Notes and Exchanges

May I comment on the remarks Wayne C. Booth made about some passages in Theory of Literature in his article "Preserving the Exemplar" (in CI, vol. 3, pp. 408-10)? Mr. Booth is completely mistaken in referring to Wellek and Warren as "those Un-new Critics." The chapter in Theory of Literature is a revision of my paper "The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art," published in the Southern Review (vol. 7, pp. 735-54) in 1942. This in turn rehearses some of the arguments of my older paper "The Theory of Literary History" in the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague (vol. 6 [1936], pp. 173-91), written some four years before my emigration to the United States. The incriminated passages are, I believe, the very first attempt to define the ontological status of a literary work of art in English. The method is phenomenological and not neo-critical at all. The terms such as "structure of norms," "structure of determinism" (used also by Meyer Abrams) come from Husserl's Miditations cartisiennes (Paris, 1931) and from Roman Ingarden's Das literarische Kunstwerk (Halle, 1931), as I acknowledged in many contexts. I trust, however, that I supported and developed this position with new arguments, for instance, in rejecting the theories of I. A. Richards. This rejection follows logically from my acceptance of Husserl's arguments against psychologism. In many contexts, I have carefully discussed the theories of I. A. Richards, first in 1937, in a Czech article, on the Cambridge theorists of literature (Richards, Leavis, Empson), most elaborately in "On Rereading Richards" in The Southern Review (vol. 3 [N.S., Summer 1967], pp. 533-54), an account which