Abstract:

In this brief essay, I consider the following question: can systems thinking offer us a general theory of literary form? By "general theory," I mean the highest level of abstraction, akin to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm; I'll largely (though not entirely) pass over the "middle-level" concepts that Marjorie Levinson and Jonathan Culler call "poetics" and, lower still, the ordinary science of literary criticism that we call close reading.1 As a scholar trained in modernist poetry, I know that such abstractions are intrinsically risky; "no ideas but in things," William Carlos Williams warned.2 But I also believe that pursuing such a general theory can help us self-reflectively describe what we actually do as literary scholars, while also suggesting new modes of critical practice. Given that the last decade in literary studies was marked by a perhaps excessive attention to methodology, in this piece I'm less interested in proposing a cybernetic "way of reading" and more interested in systems thinking's capacity to help us understand why our discipline fosters so many ways of reading, more or less successful, to begin with.

摘要：

在这篇简短的文章中，我考虑了以下问题：系统思维能否为我们提供一种文学形式的一般理论？我所说的“一般理论”是指最高层次的抽象，类似于托马斯·库恩的范式概念。我将在很大程度上（尽管不是全部）忽略马乔里·莱文森和乔纳森·卡勒所谓的“诗学”的“中级”概念，以及更底层的、我们称之为细读的文学批评的普通科学。1 作为受过训练的学者在现代主义诗歌中，我知道这种抽象本质上是有风险的。威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯警告说：“没有想法，只有事物。”2但我也相信，追求这样一个普遍的理论可以帮助我们自我反思地描述我们实际所做的事情作为文学学者，同时也提出了批评实践的新模式。鉴于过去十年文学研究的特点可能是对方法论的过度关注，在这篇文章中，我对提出控制论的“阅读方式”不太感兴趣，而对系统思维帮助我们理解为什么我们的学科促进首先，阅读的方式有很多，或多或少都比较成功。