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Introduction
ly escaped scrutiny by narratologists and other analysts o f fiction, that o f
“omniscient” narration. The notion comes, o f course, from a comparison
o f the novelist with God: the novelist stands to his or her work as God does
to his creation. It is odd that such a blatantly theological notion should
persist in discussions o f fiction, despite the so-called hermeneutics o f sus
picion and critique o f ideology that supposedly reigns in literary and cul
tural studies; odder still that it has scarcely been subjected to critical scruti
ny. I argue that “omniscience” is not a useful notion, that it lumps together
a number o f different effects or strategies, which ought to be discriminated
for the better analysis o f narrative techniques, and that to make progress
here we need to dispense with a concept o f omniscience that has in fact
misled critics and made certain sorts o f novels seem ideologically suspect.
The next section continues the work o f poetics but in a different
mode. Though theory has contested the presumed priority of speech over
writing and argued for the pertinence o f writing as a model for significa
tion in general, and though it has been resolutely self-reflexive, interrogat
ing the status o f theory, its history, its interests, still, theory has not often
explicitly posed the question o f its own nature as a practice of writing with
its own conventions. Chapter 9 looks at philosophy as a kind o f writing,
addressing the charge o f bad writing often leveled at theorists. Examining
the case o f Stanley Cavell, a notoriously difficult writer, I attempt to un
derstand the purposes, the strategies, o f difficult writing o f this kind. Does
its provocation o f the reader work to philosophical ends, and, if so, how?
Seeking to avoid the facile answer that diflScuIt problems require difficult
writing, I attempt to understand its functioning.
Chapter 10 takes up this sort o f issue in broader terms, sketching the
history o f criticism over the last fifty years or so as a history of writing prac
tices or discursive strategies, looking at some o f the varying assumptions
on which critical writing relies and the way in which its goals are manifest
ed in writing techniques.
The last two chapters discuss more institutional questions in the
realm o f theory. First, there is the issue, inseparable from the contempo
rary fate o f theory, o f the nature o f cultural studies. Might cultural studies
be, in principle, the practice o f which what we call “theory” is the theory?
I argue that the opposition between cultural studies and literary studies,
which has been a major cause o f the sense that the literary has been aban
Introduction
17
doned or neglected by theory and theorists, is based on a dubious though
understandable polemic that neglects the literary dimensions o f many of
cultural studies’ most potent concepts. Although some practitioners have
sought to introduce the term cultural analysis for a cultural studies that
would not set itself against literary studies or against analysis o f texts and
culture o f the past, I believe that it is better to retain the name and to recall
cultural studies to its underlying literariness, as a space where such con
cepts as text, sign, and performativity, for instance, can be intensively and
productively pursued.
Finally, I turn to the situation of comparative literature, which in
the 1960s and 1970s took on an important identity as the home o f theory
(the conduit for the importation o f foreign theory) but which— with the
broad dissemination of theory and national literature departments’ aban
donment o f the commitment to the historical study o f a national litera
ture— has lost much o f its distinctiveness and some o f its rationale. At a
time when, with the spread o f theory, English, French, and even German
departments pursue postcolonial theory and cultural studies, teach courses
on psychoanalysis and philosophy, when the high and the low, the verbal
and the visual, the fictional and the nonfictional are everywhere compared,
is this the triumph o f comparative literature or its eclipse?
In fact, the chapters in this book seem to identify a common struc
ture in the fate o f theory, o f literature, and o f comparative literature. In
each case we find a dissemination that leads to the loss o f much o f the dis
tinctiveness and salience o f the original object. Theory is no longer some
thing distinct and alien that some scholars promote or practice and others
combat: it is everywhere, but, no longer seen as new and distinctive, it can
be denounced as dead or passé. Literature, as I argue in “The Literary in
Theory,” has become less a distinct object, fixed in a canon, than a proper
ty o f discourse o f diverse sorts, whose literariness— its narrative, rhetorical,
performative qualities— can be studied by what were hitherto methods of
literary analysis. And the values that are often taken for granted in literary
reading o f nonliterary materials are frequently literary values: concreteness,
vividness, immediacy, paradoxical complexities. Finally, comparative liter
ature would seem to have won its battles, in that other literature depart
ments now agree that the historical study o f the evolution o f a national lit
erature is not the only legitimate way to study literature but that there are
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