literary criticism is
bound to be political in its themes, even if it is formal and aesthetic in
its procedures.
In
our own time, reality has
u~ually
taken a political
form, and criticism has kept itself serious by maintaining political
interests. Twenty or thirty years ago, it was assumed that a serious
literary criticism would work on the understanding that reality is
predominantly political, social, and, under those auspices, personal.
That assumption has been weakened.
It
is now widely, though not
universally, asserted that a serious literary criticism is responsive to
issues which are ultimately philosophical. The critics who are prof–
fered to our attention are philosophers, philosophical historians. and
linguists; they are literary critics only betimes.
This situation is a trouble to those of us who, like myself, lack
the training of a philosopher.
It
may be true, as John Crowe Ransom
said many years ago , that philosophy is the proper homework for a
critic; that he should resort to the philosophers in his spare time, so
that in his working time he will be more accomplished in his terms
and definitions.
It
may be true; though I suspect that Ransom was
merely intimating that he found it congenial to read Hegel and Kant.
It
may be the case, however. that the only philosophers who bear
upon our literary interests are virtually impossible to read, if you are
