Because of the triumph of postmodern studies, explication of classic poems by great dead white male English poets of preceding centuries has greatly declined in the last several decades, even though many of the poems may still be puzzling to interested readers, young and old. This book is addressed to both audiences in the hope that new explications of twelve classic poems (or sections of these poems) by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, and Auden may help sustain interest in the poems. Although the explication procedure is now unpopular in theory and held to be as subjective as interpretation, the procedure is based on the experience that, if a puzzling poem is reasoned with, it can often be found to make sense on a basic level of understanding—a sense perhaps complex, ambiguous, or ambivalent but not self-contradictory. In essence, then, this is a book of poetry explications having esthetic aims but written in an era of unesthetic political and cultural studies. The term conservative in the title refers to explicatory rather than political conservatism as well as to critical and literary conservation—i.e., to conserving the practice of explication whether upon literary works old or new, and so also conserving esthetic interest in the old works themselves. The book also attempts to show that new conservative explications are still possible and can be still useful—even in the postmodern era and even on classic poems already much explicated—and that therefore explication still has much to do in the work of literary studies in the postmodern era.
This book presents a new interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim based on readings from not only its published text but also its principal manuscript text. Extensive use of the manuscript text has not been a feature of any other work on Lord Jim, and such use helps bring into focus a fixed pattern of meaning and an implicit unity that Conrad said the novel has. This result controverts not only postmodern critics, who say that the novel lacks any fixed pattern of meaning, but almost all critics since its publication, who have said that it lacks unity—specifically, that it separates into two halves, the Patna half and the Patusan half. However, with the help of the manuscript text, a detailed interpretation extending over the whole of Lord Jim shows it to be a unified whole. As Conrad wrote to his publisher four days after completing the novel, it is “the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end.” Most recent Lord Jim criticism discusses the novel from a standpoint critical of the author and in political or epistemological terms, whereas the present book discusses it from a standpoint sympathetic to the author and in symbolic and metaphysical terms. The metaphysical question that pervades the novel and helps unify it is whether the “destructive element” that is the “spirit” of the Universe has intention—and, beyond that, malevolent intention—toward any particular individual or is, instead, indiscriminate, impartial, and indifferent. Depending (as a corollary) on the answer to that question is the degree to which the particular individual can be judged responsible for what he does or does not do. Variant responses to the question or its corollary are provided not only by several characters and voices in Lord Jim but also by a letter of Conrad’s and by excerpts from works by Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Hardy, James Thomson (“B. V.”), and John Stuart Mill. The present book is written in a lay vocabulary free of the diction of postmodern theory and so would be understandable to non-academic as well as academic readers. It is intended for anyone interested in gaining a coherent nonpolitical understanding of Lord Jim.
This book presents current multidisciplinary research and theory from 17 different fields (most of them never before applied to literary explication) in order to provide (1) justification for the practice of a relative-probability type of explication as distinguished from interpretation, (2) a relativistic foundation for the preference of some explication(s) of a literary work over others, and thereby (3) a middle way between the postmodern pluralist view that a work has only an unlimited number of equally acceptable though different explications and the modern intentionalist view that it has only one acceptable explication (the author’s). Nine of the 17 fields are of primary relevance: critical theory, hermeneutics, probability theory, philosophy of science, second-order logic, and four fields of cognitive science (linguistics, epistemology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence). But the book also touches upon textual criticism, legal theory, measure theory, fuzzy logic, animal learning behavior, developmental psychology, evolutionary epistemology, and neurobiology. The book shows that those using a relative-probability type of explication on a literary work can achieve consensus because the healthy, adult human brain has an evolved, uniform, and probably innate ability to form relative-probability judgments and to form them in the practice of activities (like reading and explicating) that are not uniform and innate. Lastly, the book contributes to the scholarly areas of explication theory and practice, first, by providing a relativistic foundation for a craft (explication) that currently is not acknowledged to have any foundation but nonetheless continues and will continue to be practiced and, second, by presenting a means (relative epistemic probability) by which judging some explication(s) of a literary work to be more acceptable than others may be justified philosophically—an uncommon circumstance in this postmodern era in which philosophical justification of many beliefs and practices is thought to be untenable.
This book presents current multidisciplinary research and theory from 17 different fields (most of them never before applied to literary explication) in order to provide (1) justification for the practice of a relative-probability type of explication as distinguished from interpretation, (2) a relativistic foundation for the preference of some explication(s) of a literary work over others, and thereby (3) a middle way between the postmodern pluralist view that a work has only an unlimited number of equally acceptable though different explications and the modern intentionalist view that it has only one acceptable explication (the author’s). Nine of the 17 fields are of primary relevance: critical theory, hermeneutics, probability theory, philosophy of science, second-order logic, and four fields of cognitive science (linguistics, epistemology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence). But the book also touches upon textual criticism, legal theory, measure theory, fuzzy logic, animal learning behavior, developmental psychology, evolutionary epistemology, and neurobiology. The book shows that those using a relative-probability type of explication on a literary work can achieve consensus because the healthy, adult human brain has an evolved, uniform, and probably innate ability to form relative-probability judgments and to form them in the practice of activities (like reading and explicating) that are not uniform and innate. Lastly, the book contributes to the scholarly areas of explication theory and practice, first, by providing a relativistic foundation for a craft (explication) that currently is not acknowledged to have any foundation but nonetheless continues and will continue to be practiced and, second, by presenting a means (relative epistemic probability) by which judging some explication(s) of a literary work to be more acceptable than others may be justified philosophically—an uncommon circumstance in this postmodern era in which philosophical justification of many beliefs and practices is thought to be untenable.
This book presents a new interpretation of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim based on readings from not only its published text but also its principal manuscript text. Extensive use of the manuscript text has not been a feature of any other work on Lord Jim, and such use helps bring into focus a fixed pattern of meaning and an implicit unity that Conrad said the novel has. This result controverts not only postmodern critics, who say that the novel lacks any fixed pattern of meaning, but almost all critics since its publication, who have said that it lacks unity—specifically, that it separates into two halves, the Patna half and the Patusan half. However, with the help of the manuscript text, a detailed interpretation extending over the whole of Lord Jim shows it to be a unified whole. As Conrad wrote to his publisher four days after completing the novel, it is “the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end.” Most recent Lord Jim criticism discusses the novel from a standpoint critical of the author and in political or epistemological terms, whereas the present book discusses it from a standpoint sympathetic to the author and in symbolic and metaphysical terms. The metaphysical question that pervades the novel and helps unify it is whether the “destructive element” that is the “spirit” of the Universe has intention—and, beyond that, malevolent intention—toward any particular individual or is, instead, indiscriminate, impartial, and indifferent. Depending (as a corollary) on the answer to that question is the degree to which the particular individual can be judged responsible for what he does or does not do. Variant responses to the question or its corollary are provided not only by several characters and voices in Lord Jim but also by a letter of Conrad’s and by excerpts from works by Arthur Schopenhauer, Thomas Hardy, James Thomson (“B. V.”), and John Stuart Mill. The present book is written in a lay vocabulary free of the diction of postmodern theory and so would be understandable to non-academic as well as academic readers. It is intended for anyone interested in gaining a coherent nonpolitical understanding of Lord Jim.
Because of the triumph of postmodern studies, explication of classic poems by great dead white male English poets of preceding centuries has greatly declined in the last several decades, even though many of the poems may still be puzzling to interested readers, young and old. This book is addressed to both audiences in the hope that new explications of twelve classic poems (or sections of these poems) by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hardy, Yeats, and Auden may help sustain interest in the poems. Although the explication procedure is now unpopular in theory and held to be as subjective as interpretation, the procedure is based on the experience that, if a puzzling poem is reasoned with, it can often be found to make sense on a basic level of understanding—a sense perhaps complex, ambiguous, or ambivalent but not self-contradictory. In essence, then, this is a book of poetry explications having esthetic aims but written in an era of unesthetic political and cultural studies. The term conservative in the title refers to explicatory rather than political conservatism as well as to critical and literary conservation—i.e., to conserving the practice of explication whether upon literary works old or new, and so also conserving esthetic interest in the old works themselves. The book also attempts to show that new conservative explications are still possible and can be still useful—even in the postmodern era and even on classic poems already much explicated—and that therefore explication still has much to do in the work of literary studies in the postmodern era.
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