| The tradition of English (and European) poetics has persistently had recourse to an implicit model of competence for the literary reader. Presumptions of a certain literary knowledge, of familiarity with particular literary conventions and codes, and of a specific functional attunement to the literary text extend from Pope's Essay on Criticism (an only partially arbitrary terminus a quo) through the varied state of contemporary literary theory. But it has taken the impetus of Saussurean linguistics and its various structuralist progeny to make explicit the need for a theory of reader competence which can most adequately account for our experience, interpretation, and evaluation of literary texts. "Structuralism" defines the task of poetics as a representation of the underlying system of conventions and codes which makes literary effects possible. The focus of such a task is not upon description of the qualities or properties of a given set of texts but rather upon the conditions under which such "qualities" or "properties" are experienced by a reader.;The dissertation explores the nature of literary competence and how (and under what conditions) such competence may be acquired, transmitted, and manifested by readers. More fundamentally it asks about the nature of theoretical problems that confront any specification of a literary competence. How are we to distinguish and designate the phenomena that a theory of literary competence will organize and structure? Is such specification inevitably a form of critical or ideological coercion? What is the nature of the dialogue between a theoretical concern for literary competence and traditional problems in poetics? The answers to these questions depend in large measure upon an understanding of literary convention, and a central chapter of the dissertation undertakes a theoretical exploration of precisely this problem.;The dissertation concludes by asking about the general consequences of a theory of competence for the enterprise of poetics, for our understanding of the institutional nature of this enterprise, and for literary pedagogy.;Such a task is clearly parallel with the central concern of Saussurean linguistics, which sees as its goal a description of language competence (i.e. the mastery of phonological, syntactic, and semantic codes or rules--an internalized grammar) rather than language performance (i.e. the body of individual utterances, which are seen as dependent upon such an underlying competence both for construction and comprehension). But precisely the power of this parallel or analogy raises what I suggest are characteristic issues for a theory of literary competence, for there are crucial limitations on our use of the linguistic model in literary studies. One of the major contentions of the dissertation is that to look for the precision that apparently characterizes linguistics in literary studies is a misconceived task. Not only is such precision not convincingly reflected in current linguistic extrapolations into literary theory and criticism, but, as Aristotle warned, to look for a greater precision in each class of things than the nature of the subject admits is in itself an error. I suggest a number of reasons why the competence we see presumed of the literary reader is simply not "precisely" determinable; the demands upon a literary competence that texts may occasion are neither stable, nor uniform, nor exclusively linguistic. |
