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The Limits o f Anti-Formalism. For me it is particularly striking and, I con
fess, the source o f a certain perverse pleasure that the purest example o f a
traditional project o f theory o f literature should have been produced by
the coauthor o f the 1982 article, “Against Theory,” which argued that lit
erary theory had no useful work to do and should simply stop.*’ Knapp’s
book takes up the traditional questions o f literary theory: “Is there such a
thing as a specifically literary discourse, distinguishable from other modes
o f thought and writing? Is there any way to defend the intuition that a
work o f literature says something that can’t be said in any other way?” ^
Knapp’s book surprises by giving positive answers to these questions. Phil
osophically more rigorous than most such investigations, and, I should say,
more doggedly determined not to end up with the patently unsatisfying
6. One might argue that this inconsistenq? is quite consistent with the 1982
article itself, which manifestly fails to practice what it preaches. I argue in Chap
ter 3 below that in dealing with other critics Knapp and Michaels decline to obey
their own axiom that the meaning of a text is what the author means by it, so per
haps it is scarcely surprising that they should not respect their own claim that the
ory has no work to do and should simply stop.
7. Steven Knapp, Literary Interest: The Limits o f Anti-Formalism (Cam
bridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1993), flyleaf copy; hereafter abbreviated L I
and cited parenthetically in the text.
answers that so often end such inquiries— such as that literature is what
ever a given society means by literature— Knapp’s inquiry concludes that,
Yes, there is a distinctiveness to literature. Yes, literature does do something
special.
Knapp’s approach takes up and refines traditional kinds o f answers
but under a different rubric. Having committed himself in the antitheory
article to the position that the meaning o f a literary work is simply, by defi
nition, what the author meant by it (and that any other notion is incoher
ent), he approaches the distinctiveness o f literature not through the special
kinds o f meaning that a literary work might have— there are none— but
through what he calls “literary interest.”
Since Knapp admits that our interest in literary language exceeds our
interest in figuring out what its author might have intended by it, that sur
plus is available to be called something else and is baptized “literary interest.”
The distinctiveness o f the literary lies not in the specificity o f literary lan
guage; “I came to see,” he writes, “that what could not be defended as an ac
count o f literary language could be defended instead as an account o f a cer
tain kind of representation that provoked a certain kind o f interest” {LI, 2).
Literature is a “linguistically embodied representation that tends to attract a
certain kind o f interest to itself; that does so by particularizing the emotive
and other values o f its referents; and that does that by inserting its referents
into new ‘scenarios’ inseparable from the particular linguistic and narrative
structures o f the representation itself” {LI, 3). And crucial to the particular
structures o f the representation itself are what in other theoretical schemes
are called the homologies between levels of structure and the self-referential
aspects o f literary discourse but that Knapp presents as relations between an
alogical structures involving different levels o f agency: is what the author is
doing in writing a poem analogous to what happens in the poem? “This sort
o f recursion,” Knapp writes, “— ^where a problem of agency located as it were
outside the work also shows up inside it— is the kind o f effect that turns an
interpretive problem into a source o f literary interest” {LI, 3). We are dealing
with literary interest when an interpretive problem becomes not just a source
of interest but the source o f an interest in the analogical structures whose
particularity and complexity give the work its peculiarly literary status.
An example— this is my example, not Knapp’s, but it has the virtue
of great economy— might be Robert Frost’s two-line poem “The Secret
Sirs”:
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