批评家的历史使命——查尔斯·阿尔铁里教授访谈录

王祖友

(河南理工大学,焦作,454003)

批评家的历史使命
——查尔斯·阿尔铁里教授访谈录

王祖友

(河南理工大学,焦作,454003)

查尔斯·阿尔铁里教授的主要研究兴趣在于20世纪多类美国诗歌,尤其关注其与哲学理念和视觉艺术的关系。他认为维特根斯坦并不会运用哲学的抽象定义去辩论,而是通过找到观众能够理解的例子和观点来辩论。在他看来,道德伦理由人们的行动和具体选择的价值观所支配,今天的很多批评是机械的,而不是关注一个特定的文本能具备什么价值。关于跨学科的关系,阿尔铁里教授认为,一门学科不能诠释另一门学科,但它却激发了另一门学科更丰富的发明。至于后现代主义和现代主义之间的关系,他主张后现代主义接受现代主义对于修辞的仇恨,后现代主义要求艺术围绕展示,而非表达。目前的危机就是,和它与之斗争的东西一样,艺术成为宣传的工具,从而失去它的存在是为了使这个呆板的世界变得新颖而有感觉的价值。大部分诗歌和社会批判没有把握我们的社会困境的核心:对于美国社会,似乎最令人不安的是它所给予的自由,这种自由使家庭和社会逐渐面临父权丧失的风险。

查尔斯·阿尔铁里,《当代美国诗歌中的自我与感性》,道德伦理,后现代主义和现代主义

Prof.Charles Altieri is the Rachel Stageberg Anderson Chair in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley.Altieri specializes in 20th century American and British Literature and teaches graduate courses on Nineteenth Century Thought, Victorian Literature, Modern and Contemporary English and American Poetry, Modern and Classical Literary Theory, Literature and the Visual Arts, and seminars on specific poets, theoretical problems, and interdisciplinary period studies.

WangZuyou:SelfandSensibilityinContemporaryAmericanPoetry(1984) establishes a dominant mode in “serious” American poetry, which is essentially scenic, presenting in brief dramatic settings subdued, carefully wrought emotions that build to a climactic tactile image.You view the mode not as a prescribed style but as a set of styles that share assumptions and that tend to seek the same narrow audience.Is this mode adequate for the self and sensibility in contemporary American poetry? What is the art of Contemporary American poetry?

CharlesAltieri: This is a very general question.My account of the scenic applied to most American poetry at the time, but there was also resistance that was evident in the poets of whom I wrote.I do not think it would be an adequate account now of the contemporary scene because there is a great deal more variety of voice and perspective.There is no one art of any period in the developed world.

Wang: How does Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl blend the transcendental and the elemental? How does this bear upon Wallace Stevens and your essay “Stevens and the Crisis of European Philosophy”?

Altieri: Husserl treats the transcendental not as some alternate reality but as a mental state that extends beyond the individual subject, like a sense of valuing that is intended to hold for all people, or an abstracting of the self into the pure activity, as in an act of attention that becomes available for all.Stevens was desperate to find ways in which one subject could represent other people because of the abstract intimacy of the states of mind involved.HisRockprovides good evidence for states of the subject that are open to all in their elemental nature.So the elemental becomes a shared intimacy, just as in Husserl.

Wang: Do you have a special image of Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein in your mind? What do you mean when you write: “My Wittgenstein would even agree with Cavell that one fundamental challenge for Philosophy is to explore the degree to which it can ‘become literature and still know itself’” in “Cavell and Wittgenstein on Morality: The Limits of Acknowledgement”?

Altieri: I meant that Wittgenstein does not argue by philosophical abstraction but by finding examples and perspectives an audience can take on.The mode of persuasion is close to what literature does.And because he distrusted the philosophical methods he inherited, he had to risk philosophy not knowing itself.

Wang: What is the relation between Moral Theory and Literary Discourse? As a theorist, what are your general ideas on the relationship between contemporary literature and western critical theory?

Altieri: This is too big a question.Suffice it to say that I think moral theory is a matter of justification that an agent offers either of actions or of the values that govern specific choices.Most significant literary acts do not seek justification in an analytic language or explanation but present concretely a mode of attention and understanding that has to count as the justification, without relegating justification to concepts.On the other hand, when critics talk about ethics rather than morality they usually support the claim by some version of authenticity like responding to the infinite demand of the other.But I do not think the other has standing to make demands (demands are matters of negotiating what we have in common), and the domain of infinite demands is theology and not ethics.Ethics is a concern for decisions we can live with a minimum degree of shame or guilt.

Wang: What is Epistemic Criticism? What does Wittgenstein do for you as a literary critic?

Altieri: I think epistemic criticism is best characterized by Derek Atridge’s complaint that much criticism today is instrumental rather than concerned with the value of a particular text for what it does.Epistemic criticism does not so much read individual texts closely for what they do as particulars as seek explanations for texts that can count in other disciplinary matrices from sociology to neurology.

Wang: The title ofPainterlyAbstractioninModernistAmericanPoetry:TheContemporaneityofModernismindicates intersexuality between literary art and other art such as painting.What is your opinion on the concept of intersexuality? How does it influence the interdisciplinary studies if there is any influence of the former on the latter?

Altieri: I do not consider what I do as intersexual study because I do not think meaning in one discipline can be interpreted through the other or the meaning of one text can be interpreted through what it alludes to or echoes.I think painting was a model for encountering modernity that writers emulated.Yet they realized that they had to afford modes of encounter relying on resources specific to writing, like the syntactic play of Williams “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital” that parallels the planes in Cubist construction.So one discipline does not explain the other but it motivates the other to richer inventions.

Wang: Some critics hold that postmodernism is a continuation of modernism; other critics advocate that postmodernism is a rebellion against modernism, what is your position on this issue?

Altieri: David Antin once wrote that from the postmodernism you choose you get the modernism you deserve.I am not sure I am repeating him correctly.In general I do not think that there is one answer to the question of rebellion or continuation.Postmodernism in general accepts modernist hatreds of rhetoric and demands that art involve presentation rather than representation.Postmodernism in general rejects the idea that presentation is a form of mastery by the artist rather than an act of open vulnerability and making present of differences beyond the resources of society to handle.

Wang: What is special about the logic of Post-Modernist poetics as compared, say, the logic of Modernism poetics?

Altieri: I do not think that there is one logic of modernist poetry or postmodernist poetry.Williams is very different from Eliot, and Ashbury is very different from Greeley.So one has to deal with individual poets rather than large abstractions.That said, I think modernists generally accepted ideals involving the artist creating concrete forms that gave meaningfulness can coherence to diverse levels of experience.Postmodernist poets have less faith in form and more concern for the role of reading in completing the sense of the poem according to an individual’s lights.The community is something modernists felt they could build up positively as something held in common, while community in postmodernism is built on the recognition of differences.

Wang: In “The Fate of the Imaginary in Twentieth Century American Poetry”, you make the following remark on the conclusive paragraph:

It [Criticism] can show how the imaginary becomes oppressive and elaborate the ways artists find to evade that oppression or put its pressure to creative ends.And when it is society that becomes most oppressive, it can devote itself to exploring what works of art can bring as alternatives to that oppression.(64)

Is this your agenda for the contemporary criticism?

Altieri: I did not think I had an agenda but you may have selected a good one for me.When art stresses the make-up of individual psyches, it is likely to concentrate on how the subject’s imaginary defenses and projections create two basic problems.Imaginary selves have to defended, so they have a tendency to close down.Art tries to provide modes of attention that work against these defenses by showing what it involves to open attention to experience and risk loss in order to gain new possible sources of energy.Think of Williams, Loy, Moore, Stevens, and Pound.But such art has to accept the fact that it is only indirectly social: its struggle is for each individual to experience and embrace different ways of making sense.When society becomes actively oppressive it is not a matter of just the imaginary.The oppression involves policies and methods that are unjust and insensitive.That condition makes pursuing individual reform seem small minded and ineffective so the temptation is to address the social order directly.The danger is that then art will become as propagandistic as what it combats (or at least as unconcerned with the concrete) and lose the sense that art lives when it makes the concrete world seem a repository of new possible feelings and experiences.But then one has to hope that making these experiences possible will change people on a large scale, and that is highly unlikely.

I do not know what can be done.I do think I know that most poetry and social criticism misses the core of our social dilemmas.If we take the point of view of Muslim revolutionaries, what seems most disturbing about American society is the freedom it gives that risks losing patriarchal authority in the family and in the state.And they see that the Western dream of freedom may be in the process of destroying the West because it is in fact succeeding, with the effect of making everything in life uneasy or paralyzed, hence the US Congress.So I think we suffer most from the fact that economically and socially we have realized freedom on an unprecedented scale, with no sense that the result could hurt so much.I do not see any solution because not pursuing freedom seems to contradict the very being of educated Westerners, and the dream that freedom can be somehow put to socially good purposes seems now a self-defensive illusory effort to escape complicity in the problem.

Charles Altieri’s Major Works:

1979a.BibliographyofModernandContemporaryAnglo-AmericanPoetry.Chicago: AHM.

1979b.EnlargingtheTemple:NewDirectionsinAmericanPoetryofthe1960s.Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

1981.ActandQuality:ATheoryofLiteraryMeaning.Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

1984.SelfandSensibilityinContemporaryAmericanPoetry.New York: Cambridge University Press.

1990.CanonsandConsequences.Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

1994a.PainterlyAbstractioninModernistAmericanPoetry:TheContemporaneityofModernism.New York: Cambridge University Press.

1994b.SubjectiveAgency:ATheoryofFirst-PersonExpressivityanditsSocialImplications.Oxford: Blackwell.

1998.PostmodernismNow:EssaysonContemporaneityintheArts.University Park: Penn State University Press.

2003.TheParticularsofRapture:AnAestheticsoftheAffects.Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

2005.TheArtofModernAmericanPoetry.Oxford: Blackwell.

(责任编辑 玄 琰)

王祖友,河南理工大学教授。主要研究方向为美国文学和西方文论研究。电子邮箱:wiziyi@gmail.com

I106

A

1674-8921-(2014)05-0065-03

10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2014.05.016.