Spring 2001
Volume 27, Number 3

Excerpt from
The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism
by Mary Poovey

---

Does contemporary literary criticism have a model system?3 If it does, what particular model system--what frog, baboon, or laboratory mouse--governs the practices of critics as apparently diverse as New Critics, deconstructionists, and New Historicists? If we can identify the model system of contemporary literary criticism, what does this tell us about literary studies? And what does it tell us about the model system itself, which in biology, through its presence--and effects--has become a disciplinary norm?
[...]
If modern biology is not organized by a particular instance of its grouping concept and literary criticism is, why juxtapose the two disciplines? In this essay, I argue that doing so enables us to see two aspects of each discipline in a new way; these new insights then enable us to reconceptualize the disciplines' relation to each other. The first facet this juxtaposition illuminates is the role that grouping categories, like species and genre, played in the professionalization of each discipline; the development of these categories constituted important chapters in efforts to distinguish between each of these disciplines and related practices. In so doing, the disciplinary specialization that grouping categories facilitated enhanced practitioners' ability to develop specialized techniques and instruments, to produce systematic knowledge, and thus to gain the kind of social credibility that eventually made the professionalization of biology and literary criticism possible.

See Also John Holloway: "Supposition and Supersession: A Model of Analysis for Narrative Structure" (Autumn 1976) Cesare Segre: Culture and Modeling Systems (Spring 1978) Jacques Derrida: The Law of Genre (Autumn 1980)

The second aspect illuminated by the juxtaposition concerns the internal logic of these two disciplines and one feature of their historical relationship. Like every discipline sufficiently specialized to develop its own grouping categories and to create systematic knowledge through them, modern literary criticism and biology are each governed by an organizing metaphor, which dictates the objects or details practitioners select as evidence and which guides both practice and theory. These metaphors are generally invisible to the disciplines' members, and their historical provenance is often obscure. Like all organizational paradigms, however, these tropes come from other systems of naming and ordering the world, where their figurative dimension is not necessarily prominent. In the early nineteenth century, British critics who wanted to distinguish between criticism and other kinds of writing borrowed a trope from biology that became the organizing metaphor for the discipline: the organic whole. If we can make this metaphor visibile, we should be able to identify the assumptions that organize modern literary criticism and to see what happens when practice is transformed into trope.

3. In this essay, I do not discuss every variant of literary criticism, but only the anglocentric tradition that runs from eighteenth-century British writers like Warton and Johnson, through Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, and James in the nineteenth century, through twentieth-century formalists like the New Critics, structuralists, and poststructuralists. Other variants of contemporary literary criticism draw more heavily on Continental theorists, and this may produce significant differences in the attention critics pay to formal issues. The kind of formalism I discuss here has been particularly influential in the U.S. for the last one hundred years, and it seems important to identify its characteristic features.

Mary Poovey is professor of English and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. She is the author of The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Uneven Developments (1988), Making a Social Body (1995), and A History of the Modern Fact (1998). She is currently working on a book about reading long Victorian novels.