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Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald MllerThe Implied Author


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NarratologiaContributions to Narrative Theory/

Beitrge zur Erzhltheorie

Edited by/Herausgegeben von

Fotis Jannidis, John Pier, Wolf Schmid

Editorial Board/Wissenschaftlicher BeiratCatherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik

Jose Angel Garc a Landa, Peter Hhn, Manfred JahnAndreas Kablitz, Uri Margolin, Mat as Mart nez

Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar NnningMarie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer

Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers, Jrg Schnert

9

Walter de Gruyter Berlin New York


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Translated by Alastair Matthews

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within

the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kindt, Tom.The implied author : concept and controversy / by Tom Kindt,

Hans-Harald Mller.p. cm. (Narratologia)

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018948-3 (alk. paper)ISBN-10: 3-11-018948-8 (alk. paper)1. Implied author (Rhetoric) I. Mller, Hans-Harald, 1943

II. Title.PN213.K56 2006808.3 dc22

200602757

ISBN-13: 978-3-11-018948-3ISBN-10: 3-11-018948-8

ISSN 1612-8427

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the DeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet

at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Copyright 2006 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 BerlinAll rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of thisbook may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includ-ing photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin


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Contents

Introduction: History of Criticism and the History of a Concept ... 1

Part One: Reconstructing the Concepts History

1 Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics:The Origins of the Implied Author Concept................................ 171.1 The Chicago School of Criticism

1.1.1 The Critical Turn in the Academic Studyof Literature in North America.................................... 18

1.1.2 The Chicago Critics: Pluralismand Aristotelianism...................................................... 22

1.1.3 The Legacy of the Chicago School ............................. 361.2 Wayne C. Booth and the Implied Author Concept

1.2.1 Booths Combined Ethical and RhetoricalApproach to Literary Texts ......................................... 42

1.2.2 The Implied Author and The Rhetoric of Fiction ........ 461.2.3 The Implied Author after The Rhetoric of Fiction ...... 56

2 Between Interpretation Theory and Narratology:The Reception of the Implied Author Concept .......................... 632.1 The Implied Author in Relation to Interpretation Theory

2.1.1 The Reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction ..................... 692.1.2 The Implied Author as the Key Concept in

a Theory of Interpretation............................................ 742.2 The Implied Author in Relation to Interpretation

and Description2.2.1 Reception of the Concept in the Wakeof Structuralism........................................................... 84

2.2.2 The Implied Author in Relationto Interpretation in Practice ......................................... 86

2.2.3 The Implied Author in Relation to Description......... 104


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2.3 The Model Author and Other Author Models:Alternative Concepts to the Implied Author ...................... 1212.3.1 Umberto Ecos Model Author ................................... 1232.3.2 Wolf Schmid s Abstract Author................................ 1302.3.3 Wolfgang Iser s Implied Reader ............................... 1362.3.4 The Apparent Artist, the Fictional Author, and

the Postulated Author ................................................ 143

Part Two: Explicating the Concept

3 Exit IA?Possibil ities for Explicating the Implied Author...................... 151

3.1 The Implied Author as a Phenomenon of Reception.......... 1523.2 The Implied Author as a Participant in Communication.... 1553.3 The Implied Author as a Postulated Subject

Behind the Text .................................................................. 1583.3.1 Explicating the Concept in the Context of

a Non-Intentionalistic Theory of Interpretation ........ 1623.3.2 Explicating the Concept in the Context of

an Intentionalistic Theory of Interpretation............... 167

Abbreviations .............................................................................. 183

Works Cited................................................................................. 185

Acknowledgements..................................................................... 225


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Introduction:

History of Criticism and the History of a Concept

This book examines the concept of the implied author, a term thatrose to such prominence in the wake of Wayne C. Booths 1961Rhetoric of Fiction that it is still employed in the study of literaturein virtually all languages today, despite the fact that it began to meetwith fundamental criticism soon after Booths study first appeared.One might well ask what purpose is served by devoting an entirebook to the history of such a concept and ending it by suggesting anew way of using it in future. It might be objected, for example, thatthere is no need for a critical study of the concept to proceed his-torically, as ours does, by reconstructing the different ways in whichit has been used when a far less laborious alternative suggests itself.Perhaps, that is to say, an intuitive prior understanding of what is

meant by the terms implied and author tells us enough about thekinds of objects to which they can refer to show that combiningthem can result only in an incongruous chimera. The expressionauthor, proponents of this view would argue, should under no cir-cumstances be applied to objects of the kind that can be implied insomething else, for such objects are clearly not linguistic or abstractin nature. The ultimate aim of this kind of argument is to reject useof the modifier implied with the general term authora pri ori as afatal categorial error. But, well-founded as this attack on the use of the implied author concept may be, there would be little to begained by taking such a line in the context of the present study. At-tention has been drawn to the anomalies of the concept ever since itwas introduced, but never with any effect, so it seems unlikely thatanything would be achieved by showing that it is inappropriate andanalytically vacuous here either. Users of the concept have simplynot concerned themselves with its anomalies, and, however disputedit may be, its critics have been unable to prevent it from becoming


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2 History of Criticism and the History of a Conceptone of the most successful concepts in the academic study of lit-erature in the twentieth century. This alone is reason enough to lookmore closely at how and why the implied author became so popular.And it is not, as we shall see, the only good reason for undertaking acareful study of the history of the concept.

The implied author is also of interest because it is not a technicalterm in the strict sense that, say, the heterodiegetic narrator is. Withthe concept, Booth drew unmistakable attention to the role of theauthor in literary communication on the one hand, while confiningthe author, as an implied one, to the text on the other. For this rea-son, the concept was and is inextricably bound up with the episte-mological and normative controversies about the place of the authorin textual interpretation that have been rumbling on for over a hun-dred years and are still being played out today. The story of thesearguments began when opposition to historicism and positivismstarted to appear at the end of the nineteenth century.1 The contro-versy reached a climax in proclamations of the death of the author,2but still shows little sign of ending, the subsequent return of theauthor notwithstanding.3 Whether consciously or not, the debatesurrounding the concept of the implied author has been and isshaped, more or less clearly, by the positions that have been adop-ted in this wider argument about authorship. Even so, the impliedauthor is not a programmatic concept that can be used only in thecontext of a particular line of textual interpretation such as that of psychoanalysis or deconstruction. Neither programmatic nor strictlytechnical, it can appear in many contexts involving (the theory of)textual interpretation, as well as in related areas such as receptiontheory.

Our study of the implied author concept has two main objectivesand is divided into two corresponding parts. Our first aim is a his-

torical one: to provide a faithful reconstruction of the circum-stances, distinctive in many ways and perhaps even unique, in

1 See Kindt and Mller (2002).2 See Hix (1990), Burke (1992), and Lamarque (1996).3 See Iseminger (1992a), Jannidis et al. (1999), and Detering (2002). See also

the remarks on the debate surrounding intentionalism in 3.3 below.


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Introduction 3which the concept was introduced, and then to examine the re-sponses it has met with in the course of subsequent developments.This reconstruction of the concepts history prepares the ground forthe explication of the implied author with which the second part of the book is concerned. The historical study, in other words, pro-vides the background against which we put forward a more preciseway of understanding the implied author concept, without therebydeparting completely from the ways in which it has previously beenused.4

In addition to pursuing these aims, we hope that the book willgive a compelling demonstration of why the historical developmentof terms and concepts should be given proper attention in the histo-riography of scholarly activity. We hope to show that historicalstudies of the kind presented here can provide profound insightsinto the role of individual concepts in cultural studies, and also, on alarger scale, shed light on the construction and changing nature of the theoretical frameworks that accommodate them. Put simply,such an approach informs our understanding of the function of terms and theories in the text-based disciplines.5

The idea that theorists should always be critically aware of theconcepts on which their theories and programmes depend is notnew; Max Weber advocated such a position as early as the begin-

4 Quine (1951, 156) has described the process of explication as follows: Anyword worth explicating has some contexts which, as wholes, are clear andprecise enough to be useful; and the purpose of explication is to preserve theusage of these favored contexts while sharpening the usage of other contexts.In order that a given definition be suitable for purposes of explication, there-fore, what is required is not that the definiendum in its antecedent usage besynonymous with the definiens, but just that each of these favored contexts of the definiendum, taken as a whole in its antecedent usage, be synonymouswith the corresponding context of the definiens. On explication, see alsoCarnap (1950), Quine (1960), Robinson (1968), Pawowski (1980), Danne-berg (1989b, 1991), Mller (1989), Fricke (2000), and Rey (2000).

5 Weitz (1977) provides a remarkably clear introduction to the function of open concepts in the humanities; regrettably, though, this work is ignored byliterary theorists in the United States today. For a detailed analysis of Weitzposition, see Carroll (2000b).


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4 History of Criticism and the History of a Conceptning of the twentieth century. He was perhaps the first person torealize the true extent of the importance of concepts in culturalstudies.6 The need for such awareness is all the more pressing to-day. One programme in cultural studies gives way to the next withever-increasing rapidity; in many cases they have lost half their au-thority in under a decade, and each leaves its own terminologicallegacy behind in its wake. The normative foundations of such sec-ond-hand terminology, as well as the theories and methods to whichit is epistemologically linked, are apt to become increasingly ob-scure. It is thus of paramount importance that these contextual fac-tors be kept constantly in mind in cultural studies, or at the veryleast that they be brought periodically to mind by pausing to reflecton them. Clapped-out cars and rusty tools can be abandoned forgood on the scrapheap or in a museum, if they are lucky; in culturalstudies, on the other hand, there is always the chance that terms willbe rediscovered and reused without warning, in circumstances im-possible to anticipate in advance.7

There are two reasons for the unpredictable destiny of program-matic terms in cultural studies. First, their names are not chosenaccording to the principle of maximum resistance to association,which would minimize the potential for specialist terminologies tobe misunderstood; second, their use is not controlled by esotericgroups of speakers who have the ability to ensure that the nameschosen for concepts become obligatory in terminological practice.8Rarely do the terms of cultural studies have a fixed place and classi-fication in the binding norms of a specialist language distinct fromeveryday language. In many cases, in fact, there is little to set themapart from ordinary language: they are rich in connotations, par-

6 See, with references to further reading, Palonen (2000).7 See, for example, Martin (1986, 30): Unlike progressive sciences, literary

study has never succeeded in discarding old theories because they are demon-strably less adequate than those that replace them. It is a cumulative disci-pline to which new knowledge is added, but unfashionable ideas that havelong been dormant may at any time prove their relevance to new critical con-cerns or creative methods.

8 Lbbe (2003, 7071).


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Introduction 5ticularly normative implications, and thus have numerous signallingfunctions of an appellative and persuasive nature, some latent, oth-ers less so. The resultant terminological vagueness is usually a mat-ter of regret for critical metatheorists with their interest in explicitdefinitions, but a source of gratification for sociologiststhe veryproximity of ordinary language to the specialist language of culturalstudies makes it possible for wider social interests and ways of thinking to be carried over into cultural studies, and thus helps topreserve the connection between culture and cultural studies.9

The terminological fuzziness of concepts in cultural studies isheuristically significant in the narrower context of scholarly activityas well as in a wider social sense. Given that concepts rarely have afixed taxonomic place in cultural studies, there are many ways inwhich they can be introduced into individual disciplines and evenpassed back and forth between them. In a way reminiscent of theexpectations that accompany the transfer of methodologies,10 it ishoped in every case that the concept concerned will find the sameuse in one field of study as in the other, or at the very least some-how turn out to be useful in its new environment. Transferring con-cepts in this manner, without any certainty regarding the result, isan undertaking as risky as it is alluring, and there are striking exam-ples from the history of criticism to show it.11

The heuristic use of concepts has become increasingly importantwith the growing focus on interdisciplinarity that is now particularlyprominent in the humanities. In cultural studies especially, tradi-tional disciplinary boundaries have been broken down, or at leastsuccessfully ignored, not least under the influence of certain trendsof academic politics whose followers have employed the patheticrhetoric of boundary crossings to good effect.12 Theories and meth-

9 See, with references to further reading, Kindt and Mller (2005, 33941). Seealso Margolin (1981) on different kinds of vagueness of critical concepts.

10 See Danneberg (1989a).11 One example is discussed in Mller (1991b).12 Compare Bal (2002, 6): In the wake of womens studies, cultural studies

has, in my view, been responsible for the absolutely indispensable openingup of the disciplinary structure of the humanities. By challenging methodo-


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6 History of Criticism and the History of a Conceptodologies have attracted far less attention in the interdisciplinarityproject than concepts,13 which have, it should be remembered, beenapproached more in terms of what they can do than anything else.14Two factors are at work in the recent trend for taking the transfer of concepts to extremes: the role of concepts in the humanities hasbeen vastly overestimated,15 and the concept of interdisciplinarity islacking real clarity.16 These are also the most frequent explanationsthat present themselves when interdisciplinary studies fail to arrive

logical dogma, and elitist prejudice and value judgment, cultural studies hasbeen uniquely instrumental in at least making the academic community awareof the conservative nature of its endeavours, if not everywhere forcing it tochange.

13 Bal (2002, 5) describes the main thesis of Travelling Concepts as follows: The thesis on which this book is based, and of which it is both an elaborationand a defence, is extremely simple: namely, interdisciplinarity in the humani-ties, necessary, exciting, serious must seek its heuristic and methodologicalbasis inconcepts rather than inmethods (emphasis in original).

14 As, for example, in Bal (2002, 11): While groping to define, provisionallyand partly, what a particular concept maymean , we gain insight into what itcando (emphasis in original).

15 This is the case in Bal (2002, 3334): In a somewhat grandiose interpreta-tion, one could say that a good concept founds a scientific discipline or field.Thus, to anticipate the subsequent specialized discussions in this book, onemight claim that the articulation of the concept of narrativity within the hu-manities and the social sciences founded the discipline of narratology. This isan inter-discipline precisely because it defines an object, a discursive modal-ity, which is active in many different fields.

16 A one-sided understanding of Foucault has produced a way of thinking inwhich disciplines are frequently treated as social systems that defend theirboundaries as privileges and hold back creative research. Recent historicalstudies have repeatedly demonstrated that this is, to put it mildly, an unac-ceptable generalization that obscures the actual historical situation in the de-velopment of scholarship. See, for example, Anderson and Valente (2002, 2):Put most succinctly: if the tendency is now to associate interdisciplinaritywith freedom, and disciplinarity with constraint, a closer look at the historyof these disciplines shows that the dialectics of agency and determinism, cur-rently distributed across the disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity divide, was atthe heart of disciplinary formation itself. See also Anderson and Valente(2002, 4): It becomes evident, then, that disciplinarity was always interdisci-plinary.


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Introduction 7at a common reference point, a language that would make it pos-sible to explicate concepts drawn from the languages of differentdisciplines. In its place, we find assorted pidgin or creole formsbeing propagated as academic lingua francas.17 It is perfectly ac-ceptable to suspend the normal requirements for explicating criticalconcepts if this is no more than a temporary measure that allowsthem to be transferred successfully. Explication becomes an abso-lute necessity again, however, when it comes to explaining suchsuccesses, if not before.

Our study begins by considering the genesis of the implied authorconcept, which, as noted above, first acquired its full terminologicalsignificance in BoothsRhetoric of Fiction.Our analysis places theemergence of the concept in both a general historical context and amore specific epistemological one. Booths underlying ethical ori-entation and close connections with the programme of the Chicagoschool of criticism will have an importance place in the discussion,as will the dominant position of the New Criticism in the academicstudy of literature in America. The New Criticism was based onideas that were aesthetically specific but epistemologically indis-tinct. The New Critics saw the literary text as the sole legitimateframe of reference for work in literary studies, and unceremoniouslydismissed as fallacious any attempt to take context, particularly aworks author and recipients, into consideration.

Our reconstruction of the concepts introduction is intended toidentify as precisely as possible the specific contextual conditionsagainst the background of which it took shape, and also to deter-mine as clearly as possible the meaning that Booth himself associ-ated with it. Looking briefly ahead to the conclusion of our analysis,we find that Booth did not createthe implied author concept inThe Rhetoric of Fiction but actually introduced a cover term for severalconcepts or variants of a single concept.The Rhetoric of Fiction,that is to say, leaves open the question of whether the implied au-

17 This is the case with respect to the rhetorical turn in Thompson Klein (1996,68); for criticism of this position, see Veit-Brause (2000, 1529).


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8 History of Criticism and the History of a Conceptthor is (1) an intentional product of the author in or qua the work or(2) an inference made by the recipient about the author on the basisof the work. In the first case, a further question is left open, that of whether the implied author represents a faithful or distorted imageof the real author. It is impossible to say for certain which of theseuses Booth intended or whether he actually believed that they wereall possible at once and did not feel obliged to distinguish betweenthem in any detail. However, we can be more precise about thefunction the implied author had in the approach to literature Boothenvisaged. The term originated as a compromiseit enabled him togive his approach a rhetorical foundation in which author and readerconstitute the main frames of reference without openly falling foulof the fallacies denounced by the New Criticism in the process. Irre-spective of whether the basic features of this reconstruction are cor-rect, it remains a fact that all the variants of the concept to which werefer have been associated with the implied author in the subsequentreception of Booths work.

Like the meaning of the term itself, the theoretical status of theimplied author is not clear inThe Rhetoric of Fiction.Was the im-plied author intended to be the central concept in a theory of inter-pretation, the defining entity to be sought for when interpreting atext? Or was it part of a quasi-empirical theory of reception, a con-struct that Booth thought was necessarily employed by every readerwhen dealing with texts? The ambiguity of the term and the theoryof which it was a part shows that the concept had a range of poten-tial meanings that extended far beyond the ways in which it wasactually used by Booth. A crucial factor in shaping subsequent re-sponses to the implied author was the fact that the concept compliedwith the anti-contextualism of the New Criticism on the one hand,while being open to a multiplicity of new empirical applications and

theoretical generalizations on the other. Use of the term was notrestricted to a particular approach. It was also lacking in clarity andcould be put into operation in any number of ways. Another factorat least equally important in shaping reception of the concept was,as we shall show with reference to its primary reception in theUnited States, the need to refresh the interpretive conventions and


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Introduction 9practice of the New Criticism without directly questioning itsnorms, let alone breaking them, something that did not happen untilthe reception of structuralism and poststructuralism began to takeeffect.18

After presenting a reconstruction of the context in which the con-cept took shape in the first chapter of our study, we turn in the sec-ond to reception of the implied author in the academic study of literature.19 Although we are able to suggest a number of reasons forthe readiness with which American academics made use of the con-cept, its international reception is such a vast field that we cannotclaim any authority when it comes to explaining the influences atwork here. Even so, it is clear if nothing else that international re-ception of the implied author has exploited the wide range of appli-cations to which the concept can lend itself. Booth himself simplypostulated that it plays an important role in literary communication;he neither specified the theoretical framework in which the impliedauthor was to be used nor provided a methodology for identifying itin individual cases.

It was the academic study of literature in Europe that respondedto the concept of the implied author most quickly and used it mostwidely. Long-term factors are bound to have been influential in thisrespect. In a climate in which historicism and positivism were un-popular, explaining works of art in terms of how they came intobeing had become discredited among European academics studyingliterature at the end of the nineteenth century. Interest in the author,his biography, and what he intended to express was dismissed asbiographism or psychologism and banished from literary theory (butnever with any consistency from actual interpretive practice). Theliterary work of art was to be interpreted on its own terms as a self-contained whole, a text without context. This normative definition

of the nature of works of art persisted, not without criticism,throughout the twentieth century, gaining new strength thanks to

18 See Berman (1988).19 Although we cannot provide a detailed discussion of use of the implied au-

thor in other areas of cultural studies, we shall refer occasionally to its rolebeyond the study of literature when it is helpful to do so.


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10 History of Criticism and the History of a Conceptstructuralism and poststructuralism. Only in the most recent past,with the appearance of contextualist literary theories, has the authorbegun attracting attention in interpretation again.20 The upshot of allthis is that the energetic response to the implied author in Europeanliterary studies would seem to have been driven by the followingfeature of the concept: it allows us to speak of author-functions thatstem from the real author without actually referring to the latter inthe process.

The reception of the implied author is so diverse that it would nothave been practical for us to trace the various lines of developmentchronologically, let alone aspire to cover every single piece of evi-dence. Instead, we have decided to take a typological approach toanalysing the reception of the conceptto provide an overview of its most common typical uses and in the process identify featuresthat may be of use when explicating it. In doing so, we have beenguided by the following questions: in what theoretical or practicalcontexts is the concept discussed and employed; is it analysed infurther detail or defined, and if so, how; and what, if any, argumentsare advanced for or against its use? Our study will show that thereare two dominant contexts in which the implied author is men-tioned: interpretive contexts and descriptive ones. In the latter, theconcept is almost always rejected. In the former, two subgroups of usage can be identified. The first covers use of the implied author ininterpretation theory, the second its use in relation to interpretationin practice. The interpretation theory context has hosted a (some-times sporadic) discussion about the significance of the impliedauthor concept. This debate has yet to reach a tangible conclusion,not least because there is no theoretical framework available fordiscussing the structure of approaches to interpretation in the aca-demic study of literature.21 The implied author has been embraced

most often in relation to interpretive practice, with supporters of normative interpretation in all its forms making use of the conceptin many diverse situations. Our findings in this area will be pre-

20 On this, see the references in note 3 above.21 See Danneberg and Mller (1981, 1984a, 1984b), Stout (1982, 1986), Her-

mern (1983), Danneberg (1999), and Strube (1993, 2000).


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Introduction 11sented in full below; for the present, it is sufficient to note that thedominant tendency in use of the concept is to assume, though this israrely stated explicitly, that we can use it to arrive at the meaning of a literary text without leaving the level of description and withoutsetting out a theory and methodology for working out what (or who)the implied author actually is in any given case.

We bring the second chapter of our study to a close by consider-ing a series of concepts that have been suggested as alternatives tothe implied author. Even if they do not retain the term implied au-thor, they nonetheless preserve certain key aspects that lie at theheart of the concept. There are several reasons why alternative con-cepts of this kind have been introduced. For a start, Booths impliedauthor has met with a not inconsiderable amount of criticism andacquired a problematic legacy that some writers have sought tosidestep by giving the concept a new name. Others have been un-happy with its connotations; some, for example, believe that theimplied author as Booth understood it was still too intentionalistic,that it bore too many traces of a real author who, because implied,was still present in the text. It was thought that choosing an alterna-tive term would help to rectify this shortcoming. Finally, the 1970ssaw a reorientation of literary theory in the light of which some feltit necessary to lift Booths concept out of the rhetorical haze of the1960s and update its image to fit the contemporary climate. Oneway of doing this was to reformulate the concept in the context of the new literary theories that were appearing, such as reception the-ory or the aesthetics of reception, or analyses of literary communi-cation.

Our study does not consider the motives behind the introductionof new names for the implied author in further detail. Instead, weconfine ourselves to taking a closer look at the three alternative con-

cepts that are encountered most frequently: Umberto Ecos ModelAuthor, Wolf Schmids abstract author, and Wolfgang Isers im-plied reader. In doing so, we hope to determine for each alternative(1) the theoretical context in which it was introduced, (2) what as-pects of the implied author it abandoned and what aspects it re-


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12 History of Criticism and the History of a Concepttained, and finally (3) whether it managed to steer clear of the theo-retical anomalies associated with the implied author concept itself.

Our treatment of the origins and history of the implied authorconcept and some of the alternative names suggested for it results inthe following conclusion: the implied author is one of those con-ceptsnot, one suspects, all that uncommon in the humanitiesthat have managed to survive intact despite their conceptual anoma-lies and repeated calls that they be abolished or replaced. This stateof affairs should not, however, give rise to resignation; instead, webelieve, it strengthens the case for making a committed effort to ex-plicate the concept. We would suggest that previous proposals forabolishing or replacing the implied author have failed to appreciatethe true complexity of the problems posed by the concept. It is ourthesis that the implied author concept consists of components thatreflect correct intuitions in and of themselves, but conflict with oneanother when combined together in a single concept. A sensible ex-plication, therefore, must not try to explicate the concept as thecontradictory whole that it is, but should seek instead to elucidate itsindividual components separately from one another in order to iden-tify what, if any, possible explications for them emerge. The objec-tive of this clarification process is to determine whether the indi-vidually correct intuitions behind the components of the impliedauthor concept can be expressed in a way that does not result in acontradiction. We subject two ways of modelling the implied authorto such an analysis: the idea that it be treated as a participant incommunication on the one hand, the idea that it be treated as a subject to which meaning can attributed on the other. Like most previ-ous research, we come to the conclusion that the implied authorcannot be understood as a participant in communication. The treat-ment of the implied author as a subject identified with a works

meaning, however, is much harder to assessthe context of inter-pretation theory sees a whole range of possibilities unfold for bring-ing the implied author into play as a subject in which meaning canbe seen to originate. Nonetheless, all ways of using the implied au-thor in this manner do have something in common. They go furtherthan employing the concept to describe literary workstheir ulti-


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Introduction 13mate aim is to ascertain the basic meaning of literary works. Anobjective of this kind can be properly discussed only in the contextof theories about the interpretation of literature; it turns out that twocompletely different concepts of work meaning can be associatedwith the implied author, one intentionalistic, the other non-intentio-nalistic. Our explication of the two most frequent non-intentio-nalistic understandings of the implied author, the pragmatist andconventionalist ones, shows that they do not fulfil the basic require-ments that a convincing clarification of the concept should meet.

After discussing the non-intentionalistic idea of the implied au-thor, we move on to consider two variants of its intentionalisticcounterpart. In the process, we refer to the current state of discus-sion regarding intentionalistic theories of interpreting literary texts.We find that the perspective of hypothetical intentionalism candefinitely be used to arrive at a more precise conception of the im-plied author. We believe, however, that it is more sensible to referto this narrower and more clear-cut concept as the hypothetical orpostulated author. Actual intentionalism, on the other hand, as-cribes the meaning of literary texts directly to their empirical au-thors, and therefore does not need an additional entity such as theimplied author to which meaning can be attributed.

The conclusion of our book can be summarized as follows: it ispossible to provide an effective explication of the implied author,which is then better referred to as the hypothetical or postulatedauthor; the misleading term implied author, and the impreciseconcept behind it, on the other hand, can be safely put aside.


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Part One

Reconstructing the Concepts History


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1 Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics:

The Origins of the Implied Author Concept

Surprisingly little attention has been given to the origins of the im-plied author in previous work on the concept. There are few studiesof any substance that fail to inform us that the concept was intro-duced in a book entitled The Rhetoric of Fiction by an Americanliterary theorist called Wayne C. Booth. 1 Rarely, however, is thisinformation accompanied by a more detailed treatment of the con-text in which concept was put forward, its background, and the aimsattached to it. 2 It can, perhaps, be fairly argued that the history of aconcept does not tell us how it should be defined and what use ithas, and this may go some way towards justifying the lack of a de-tailed appraisal of the context in which the implied author origi-nated. Even so, this omission has had a considerable effect on dis-cussion of the implied author, particularly on the quality of the sug-gestions put forward for retaining or rejecting, explicating or re-placing it.

For this reason, we shall use the coming pages to present a care-ful reconstruction of how the implied author came into being. Thisreconstruction has two parts. In the first (1.1), we consider a crucialinfluence on Booths approach to li terary theory during the 1950sthe views on metatheory and the academic study of literature heldby a group now known as the Chicago school of criticism. 3 Somegeneral remarks on Booths plan for a rhetoric of epic texts provide

1 Detailed consideration will show that this is something of an oversimplifica-tion in both historical and systematic respects (see 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 below).

2 The initial reviews of The Rhetoric of Fiction from 1961 to 1966 are anexception (see 2.1.1 below).

3 Here and in what follows, we use the term school solely for descriptive pur-poses rather than as a theoretical concept relating to the study of academichistory (on this, see Kindt and Mller 2005, 33639).


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The Origins of the Impli ed Author Concept18

the starting point for the next stage of our analysis (1.2), in whichwe undertake a detailed study of how Booth introduced the conceptof the implied author in his Rhetoric of Fiction of 1961 and how hedefended it, with minor modifications, in various pieces of workover the forty years that preceded the writing of this book.

1.1 The Chicago School of Criticism

1.1.1 The Criti cal Turn in the Academic Studyof Literature in North America

Growing dissatisfaction with the situation in literature departmentsbecame increasingly apparent at universities in the United Statesduring the 1930s. This discontent was accompanied by calls for thedepartments to move forward in a fundamentally new direction. Nu-

merous proposals, lectures, and articles demanded that the academicstudy of literature finally break away from the pursuit of history,around which it had been oriented since the nineteenth century, andfollow the path of literary criticism into the future. It was no longerenough, it was said, for academics in this field to be historians witha special interest in the development of literature; instead, theyshould see themselves first and foremost as critics responsible foranalysing and assessing it. This was the line that, in any number ofvariations, was taken when promoting a position captured program-matically in the pointed language of John Livingston Lowes, pre-sident of the Modern Language Association, when he wrote in 1933that the ultimate end of our research is criticism .4

The call for a critical turn was prompted by the decline in statusthat had been affecting the literature-related disciplines since theturn of the century. It was customary for those working in literature

4 Lowes (1933, 1405; emphasis in original).


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level education remodelled along the lines of the European univer-sities. This process of change began in the second half of the nine-teenth century, when it was decided that the college system, theparadigmatic institutional framework since higher education firstdeveloped in the United States around 1700, was unable to meet thecomplex demands made of third-level education in a modern indus-trialized society. The curricula were outmoded and the number ofgraduates produced was too low. 6 The main organizational featureof the reforms lay in the replacement of the rigid system of classgroups by a more flexible system of courses and seminars. 7 As faras the curriculum was concerned, the changes led to the introduc-tion of an approach that would become known as vocationalism.The traditional colleges aimed not to qualify students for particularcareers but to provide them with a general schooling in criticalthinking. Thus, the pursuit of learning for its own sake lay at theheart of their teaching, even if they usually sought to impart thenecessary skills on the basis of specific canonical material such asthe classical languages of Greek and Latin. 8 The reformed universi-ties, on the other hand, were concerned more with imparting fixedcontent than with encouraging learning per se . The material contentin question was meant to have the benefit of being of practical userather than of traditional value. 9 The gradual transformation of thecolleges turned out to provide the basis for major advances in thenatural sciences, but it had a number of problematic consequences

6 For general treatments of the history of the university in North America, seeRudolph (1962), Graff (1987), and Brubacher and Rudy (1997).

7 See here Graff (1987, 2728). The establishment of the seminar system inGerman third-level education is described in vom Brocke (1999).

8 Geiger (1993, 23637) summarizes the educational ideal behind the old-timecollege as fol lows: According to the accepted contemporary doctrines of f ac-ulty psychology, the chief aim of the college training was to insti l mentaldisciplinethe capacity to learn. This capacity was to be mastered, i t wasbelieved, by learning the classical languages, essentially by rote. Such learn-ing was conducted and monitored through classroom recitations. Knowledgeunder this system was not the end of education but the means.

9 See Brubacher and Rudy (1997).


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cism; they held the most important professorial chairs and ran theleading journals.

Naturally, the more successful the literary critics were in assert-ing their presence in the field, the clearer it became that there wereconsiderable differences among them regarding the specific shapethat they expected the new approach to literary works to take. Inmany cases, the supporters of the critical turn were united simply bytheir rejection of the study of literature as it was at the beginning ofthe century, not by a shared concept of literary criticism. 13 With theNew Criticism, it is true, a criticism-based programme becamedominant in literature departments soon after the end of the war, butthe New Critics were continually forced to defend their positionagainst the programmes of competing approaches, and they finally,if slowly, began to lose their influence as a disciplinary force in the1970s. 14

1.1.2 The Chicago Critics: Pluralism and Aristoteli anism

The most ambitious alternative to the New Criticism to appear inthe study of literature during the decades following the critical turnoriginated in a small circle of intellectuals involved in the humani-ties and social studies in Chicago. They had been meeting at thesuggestion of a literature professor called Ronald S. Crane since theearly 1930s and soon became known as the Chicago group or theChicago school of criticism. 15 Apart from Crane himself, the mostregular participants at the circle s meetings included Richard

13 An overvi ew of the various currents in the academic study of literature inNorth America during the 1940s and 1950s can be found in, for example,Wellek (1956, 5988), Sutton (1963, 63218), Webster (1979, 95206),Goldsmith (1979, 10245), Graff (1987, 183243), and Leitch (1988, 1147).

14 On the New Criticism, see in general Abrams (1998) and Wenzel (2001).15 On the Chicago Critics, see McKeon (1982), Shereen (1988), and Schneider

(1994). For an analysis of Cranes cri tical approach, see also Dietrichson(1963).


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Poetics, Rhetoric, and Ethics 23

McKeon, philosopher, and Elder Olson, lyric poet, dramatist, andliterary theorist. At the heart of their discussions lay the exchange ofideas about the situation of and future perspectives for the NorthAmerican universities and their humanities departments. 16

Cranes essay History versus Criticism in the Study of Litera-ture gave a first taste of the ideas developing in the discussions ofthe Chicago circle. 17 It was published in the English Journal in1935 and immediately attracted considerable interest. However, al-though this was the first text to draw attention to the Chicago criticsand their suggestions for reforming literature departments, it is er-roneous to treat it as some kind of charter establishing the Chicagoschool of criticism there and then. 18 At the time, only those in theknow could see that the essay held the key to many of the ideasabout theoretically and institutionally transforming the humanitiesthat would take shape in the publications and reforms of the Chi-cago critics in the coming decades. 19 For those contemporaries whodid not take part in the Chicago meetings, however, Crane s essaystood out only in terms of certain details, if that; 20 it was merely oneof many statements in favour of replacing the narrow historical ap-proach to the study of literature with a new emphasis on literarycriticism. Crane did indeed provide an unusually careful analysis ofthe distinction between the historical reconstructions that were thework of scholars and the aesthetic evaluations with which critics

16 See the detailed reconstruction in Schneider (1994, 7880).17 Crane (1935).18 As is the case in, for example, Corman (1994, 143).19 See Schneider (1994, 7893). The presence of specific concrete ideas behind

Cranes essay is evident in a number of passages. See, for example, Crane(1935, 4) on the choice between the historical approach and that of literarycriticism in the academic study of literature: The answer we give to thisquestion will determine not only the view we take of the proper place andfunction of our departments in the university, but also, to a greater or lesserextent, the policy we pursue with respect to courses and appointments, ex-aminations and dissertations, and ultimately perhaps the orientation of re-search.

20 Well ek (1956, 64) captures this point when he reports that the article did notcommit itself to any specif ic critical method .


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were concerned. His reading of the overall situation in the academicstudy of literature, however, concurred with general opinion in thefield:

it cannot be denied that literary history has occupied too privileged aplace, especially during recent years. However vigorously on occasion wemay have professed our allegiance to criticism, it has not been criticism buthistory to which we have devoted our really serious energy and thought. Re-search has been our watchword, and with results we need not be ashamed of;but for the most part we have narrowed the meaning of the term until it hascome to stand, not broadly for responsible and original inquiries of all sorts,but specifically for inquiries among documents pursued for strictly historicalends. Our teaching meantime has taken a similar course. 21

Like all the other calls for a critical turn in the study of literature,Cranes essay basically proposed a thoroughgoing revision in ourdepartments of literature, 22 calling for the predominant approach toliterature, the historical one, to be replaced by that of literary criti-cism.

Just how well Crane s essay fitted into the general trend of workadvocating such a reorientation can be seen from the enthusiasmwith which the piece was received by many of the literary critics

who were later, in the 1950s, to be involved in bitter arguments withthe Chicago school about the path that should be followed in theacademic study of literature. In hindsight it is remarkable to findsubsequent advocates of the New Criticism such as John C. Ransomand William K. Wimsatt welcoming History versus Criticism in theStudy of Literature as a groundbreaking contribution to their pro-

ject of converting the study of literature to literary criticism. Ran-som, whose 1941 monograph The New Cr iti cism established him asa central figure in the movement of the same name, 23 actuallyseemed convinced in 1938 that Cranes essay would pave the wayfor the necessary reorientation of l iterature departments: At theUniversity of Chicago Professor Crane, with some others, is put-

21 Crane (1935, 2021).22 Crane (1935, 22).23 Ransom (1941).


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ting the revolution into effect . 24 And Wimsatt, referring to the Chi-cago critics in 1954, looked back with regret to the common groundthat Crane s piece of two decades earlier had seemed to establish. Inretrospect, History versus Criticism seemed to him to be a revo-lutionary document that made a decisive contribution to a victoryfor criticism in the academic study of l iterature. 25

Only gradually, with the publications that emerged from the Chi-cago group in the 1940s, did it become clear just how little the Chi-cago critics shared with the New Critics and a host of other contem-porary movements in the academic study of literature. 26 The com-mon ground consisted of little more than a shared desire to establishliterary criticism in academia. Once Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern was published in 1952, 27 there could no longer be anyreasonable doubt that Crane s circle had its own very specific ideasabout how aesthetics was to replace historiography as the concep-tual foundation on which the study of literature was based. The col-lection of essays in Cri tics and Criti cism made it unmistakably clearthat a distinctive programme had taken shape at the University ofChicago. 28 In the book, Crane, McKeon, Olson, Norman Maclean,Bernard Weinberg, and William R. Keast set out the epistemologi-cal foundations, object of study, and methodological procedures thatthey felt should be adopted in the academic study of literature. Inaddition, many contributions to the collection sought to place theprogramme behind it in a historical and contemporary context, torelate it to how literature had been analysed in the past and to thecompeting approaches of the present respectively.

Cri tics and Criti cism was the Chicago school s response to theloss of standing experienced by the disciplines of the humanities

24 Ransom (1938, 456).25 Wimsatt (1954b, 41).26 See in particular Crane et al. (1942) and Crane (1947/48).27 Crane et al. (1952). In the shortened version of the book publi shed in 1957

(Crane et al. 1957), which contained only eight of the original twenty contri-butions, the subtitle Ancient and Modern was replaced by Essays inMethod .

28 This is shown by the reactions to the anthology (see 1.1.3 below).


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since the turn of the century. As Crane highlighted in his introduc-tion to the book, one concern of the pieces in this Chicago Mani-festo was the question of how the humanities might be able to playa more influential role in the culture and action of the contemporaryworld.29 The answer put forward by the Chicago critics had twokey components, one relating to metatheory and expressed in a plu-ralistic openness towards competing programmes in the text-baseddisciplines, and one concerning the study of literature itself andconsisting of an Aristotelian model for analysing literary texts. 30

Metatheoretical Plural ism

If, borrowing from Kenneth Burke, we describe the Chicago criticsas neo-Aristotelians or neo-Aristotelian literary critics, 31 we run therisk of forgetting that the circle around Crane and McKeon wasneither solely nor primarily concerned with putting forward a speci-fic concrete form of literary criticism. 32 Since the early 1930s, the

Chicago critics had actually attached greater significance to syste-matic reflection on the place, possibilities, and boundaries of thehumanities. Their concept of literary analysis was subsequently in-tended to provide an example of what this kind of reflection could

29 Crane (1952a, 2); see also Sprinker (1985, 193). The term Chicago Mani-festo was fi rst used by Johnson (1953a; 1953b). On this essay, see Crane(1953b); on the idea of a Chicago manifesto itself, see Crane (1957, vi).

30 See Kindt and Mller (2005, 33642) on the concept of the historiography ofacademic scholarship on which the following discussion is based.

31 See Burke (1943).32 Lohner (1967), for example, falls foul of this trap in his otherwise accom-

plished portrayal of the Chicago school. Burke himself cannot be accused ofmaking a similar mistake. The descriptions he suggested were based solelyon knowledge of Crane et al. (1942); the Chicago school s work on the his-tory and theory of the humanities did not appear until the late 1940s, the1950s and 1960s (see, for example, Crane 1947/48, 1952a, McKeon 1952a,and Olson 1952, 1966).


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believed, could a position of high ground be obtained amid the dis-putes unfolding in the humanities. Olson restated this view in 1966when he wrote that examination of the philosophic foundations ofcriticism was requisite for the proper development of the theory ofthe arts . 36

The supporters of the Chicago school were not content, as manyothers in the humanities were, with merely proposing that the his-torically-oriented text-based literary disciplines be given a philoso-phical foundation. In a series of publications, they went a step fur-ther and set about making their hopes a reality. Accordingly, in theirsearch for insight into the nature of assertions and the constructionof theories in the humanities, the Chicago critics not only recon-structed the development of poetics and criticism since the classicalperiod; 37 they also analysed the dominant positions in the academicstudy of literature in North America after 1900. 38 Their historicalstudies and systematic reflection led them to appraise the ap-proaches of literary criticism in a way that differed considerablyfrom the dominant ideas of the time. Again and again, Crane and hisChicago supporters fired new salvos questioning prevailing aca-demic views about the coexistence of different approaches to inter-pretation in the study of literature. Their criticism was directed bothat attempts to put an end to such competition by settling on a singlemode of interpretation, 39 and at the idea that the various approachesof the literary disciplines should be seen as complementing one an-other in the search for a comprehensive explanation of literaryworks. 40 Rejecting such positions, the Chicago critics advocated an

36 Olson (1966, 207).37 See, for example, McKeon (1952a, 1952b) or Crane (1967).38 See, for example, Crane et al. (1942), Crane (1947/48, 1953a), or Olson

(1966).39 The Chicago school believed this was one of the aims pursued in most pro-

grammes in the academic study of literature in the first half of the twentiethcentury: Ransoms approach, Brookss position, the New Criticism of Wim-satt and Beardsley, the theory of Wellek and Warren, and so on.

40 The Chicago cri tics saw such ideas in, for example, Richard P. Blackmur sattempt to mediate between the New Critics and their opponents. See Black-mur (1951) and Crane (1952a, 6; 1953a, 9).


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alternative stance that Crane described as a plurali sti c and instru-mentalist view of criticism . 41

The representatives of the Chicago school believed that it wasneither possible nor desirable to remove pluralism from the aca-demic study of literatureit was perfectly clear, they felt, thatcompeting ways of analysing and interpreting literary texts could beequally valid and relevant. The ideas on which the resultant Chi-cago pluralism was based can be summarized very briefly as fol-lows. The practical study of literature always depends on the selec-tion of a particular theoretical approach, a choice that can be madeexplicitly or implicitly. The selection process is composed of twomain decisions: first, specifying a universe of discourse , a vocabu-lary which determines the object of study and the key questionsasked about it; and second, choosing a system of inference to useas a source of orientation, a set of procedures and rules to followwhen examining the object of study. 42 It is impossible to find rea-sons that necessitate the choices made on a particular occasion: theprogramme of literary theory that is chosen can be justified only interms of the aims being pursued in each case. 43

For the Chicago critics, then, pluralism in the academic study ofliterature results from the fact that statements made about literaryworks in this context can claim only relative validity, nothing more.There are two reasons for this: such statements are dependent firston the approach chosen and second on the overarching objectives ineach particular case. Crane summarized this view succinctly in the

41 Crane (1952a, 9).42 See Olson (1966, 20910). The form of literary theory employedthe ap-

proach usedwas thus understood, in brief, as a function of i ts subject mat-ter and of the dialectic, i.e., system of inference, exerted upon that subjectmatter (Olson 1952, 548).

43 The work of the Chicago critics does not contain a fixed term for the com-plexes of vocabulary and methodology that we refer to as approaches here.Most frequently, with reference to the New Criticism or marxist literary criti-cism, say, the Chicago critics encounter the words frameworks (see, forexample, Crane 1953a, 13) or methods (see, for example, Crane 1952a, 8).On the disadvantages of this use of the term method , as commonplace as itis misleading, see Titzmann (1977, 38182) or Mller (1984, 90).


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1953 Alexander Lectures, published in his Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry : There is a strict relativity, in criti-cism, not only of statements and questions to frameworks but offrameworks to ends, that is, to the different kinds of knowledgeabout poetry we may happen at one time or another or for one oranother reason, to want. 44

In order to avoid misunderstandings, Crane and his Chicago sup-porters were constantly concerned that their reflections on the aca-demic study of literature should make clear the difference betweentheir metatheoretical ideas and other approaches to pluralism in thefield. In this respect, it was most important for them to point outthat assuming different forms of literary analysis to be relative didnot mean subscribing to an unconstrained relativismtheir plural-ism was not to be confused with, to borrow one of Booth s formu-lations, a live-and-let-l ive eclecticism . 45 For the Chicago critics,seeing the academic study of literature as a collection of distinctand more or less incommensurable frameworks in no wayamounted to claiming that it was impossible to subject interpreta-tions and theories of interpretation to criticism. 46 Quite the opposite,they said: only by reconstructing, as they did, the underlying as-sumptions of literary analyses can we see how we should proceedwhen discussing the meaning of a text or approaches to textual in-terpretation. In the preface to the 1957 edition of Critics und Criti- cism , Crane tried again to make clear what the Chicago school cer-tainly did not mean when it referred to pluralism:

It does not imply that one cannot compare the results obtained in a givenmethod (for instance, that of Plato) with the results obtained in another (forinstance, that of Aristotle); or that one can never appeal beyond a criti cs ver-sion of the literary facts to the facts themselves; or that one has to take allmethods critics have used at face value, with no possibility of saying thatsome are more comprehensive than others or more appropriate to the knownfacts of literature and li terary history. There is a great difference between plu-

44 Crane (1953a, 27).45 Booth (1967, xx). For a more detailed analysis of the Chicago plurali sm,

concentrati ng on Crane, see Booth (1979, 3997).46 Crane (1953a, 13).


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rali sm and relativism , and also between pluralism and merely amiable tol-erance of half-truths, bad reasonings, and preposterous interpretations. 47

The efforts of the Chicago critics to encourage a more balanced re-sponse to their metatheoretical positions on the study of literature,however, met with little success. 48

Ari stoteli an Cr iti cism

The circle around Crane and McKeon during the 1930s and 1940swas united not just in its treatment of the way the humanities oper-ated but also in its efforts to develop its own approach to textualanalysis. Studies of textual genesis and exercises in textual criticismhad become the ends rather than the means for mainstream aca-demics studying literature in North America at the beginning of thetwentieth century. The Chicago critics, on the other hand, arguedfor a mode of literary analysis in which the questions posed andmethods followed were based on Aristotle s philosophical works,

mainly the Poetics, but also other texts. 49 The Chicago school didnot believe that the resultant reorientation of the study of literaturewould show them the right way of understanding literary texts.Rather, in accordance with their ideas on the nature of their disci-pline, they believed that adopting an Aristotelian view of literaturerepresented a strictly pragmatic and nonexclusive commitment . 50

The Chicago critics justified the adoption of this theoretical pro-gramme by arguing that making recourse to Aristotle allowed themto develop a comprehensive framework for textual analysis, one thatcould also be linked to many other areas in which theories werebeing developed in the academic study of literature. In addition,

47 Crane (1957, ivv).48 See 1.1.3 below.49 See Sprinker (1985, 19697) on dif ferences between the ideas of Crane on

the one hand and McKeon and Olson on the other.50 Crane (1952a, 1213).


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they felt that an Aristotelian approach helped to highlight aspects ofliterary works that otherwise tended to be neglected in the study ofliterature. 51

In the following pages, we shall describe in outline the pro-gramme pursued by the Chicago school of criticism, reconstructing(1) the fundamental assumptions made about the object of study inthis approach and (2) the central ideas held about the methodologywith which it should be examined.

(1) Drawing on Aristotle, the Chicago critics took as their start-ing point a concept of literature that differed significantly from theother concepts that were current in the 1940s and 1950s. The schol-ars around Crane believed that literature had been widely seen asone of many modes of discourse since late antiquity, and that sucha view had been the predominant one from romanticism onwards;they set themselves apart from this position by calling for literarytexts to be understood as a special class of made objects that areanalyzable by analogy with natural things and artifacts . 52 Thismodification of the way in which the study of literature understandsits object may seem rather unspectacular at first sight; for the Chi-cago critics, however, it amounted to nothing less than a funda-mental reorientation of how we go about dealing with literature. Ifliterature is treated as a form of speech, they believed, there is adanger that literary texts will be seen simply as illustrative examplesof literariness. This in turn can mean that analysts will be content topick out the aspects of a text that allow it to be assigned to this formof discourse and leave it at that. The Chicago critics felt that thisapproach to literary texts was typical of the work of the New Criti-cism; Kenneth Burke concisely described it as follows in 1943:

One begins by expounding some general philosophic or metaphysical or psy-chological frame. Next one treats poetry in general as a representative aspect

of this frame. And finally one treats specific poems as individual instances of

51 See Crane (1952a, 13), McKeon (1952a, 1952b), and Olson (1952, 1966).52 Crane (1952a, 1314).


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vessels of poetry. The critic thus employs what we might call a process ofnarrowing down. 53

The Chicago critics saw their concept of literature as a means ofguarding against the risk of treating literary texts in this way. If lit-erature is conceived of as a class of objects rather than a form ofspeech, they felt, critics will no longer be able to get away with fo-cusing solely on how a certain kind of discourse is manifested in theindividual literary works they study. Instead, the Chicago criticssuggested, treating texts as objects means viewing them as artisticwholes whose composition is governed by a principle that should beelucidated by analysing their construction and component parts.Thus, the Chicago critics used their definition of literature as thebasis on which they advocated a form of literary criticism thatwould examine individual works in particular rather than literaturein general. For Crane, the Aristotelian orientation produced a shiftfrom a criticism of poetry to a criticism of poems , 54 for in hiseyes it led to an analysis of texts

which takes as its starting point the peculiar natures of artistic wholes theirwriters were engaged in constructing and which attempts to explain and ap-

preciate their parts, and the relations these bear to one another, as poeticallynecessary or desirable consequences of the wri ters commitment to certainkinds of poetic structures and effects rather than others. 55

The academic study of literature should, as the Chicago critics un-derstood it, aim to examine literary works as concrete artisticwholes, and should do so with the aim of identifying the elements,structure, and functioning of such wholes. The Chicago school, inother words, advocated the pursuit of historically appropriate recon-structions of literary texts.

(2) Aristotelian thought also provided the basis for the meth-odological ideas held by the representatives of the Chicago circle.The Chicago critics were all agreed that the analysis of literary textsshould finally become an inductive rather than a deductive proce-

53 Burke (1943, 85).54 See above all Crane (1947/48).55 Crane (1952a, 15). See also the reconstruction in Sprinker (1985, 19596).


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dure. Instead of the top-down interpretation that had become thedominant method in the wake of the New Criticism, they wanted tosee a bottom-up mode of analysis introduced so that individualworks could be understood on the basis of their construction. 56 Onlyby putting this plan into practice, they believed, would it be possibleto make a true reality of the aim, which the New Critics set them-selves but did not achieve, of elucidating works from a consistentlytext-internal perspective. Responding in 1948 to The Well-Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks, 57 Crane provided the following brief expla-nation of the far-reaching methodological implications that he sawin the Chicago critics idea of the literary text:

To reconstruct criticism in this way would obviously be to reverse the wholetendency of critical reasoning as practiced by the new critics. It would be tosubstitute the matter-of-fact and concrete for the abstract; the a posteriori forthe a priori; the argument from immediately sensible poetic effects to theirproximate poetic causes for the argument from remote and nonpoetic causesto only general and common poetic effects. It would be, in one word, to studypoems as complete wholes possessed of distinctive emotional powers ratherthan merely the materials and devices of poems in a context of extrapoeticconsiderations. 58

Within the Chicago school itself, however, little attention was givento the exact form that the inductive analysis of literary texts shouldtake. The plentiful output of the Chicago critics contains only scat-tered pointers to the methods and tools that might be used for ex-amining individual literary wholes and identifying the ideas under-lying their composition. Model interpretations of individual literaryworks are even more uncommon. Taken together, however, the iso-lated remarks and occasional case studies do show that the Chicagoschool was widely agreed regarding the exact way in which textualanalysis should proceed.

The methodological position of the circle around Crane wascharacterized by two key factors. First, textual analysis was seen as

56 See Crane et al. (1942) for an early example of this; see also the remarks inBurke (1943).

57 Brooks (1947).58 Crane (1947/48, 245).


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an interplay of empirical observation and generic supposition.Analysis was meant, in other words, to take the component parts ofa work and use them to suggest which genre the work belonged to,so as to obtain against the background of this genre assignment amore precise picture of the component parts and the relations be-tween them. The composition of a work and the principle behind itwere to be determined by means of a corresponding procedure,sometimes by repeating it several times. 59

Second, the theory of causality that Aristotle developed in thePhysics and applied in other writings, 60 such as the Poetics ,61 wascentral to the way in which such analyses were envisaged. The ideawas that the special quality of a literary work could be brought outby seeking to identify, with reference to transhistorical genre mod-els, its causa materialis , causa for malis , causa efficiens , and causa finalis .62 Consequently, the academic study of literature was to de-termine the parts of which a work consisted, the way in which itwas put together, the intentions it sought to realize, and the effects itaimed to achieve. Importantly, the question of a text s causa efficiens and causa finalis was not be understood as one involving theauthor s intentions and the effect the text had on the recipient. Boththe internal causes (the causae intresecus ) and the external causes(the causae extrasecus ) of a literary work were to be determined

59 A careful reconstruction of this process can be found in Richter (1982, 34 37). Despite their prolific work on the history of the humanities, the Chicagocritics do not seem to have noticed the parallels between their positions andhermeneutic thought of the nineteenth century such as the approaches ofFriedrich Schleiermacher or August Boeckh.

60 See Aristotl e, Physics (194ab) and the overview in Rapp (2001, 12730).61 This, at least, was the way in which the Chicago critics understood Aristotles

poetics. See, for example, Olson (1952, 549): Aristotl e employs dif feren-ti ati ons of object, means, manner, and effect to define tragedy . The works ofthe Chicago critics do not indicate how aware they were of the significanceof the causal model in the history of hermeneutics since the Middle Ages(see, for example, Danneberg 1999, 8991).

62 See Vince (1993, 117).


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according to its formal shape alone. 63 Thus, the Aristotelian causalmodel should be seen as a conceptual model for an approach totextual analysis in which the communicative functions of a work areto be determined on the basis of its construction.

Summarizing our brief consideration of the approach to literarytheory advocated by the Chicago critics, it is clear that they wantedthe disciplines of literary study to be reoriented on an Aristotelianbasis. In their view, the aim of analysing literary works should be toidentify for each work the specif ic final end or first principle ofconstruction which determines most completely the form or ef-fect of the whole . 64 Historical contexts could be considered whenidentifying this first principle, but the starting point of any analy-sis had to be the text itself. Aristotle s theory of causality was toserve as a heuristics. The interpretation of literature as the Chicagoschool of criticism understood it was, in short, aimed at recon-structing the composition of literary works as closely as possible. 65

1.1.3 The Legacy of the Chicago School

The influence of the Chicago school of criticism was minimal; atmost, the Chicago critics succeeded in converting some of their ownstudents to their ideas. And even in their first generation, these stu-dents did not subscribe blindly to the programme of their teachers.Instead, they took the Chicago pluralism and Aristotelianism as thebasis for their own reflections, which led to the development of a

63 See Shereen (1988, 40), who writes that neither the author nor the audienceare ignored; yet they are only considered as elements contributing to theform.

64 Crane (1953a, 57).65 See also the comments in Corman (1994, 144). I t is, however, not enti rely

clear why the Chicago critics approach should follow, as Corman suggests,from their decision to use the Aristotelian mimesis concept as a point of ori-entation.


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wide range of heterogeneous positions. 66 The views that Crane scircle held regarding metatheory and literary theory never met withany approval of note beyond Chicago. True, the Chicago schoolbecame the object of widespread academic attention in the study ofliterature in North America when Critics and Criticism was pub-lished, but this interest was short-livedonce the bitter disputesover their manifesto had subsided, the Chicago critics were soonforgotten. 67 Introductions to the theories and methods of literarystudy do not consider the Chicago school s approach worthy of sub-stantial appraisal, and rarely is the work of its representatives to befound in collections of key texts in the development of literary the-ory in the United States during the twentieth century. 68

One reason for the limited influence of the Chicago school mustlie in the withering criticism that its approach received at the handsof the New Critics. The publication of the Chicago manifesto, itselfin large part an attack on the New Criticism, led representative sup-porters of the latter to launch a rapid counter-offensive in the formof a series of reviews, alternative analyses, and commentaries de-signed to expose major shortcomings in the Chicago criti cs ap-proach. In the process, the metatheoretical ideas of the Chicagoschool were rarely considered important enough to merit substantialcritical consideration; some appraisals even failed to make any ref-erence at all to this part of the Chicago programme. 69 One explana-tion for this was certainly the fact that most critics were opposed tothe idea of pluralism in the academic endeavour of which they were

66 See Richter (1982) on the relationship between the first and second genera-tions of the Chicago school. Booth (1982, 2224) gives an overview of themost prominent second- and third-generation supporters of the Chicago ap-proach.

67 See the comments in Wellek (1956, 67), Webster (1979, 123), and Leitch(1988, 80). Despite Lohner s 1967 essay (Lohner 1967), the German-speak-ing countries did not produce a comprehensive discussion of the Chicagocritics unti l Schneider s essential study (Schneider 1994)consider, for ex-ample, the earlier treatments in Strelka and Hinderer (1970) or Zapf (2001).

68 Examples include Glicksberg (1951), Stovall (1955), Rahv (1957), Scott(1962), Erzgrber (1970), Lipking and Litz (1972), and Guerin et al. (1992).

69 Ransom (1952), for example.


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part but could not produce any theoretical justification for theirhostility to it. 70 The main reason why there was no serious engage-ment with the Chicago pluralism, however, must be the simple factthat it was not considered convincing. In the eyes of opponents fromthe New Criticism circle, the calls for an Aristotelian approach toliterature and the polemics against competing modes of textualanalysis suggested that the Chicago school was not all that confi-dent about its own concept of different but equally valid ways ofexamining literature. 71 The plea for pluralism, Samuel F. Johnsonwrote, summarizing the repeated objections raised against the Cranecircles metatheoretical ideas, seems to have been an afterthought,and is effectually denied by the general tone of the rest of thebook. 72

Those in the New Criticism circle gave rather more attention tothe Chicago school s Aristoteli anism than they did to i ts plurali sm,but the unfavourable outcome was just the same. The reviewers ofCri tics and Cri ticism were unanimous in asserting that Aristotelianideas could not provide the basis for a contemporary theoreticalapproach: adopting an Aristoteli an point of orientation in ones the-ory, they argued, inevitably meant disregarding many importantadvances made in the debates on the theory of interpretation thathad taken place in the preceding decades. Ransoms view of theCrane circle s approach was now noticeably different from what ithad been fifteen years earl ier: since it was a program which had tobe recovered from antiquity, he wrote this time, it was anti-

70 This tendency was sti ll present as late as 1970 when Bosonnet (1970, 58) at-tacked the Chicago pluralism on the basis that such a perspective made theinterpretation of literature look l ike no more than a glass bead game( bloes Glasperlenspiel ; my translation).

71 Criticism of the mismatch between the Chicago schools pluralistic pro-gramme and its practical implementation is entirely legitimate. In an essaysubtitled Neo-Aristoteli anism since R. S. Crane , Richter (1982, 30) hit themark when he said of the founding father of the Chicago cri tics that forevery page he wrote expounding instrumental pluralism he wrote two ques-tioning the validity of rival schools of cri ticism .

72 Johnson (1953a, 250). For examples of similar objections to the Chicagopluralism, see Vivas (1953, 148) or Wimsatt (1954b, 4647, 58).


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quated. 73 The critics of the Chicago school saw its approach as astep backwards because it gave no consideration to certain aspectsof literary analysis that were of crucial importance in their eyes. 74

Above all, the Chicago Critics were reproached for not showingsufficient interest in the linguistic form of literary texts. The Cranecircles understanding of literary criticism was, in Johnsons eyes,nothing more than plot summary or paraphrase . 75 It should notneed pointing out that such gaps appeared in the Chicago pro-gramme only when it was viewed from the perspective of the par-ticular alternative approach which the observer happened to preferin any given case. Another line of attack aimed at exposing underly-ing fallacies in the theory and practice of the Chicago circle. WhereCranes group had hoped that adopting Aristotelian positions wouldmake it possible to pursue a text-internal form of literary analysis,the New Critics thought the Aristotelian orientation had entirely theopposite effect. They assumed that any theory of interpretationbased on Aristotle would always bring with it the temptation oflooking outside texts when examining them. Wimsatt s review ofthe Chicago manifesto captured this ri sk in what he called the fal-lacy of neoclassic species :

It is quite clear that they [the Chicago critics] want or believe they want tostudy the poem, not its origins or results. But two of the most important termsin the Chicago system are pleasure and purpose . And if these terms haveeven in Aristotle some tendency away from poems toward genetic and affec-tive psychology, they have it more decidedly for the Chicago critics. 76

The New Critics, then, accused the Chicago school of making aneoclassic fallacyof assuming that it was possible to use Aristo-telian positions as the basis for textual analysis without committingan intentional and affective fallacy by bringing the author and re-cipients of the work in question into consideration. 77

73 Ransom (1952, 649).74 See, for example, Johnson (1953a, 25152, 256), Ransom (1952, 653), or

Wimsatt (1954b, 44).75 Johnson (1953a, 255).76 Wimsatt (1954b, 60).77 See Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946, 1954).


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In reality, the effectiveness with which the New Critics attackedthe Chicago school had little to do with the validity of their objec-tions to a neo-Aristotelian reorientation of literary theory. They aremore likely to have succeeded because of sociological factors in theacademic community rather than because of the quality of their ar-guments. The commentaries of Ransom, Wimsatt, and other sup-porters of the New Criticism made perfectly legitimate points onindividual issues, but it is quite clear that the overall picture theypresented did not do justice to the Chicago group. 78 The real reasonfor the success with which the New Critics attacked the Crane circlelay in academic power structures in the study of literature in NorthAmerica at the beginning of the 1950s. By this time, the New Criti-cism had already assumed a clear position of superiority in thestudy of literature; the Chicago school had at best an outsider s roleto play. The responses to Critics and Criticism,in other words, werenot the cause of the difficulties that the Crane circle had in assertingitself in the academic study of literature. Instead, the reviews of theChicago manifesto were simply the last stage in a process that hadbegun in the 1930s with the calls for literary criticism to be given aplace in academia. There were many reasons for this process, in thecourse of which the New Criticism became the leading movementin the academic study of literature and the Chicago criticism failedto attain a significant status even within the field. In all probability,however, there were two crucial factors at work, both of which wererelated only indirectly to the two competing programmes. 79

The first major reason for the difficulties experienced by theChicago school in asserting itself in competition with the New

78 Some monographs on the history of l iterary criticism in the United States seethings differently. Drawing on the arguments of the New Criticism, they at-tribute the failure of the Chicago school to shortcomings in its approach.Readers of Grant Webster s Republic of Letters, for example, are told that the theoretical i ssues raised by the Aristotelians have become obsolete evenbefore the death of their defenders (Webster 1979, 123). Further examples ofthis position can be found in Wellek (1956, 6768) and Goldsmith (1979,14445).

79 See the pointers in Leitch (1988, 7980) and Schneider (1994, 4448).


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Criticism lay in its failure to step beyond the institutional context inwhich it developed. This meant that its potential influence on thedebates of literary criticism would always be limited. Even thoughsupporters of the Crane circle held key positions at the University ofChicago and edited an internationally renowned journal, Modern Philology ,80 they had nothing approaching the resources available tothe New Criticism for disseminating its ideas. Representatives ofthe latter taught at several respected third-level institutions and wereable to influence a number of important publications such as The Sewanee Review , The Kenyon Review , and The Southern Review .81

The second, probably crucial disadvantage of the Chicago criticsin their confrontation with the New Criticism lay in the way inwhich Crane and his supporters went about publicizing their ap-proach, their concept of literature, and their metatheoretical ideas.The New Critics set out their programme in a wide range of text-books and produced a series of model studies, ripe for imitation, inwhich they gave a detailed picture of how it could be applied inpractice. 82 The representatives of the Chicago school, on the otherhand, published mostly on questions of theory and metatheory inthe academic study of literature. 83 The Chicago critics never puttogether a more widely accessible presentation of their approach,and only rarely did they produce illustrative examples of it in use.After two brief tasters of the Aristotelian analysis of literature pro-vided by Olson and Maclean in 1942, 84 the next examples of howthe Chicago school s programme could be put into practice did notappear until the manifesto of 1952, and then only in two of the

80 See Keasts review of Crane s period as editor of Modern Philology (Keast1952).

81 See Berman (1988) and Wenzel (2001).82 Particularly prominent here are the following popular handbooks edited by

Cleanth Brooks and other New Critics: An Approach to Literature (1936),Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Under- standing Drama (1945).

83 See 1.1.2 above.84 Crane et al. (1942).


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twenty contributions to Cri tics and Criti cism : Cranes study of Tom Jones and Macleans piece on Ki ng Lear .85

Unlike his teachers, Crane, McKeon, and Olson, Wayne C.Booth worked out his position in discussions of literary worksrather than in theoretical treatises. This, not least, may well be whyBooth s work found a resonance that the fi rst generation of the Chi-cago school did not. To that work we now turn.

1.2 Wayne C. Booth and the Implied Author Concept

1.2.1 Booths Combined Ethical and Rhetorical Approachto Literary Texts

Wayne Clayson Booth began his postgraduate study of English lit-erature at the University of Chicago in 1946. Born into a Mormon

community in Utah in 1921, Booth had gained his B.A. at BrighamYoung University in 1944. Before starting his postgraduate work,however, he decided to complete a period of work as a Mormonmissionary begun in 1942, and he had then to carry out nationalservice in the United States Army, starting in the last year of thewar and finishing in the year after it ended. Exposure to the teach-ing of the Chicago critics soon converted Booth to their cause. Allof us who encountered Richard McKeon, Ronald Crane, Elder Ol-son, Norman Maclean, Rea Keast, or Bernard Weinberg just afterWorld War I I , he recalled, knew that there was a Chicago Schooland that if we just worked hard enough we could master their se-crets and join the elect. 86 Spurred on by this prospect, Booth sooncompleted his studies, obtaining his M.A. in 1947 and receiving hisPh.D. for a thesis entitled Tristram Shandy and its Precursors: The

85 Crane (1952b) and Maclean (1952).86 Booth (1982, 19).


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Self-Conscious Narrator in 1950. After obtaining his doctorate, heworked as an assistant professor

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