Modern critical theory is commonly thought of as a collection of diverse methods, schools, systems, and approaches. There is, however, a significant pattern in the diversity. This pattern is generated by the conflict between the widespread effort of twentieth-century theorists to make criticism scientific and the internal resistance to that effort presented by the hermeneutic impulse. The scientific tradition is characterized and unified by a set of common theoretical principles and by a common sequence of transformations that each school within it undergoes. The result of these transformations is that every proposed scientific model for criticism changes into an interpretive method and the project of scientific criticism is subverted.

The critical reception demanded by an avant-garde artwork recapitulates in intensified form the hermeneutical problem of literary study, the relation of criticizing to criticized text. Walter Benjamin's dialectical concept of allegory, rooted in the interpretive practice of “critical decomposition,” provides a singularly productive model for analyzing the notorious difficulties inherent in an avant-garde text by the preeminent Peruvian poet, César Vallejo (1892–1938). In Trilce, Vallejo depicts Venus de Milo, the celebrated symbol of Romantic, symbolist, and modernista aesthetic perfection, but only to dismember the sculpture's self-sufficient totality and to propel it into a temporalizing linguistic fragmentation, into an allegorical mode of signifying.

Most readers have rejected conceptions of modern literature that depend on ideas of apocalypse and historical crisis, especially as writers like Pater and Stevens have replaced Arnold and Eliot at the center of the modernist canon. For some of these readers, however, Arnold and Eliot are rejected precisely because their work appears to be bolstered by untenable ideas of historical crisis. While this essay argues that modernist literature sometimes promotes such ideas, it also argues that the very same literature provides the terms for undermining those ideas. Surveying a range of post-Romantic texts and then focusing on Arnold's “Empedocles on Etna,” the essay proposes that the tradition of modern apocalypse contains its own critique, complicating a dualistic sense of the canon (split between Arnold and Pater or Eliot and Stevens). This internalized critique is so stringent that it exposes a blindness in some postmodern assessments of apocalypse.

Foucault's work has been investigated from within the Western intellectual tradition. My study approaches it from outside that tradition, from the perspective of Oriental thought. Oriental concepts were appropriated by the Western counterculture of the sixties and were espoused by associates of Tel quel when Foucault began to develop his radically subversive critique of Western discourse formation. Eastern models appear to have shaped his own discourse to such an extent that they function as a concealed subtext in his work. He criticizes the West for its anthropocentrism and logocentrism, its antagonistic dialectics, and its confidence in an unlimited advance of systematic knowledge. Foucault's enterprise is grounded in Oriental, chiefly Buddhist, systems that emphasize a progressive decentering of the individual through praxis rather than theory, a logic of coexisting opposites, a paradoxical language, and a knowledge unattainable through logocentric rationality.

Critics have failed to grasp that Yeats's “tragic joy” is a version of the sublime. The phrase captures the affective dynamic of the sublime—the transformation of defeat and terror into joy—as do similar concepts in Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, and Schiller. Yeats can help us understand death as the ultimate occasion of the sublime. Through his lyrics of tragic joy we can trace the psychic and rhetorical resemblances that connect diverse modes of the sublime: curse, prophecy, and apocalypse. These modes encode affirmative responses to destruction, so that the psycholinguistic violence in the poems may owe less to fascism than to the Romantic sublime. Although Yeats turns the sublime of Blake and Shelley in a reactionary direction, the politics of the sublime are inherently neither right-wing nor left-wing but open to either articulation.

Sturm und Drang's self-critique of its rebellious impulses resembles Kant's virtually contemporaneous struggle to formulate the principle of autonomy, for both involve the reconciliation of individual freedom with rules that can make such freedom accountable. Dramas of Goethe, Klinger, and Schiller acknowledge the need for principles of accountability by presenting the violent Kraftmensch within plots designed to justify the figure's actions. The frequent repetition of words and phrases in the drama of Sturm und Drang is part of the tradition's search for repeatable rules within the scope of its own impulsiveness. Among major writers of Sturm und Drang, only J. M. R. Lenz avoids depicting the Kraftmensch. Because Lenz will not mitigate the culpability of his characters, his drama can deal more honestly with problems of freedom and individuality.

In The Rhetoric of Religion, Kenneth Burke refigures Augustine's Confessions as a Platonist comedy, structuring his book as an Upward Way that imitates and overgoes the textual ascent he analyzes in Augustine. He links that ascent to the principles of hierarchy, order, guilt, and victimage: the sacrificial principle of tragedy. Yet he counters the tragic motif with a comic criticism, teaching a tolerant charity and humble irony. His comedy thus tropes the Confessions on a large scale, converting it to logology. Burke teaches us about the tendency toward perfection obvious in the Upward Way, yet inherent in all symbols. In the political realm, this tendency aims toward perfect order and works to anathematize the opposition, exerting the principle of victimage. Burke warns us against this principle, which functions as much in the rhetoric of politics as in the rhetoric of religion.

Baudelaire's poetry dramatizes the self-effacing quality of dominant discourse so well that until recently critics have failed to engage his interest in ideology. In the prose poem “Les yeux des pauvres,” the traces of that self-effacement allow us to read the ideological implications of what seem to be the text's purely aesthetic and ethical dimensions. By staging encounters with social and sexual difference, “Les yeux” challenges the principle of reflexivity underlying its announced aesthetic of the correspondences. In questioning the logic of the same that governs the mystified speaker's figuration and psychology, the text asks whether and how an Other can escape the confines of the official egalitarian ideology of post-1848 France, which tends to cast alterity in its own image.

Copying as both duplication and writing informs the structure and thematics of Leopoldo Alas's Su único hijo (1891). In building an entire novel around a copy clerk, Alas, known as Clarín, taps into a rich literary tradition. He also ends up suggesting that the imaginative impulse emerges out of a deeply felt and little understood desire to copy. Clarín's own “corrective copying” of Flaubert illustrates the classic artistic formula of “schema and correction,” revision of the canonical schemata to come up with an “original.” His homage to Flaubert, reenacted textually through the issue of paternity in Su único hijo, operates paradoxically by denying the nihilistic implications of Flaubertian repetition and paternal absenteeism. Where Bouvard et Pécuchet is about copying and an absent father, Clarín's novel is about the inescapable paternal presence, the sign of individuality, and the assertion of self.

The story of John Merrick—the “Elephant Man” of late Victorian sideshows who became a cause célèbre of the aristocracy—has achieved a new and perhaps surprising popularity in recent years. An examination of Bernard Pomerance's 1979 play and David Lynch's 1980 film reveals several sources of viewing pleasure that may account for this attraction, all of which converge on representations of Merrick. Among these sources are the appeals of melodrama and Brechtian epic theater, as well as the more deep-seated gratifications connected with voyeurism, pornography, and theatrical and cinematic spectating. In distinctive ways, each narrative constructs both a mythology of Merrick's life and spectators who are alternately empowered and submissive, politically aware and emotionally engaged.

In definitions, occasional comments, and especially the selection of illustrative quotations, Johnson's Dictionary both conveys specific linguistic information and presents its readers with knowledge of the broadest kind. Like the abstract authority “the dictionary,” Johnson's Dictionary is an active instrument of the culture it reflects and helps to shape. As such, Johnson's book embodies a politics, while transmitting political views on every one of its quotation-filled pages. As a collection of quotations, the Dictionary tends to display an underlying political consensus founded on cultural assumptions winnowed from the arguments of combatants on a variety of different but, at a distance, analogous controversies. As a cultural act in its own right the Dictionary supports the growth of democracy and liberalism through its assistance to and dependence on the growing population of literate, book-buying, voting English citizens.

The court spectacle plays of Calderón de la Barca, when viewed within their historical, physical, and dramatic context, reveal a polysemous structure of meaning that both supports and criticizes the ruling monarch. The first of these, El mayor encanto amor, reproves Philip iv's pursuit of sensual pleasures in time of war and his surrender of power to his prime minister; the last, Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, attempts to forge a credibly regal image of the weak Charles ii. These plays dramatize the belief that the polyphonic richness of theatrical representation can not only serve and guide the king but also generate his authority, that the proper constitution of the central figure in the theater of power may depend on the power of theater.

Goethe's poem “Selige Sehnsucht” has been variously interpreted in the light of different readers' notions of what is characteristically “Goethean.” This essay examines syntactic, semantic, and rhetorical ambiguities in the poem and adds to the variety of interpretations by suggesting that the opening lines' elitist restriction of the message to “none but the wise” is, ironically, democratic and that the familiar closing maxim discriminates not between “us” and “them” but between “before” and “after”—between blessed, half-blind (“trübe”) desire and a brilliant fulfillment potentially in store for everyone. Goethean enlightenment, like irony, is indirect. Temporarily obfuscating, it promises—beyond time and selfhood—a consummate unitary illumination.