Preface

Summary

When I was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in the early 1960s, I majored in English and dabbled in science and philosophy. (We had in those days more luxury than students have now to “find ourselves” in a liberal arts curriculum.) In my senior year, I wrote a thesis on the distinction between prose and poetry and the role that distinction played in the “objectivist” literary criticism of Ransom, Tate, and Brooks, still fashionable in that period. My real concern, as I gradually became aware, was philosophical: What is a “literary theory”? What is it about? What does it really explain? What makes one such theory better than another? What is the relationship between a literary theory and good literary criticism, or good creative writing, for that matter? How was theory connected to practice? I could not answer these questions. The net result of my undistinguished senior thesis was that I abandoned my career plans to study literature and went into philosophy instead. Philosophy, and in particular, philosophy of science, I hoped, would help me understand what makes one theory a better theory than an alternative. Armed with that understanding, I thought, I might then go back to answer the questions that plagued me as an undergraduate.

The essays in this volume grow out of those early interests in the nature of theory and its relationship to practice, but the focus is on ethical, not literary, theory and practice.