译者按：读到芮塔·菲尔斯基（Rita Felski）的《文学的用途》（Uses of Literature）这本书的引言时，我自己的阅读体验是震撼和愉悦的。犀利的观点由犀利的遣词造句表达出来，显然是大家风范。因为前段时间有读者后台问我译介一些文章时能不能考虑双语版，我当时表示“会考虑”但同时也会担心“众口难调”。不过当决定要译介这篇内容时，还是有强烈希望大家也能读到英文原文的心情，因为实在是写得太棒了。这次译文并不短，加上双语版可能都会让人“望而却步”，不过我还是希望你们也会跟我一样享受这段阅读旅程。Enjoy！
Introduction
引言
This is an odd manifesto as manifestos go, neither fish nor fowl, an awkward, ungainly creature that ill-fits its parentage. In one sense it conforms perfectly to type: one-sided, skew-eyed, it harps on one thing, plays only one note, gives one half of the story. Writing a manifesto is a perfect excuse for taking cheap shots, attacking straw men, and tossing babies out with the bath water. Yet the manifestos of the avant-garde were driven by the fury of their againstness, by an overriding impulse to slash and burn, to debunk and to demolish, to knock art off its pedestal and trample its shards into the dust. What follows is, in this sense, an un-manifesto: a negation of a negation, an act of yea-saying not nay-saying, a thought experiment that seeks to advocate, not denigrate.
作为一篇宣言，这篇文章显得有些奇怪，既不像鱼也不像鸟，犹如一个笨拙且不合时宜的怪物，显得与它的出发点格格不入。从某种意义上，它完全符合宣言的典型特征：片面、偏颇，只专注于一个话题，不断重复一个音符，只讲述一半的故事。写宣言常常成为抨击假想敌、攻击稻草人，甚至不惜“连孩子带洗澡水一起倒掉”的完美借口。然而，先锋派的宣言却满怀愤怒，驱动着一股摧毁与揭露的冲动，渴望颠覆与粉碎，将艺术从神坛上推下，并将其碎片践踏进尘土中。正因如此，接下来的内容可以称作一篇“非宣言”：它是否定的否定，是一种肯定的姿态，而非反对；它是一场倡导的思想实验，而非贬低。
There is a dawning sense among literary and cultural critics that a shape of thought has grown old. We know only too well the well-oiled machine of ideology critique, the x-ray gaze of symptomatic reading, the smoothly rehearsed moves that add up to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ideas that seemed revelatory thirty years ago – the decentered subject! the social construction of reality! – have dwindled into shopworn slogans; defamiliarizing has lapsed into doxa, no less dogged and often as dogmatic as the certainties it sought to disrupt. And what virtue remains in the act of unmasking when we know full well what lies beneath the mask? More and more critics are venturing to ask what is lost when a dialogue with literature gives way to a permanent diagnosis, when the remedial reading of texts loses all sight of why we are drawn to such texts in the first place.
文学和文化批评界逐渐产生了一种共识：某种思维框架已经走向衰退。我们对意识形态批判这架完美运转的机器、对“症候式阅读”的透视眼光，以及那些久经练习的批评手法已了如指掌——这些手法构成了一套怀疑的解释学。三十年前那些曾令人耳目一新的理念——去中心化的主体！社会建构的现实！——如今已成陈词滥调；陌生化的概念已转变为教条，和它曾试图打破的确定性一样僵硬。当我们对面具下的东西已经了如指掌时，揭露行为本身又能剩下多少价值？越来越多的批评家开始质疑，当与文学的对话让位于持续的诊断时，当纠正性的文本解读忽视了我们最初为何被这些文本吸引时，我们到底失去了什么。
Our students, meanwhile, are migrating in droves toward vocationally oriented degrees in the hope of guaranteeing future incomes to offset sky-rocketing college bills. The institutional fiefdoms of the natural and social sciences pull in ever heftier sums of grant money and increasingly call the shots in the micro-dramas of university politics. In the media and public life, what counts as knowledge is equated with a piling up of data and graphs, questionnaires and pie charts, input-output ratios and feedback loops. Old-school beliefs that exposure to literature and art was a sure path to moral improvement and cultural refinement have fallen by the wayside, to no one’s great regret. In such an austere and inauspicious climate, how do scholars of literature make a case for the value of what we do? How do we come up with rationales for reading and talking about books without reverting to the canon-worship of the past?
与此同时，学生们正成群结队地涌向职业导向的学位，希望借此保障未来的收入，以应对不断飙升的学费。自然科学和社会科学领域越来越多地吸引研究经费，成为学术界和大学政治中最具影响力的领域。在媒体和公共生活中，所谓的“知识”越来越等同于数据与图表的积累，调查问卷与饼状图，输入输出比率与反馈循环。那些曾经主张接触文学和艺术能够提升道德和文化修养的信念，如今早已无人提及，也鲜有人对此感到惋惜。在这样一个严苛而不利的环境中，文学学者如何为自己的工作正名？我们如何能够为阅读和讨论书籍提供正当理由，而不至于退回到过去对经典的盲目崇拜？
According to one line of thought, literary studies is entirely to blame for its own state of malaise. The rise of theory led to the death of literature, as works of art were buried under an avalanche of sociological sermons and portentous French prose. The logic of this particular accusation, however, is difficult to discern. Theory simply is the process of reflecting on the underlying frameworks, principles, and assumptions that shape our individual acts of interpretation. Championing literature against theory turns out to be a contradiction in terms, for those who leap to literature’s defense must resort to their own generalities, conjectures, and speculative claims. Even as he sulks and pouts at theory’s baleful effects, Harold Bloom’s assertion that we read “in order to strengthen the self and learn its authentic interests” is a quintessential theoretical statement.
按照某种观点，文学研究目前的困境完全是它自己造成的。理论的兴起导致了文学的衰亡，艺术作品被埋没在社会学说教和深奥法语的洪流中。然而，这种指责的逻辑难以理清。理论不过是对塑造我们每个人解读行为的框架、原则和假设的反思过程。捍卫文学而反对理论，实际上是一种自相矛盾的行为，因为那些为文学辩护的人最终还是要诉诸于他们自己的一般性推测与猜想。即便哈罗德·布鲁姆愤愤不平地批评理论的负面影响，他声称我们阅读是“为了增强自我并了解其真实兴趣”，这一点本身就是典型的理论声明。
Yet we can concede that the current canon of theory yields a paucity of rationales for attending to literary objects. We are called on to adopt poses of analytical detachment, critical vigilance, guarded suspicion; humanities scholars suffer from a terminal case of irony, driven by the uncontrollable urge to put everything in scare quotes. Problematizing, interrogating, and subverting are the default options, the deeply grooved patterns of contemporary thought. “Critical reading” is the holy grail of literary studies, endlessly invoked in mission statements, graduation speeches, and conversations with deans, a slogan that peremptorily assigns all value to the act of reading and none to the objects read. Are these objects really inert and indifferent, supine and submissive, entirely at the mercy of our critical maneuvers? Do we gain nothing in particular from what we read?
然而，我们不得不承认，现有的理论经典确实无法充分解释我们为何应关注文学作品。我们被要求保持分析性的疏离、批判性的警惕以及戒备的怀疑；人文学者深陷于无尽的讽刺中，不可抑制地想要将一切都置于引号之中。问题化、质询与颠覆已成为默认的选项，成为当代思想的刻板模式。“批判性阅读”是文学研究的圣杯，常常出现在使命声明、毕业典礼演讲和与校长的对话中，这一口号将所有的价值都赋予了阅读行为本身，而忽略了阅读对象的价值。难道这些对象真的是死气沉沉、无动于衷的，只是批评操控的工具吗？我们从阅读中真的一无所获吗？
Literary theory has taught us that attending to the work itself is not a critical preference but a practical impossibility, that reading relies on a complex weave of presuppositions, expectations, and unconscious pre-judgments, that meaning and value are always assigned by someone, somewhere. And yet reading is far from being a one-way street; while we cannot help but impose ourselves on literary texts, we are also, inevitably, exposed to them. To elucidate the potential merits of such an exposure, rather than dwelling on its dangers, is to lay oneself open to charges of naïveté, boosterism, or metaphysical thinking. And yet, as teachers and scholars charged with advancing our discipline, we are sorely in need of more cogent and compelling justifications for what we do.
文学理论告诉我们，专注于作品本身并不是一种批评偏好，而是一种实际上的不可能。阅读依赖于一张复杂的预设、期望和无意识判断交织的网络，意义与价值始终是由某个地方的某个人赋予的。然而，阅读绝不仅仅是单向的行为；虽然我们无法避免将自己投射到文学文本之上，但我们也不可避免地受到文本的影响。阐明这种影响的潜在好处，而非沉溺于其危险性，无疑会招致幼稚、过分乐观或形而上学的指责。然而，作为教师与学者，我们肩负推进学科发展的责任，因此我们迫切需要更为有力、更加令人信服的理由来解释我们所从事的工作。
Eve Sedgwick observes that the hermeneutics of suspicion is now virtually de rigueur in literary theory, rather than one option among others. As a quintessentially paranoid style of critical engagement, it calls for constant vigilance, reading against the grain, assuming the worst-case scenario and then rediscovering its own gloomy prognosis in every text. (There is also something more than a little naïve, she observes, in the belief that the sheer gesture of exposing and demystifying ideas or images will somehow dissipate their effects.) Sedgwick’s own suspicious reading of literary studies highlights the sheer strangeness of our taken-for-granted protocols of interpretation, the oddness of a critical stance so heavily saturated with negative emotion. As I take it, Sedgwick is not lamenting any lack of sophisticated, formally conscious, even celebratory readings of literary works. Her point is rather that critics find themselves unable to justify such readings except by imputing to these works an intent to subvert, interrogate, or disrupt that mirrors their own. The negative has become inescapably, overbearingly, normative.
艾芙·塞奇威克指出，在文学理论中，怀疑的解释学几乎已成为一种标准姿态，而不再仅仅是众多选择中的一种。作为一种典型的偏执式批评，它要求我们始终保持警惕，逆向解读，假设最坏的情况，然后在每一部作品中重新发现自己的阴郁预测。（她还指出，仅仅通过揭露或去神秘化某些观念或形象，并不会自动消除它们的影响，这种信念本身未免有些天真。）塞奇威克对文学研究的怀疑式解读，揭示了我们那些已成常态的解读方法的怪异性，批评的立场往往充满负面情感。塞奇威克并不是在为缺乏精致、形式意识或庆祝意义的文学解读感到遗憾，而是指出批评家们无法为这些解读找到合理的理由，除非他们赋予这些作品一种反叛、质询或破坏的意图，而这种意图恰好反映了批评家的立场。负面的东西已经不可避免地、压倒性地成为了规范。
Moreover, even as contemporary theory prides itself on its exquisite self-consciousness, its relentless interrogation of fixed ideas, there is a sense in which the very adoption of such a stance is pre-conscious rather than freely made, choreographed rather than chosen, determined in advance by the pressure of institutional demands, intellectual prestige, and the status-seeking protocols of professional advancement. Which is simply to say that any savvy graduate student, when faced with what looks like a choice between knowingness and naïveté, will gravitate toward the former. This dichotomy, however, will turn out to be false; knowing is far from synonymous with knowingness, understood as a stance of permanent skepticism and sharply honed suspicion. At this point, we are all resisting readers; perhaps the time has come to resist the automatism of our own resistance, to risk alternate forms of aesthetic engagement.
当代理论虽然以其精致的自我意识和对固定观念的无情质疑而自豪，但在某种程度上，这种立场的采用并非是出于自由选择，而是受到制度压力、学术声望和职业晋升规范的预先设定。也就是说，任何聪明的研究生在面临“洞察力”与“天真”之间的选择时，都会倾向于选择前者。然而，这种二分法终将被证明是虚假的；洞察力与“洞察感”并不相同，后者是一种持续的怀疑和精心打磨的批判姿态。如今，我们都成了抵抗性的读者；或许现在是时候反思并抵抗我们这种自动化的抵抗，尝试冒险探索另一种审美参与的方式。
This manifesto, then, vocalizes some reasons for reading while trying to steer clear of positions that are, in Sedgwick’s words, “sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary.” It also strikes a path away from the dominant trends of what I will call theological and ideological styles of reading. By “theological” I mean any strong claim for literature’s other-worldly aspects, though usually in a secular rather than explicitly metaphysical sense. Simply put, literature is prized for its qualities of otherness, for turning its back on analytical and concept-driven styles of political or philosophical thought as well as our everyday assumptions and commonsense beliefs. We can find variations on such a stance in a wide range of critical positions, including Harold Bloom’s Romanticism, Kristeva’s avant-garde semiotics, and the current wave of Levinasian criticism. Such perspectives differ drastically in their worldview, their politics, and their methods of reading. What they share, nevertheless, is a conviction that literature is fundamentally different from the world and our other ways of making sense of that world, and that this difference – whether couched in the language of originality, singularity, alterity, untranslatability, or negativity – is the source of its value.
因此，这篇宣言发出了某些为阅读正名的声音，但同时也试图避免如塞奇威克所说的“软弱、唯美化、防御性、反智或反动的”立场。它试图为我称之为神学式和意识形态式的解读方法提供一种替代路径。所谓“神学式”，指的是任何赋予文学超凡性质的主张，尽管这些主张通常是世俗的，而非明确形而上学的。在这种观点下，文学因其与常识和概念性政治或哲学思维方式的背离而被珍视。无论是哈罗德·布鲁姆的浪漫主义、克里斯蒂娃的先锋派符号学，还是当下列维纳斯式的批评，这些立场之间虽然差异巨大，但它们都认为文学与世界及我们理解世界的方式之间存在着根本的不同，而这种不同——无论是以原创性、独特性、他者性、不可翻译性还是负面性为表述方式——正是文学的价值所在。
At first glance, this argument sounds like an ideal solution to the problem of justification. If we want to make a case for the importance of something, what better way to do so than by showcasing its uniqueness? Indeed, it would be hard to dispute the claim that literary works yield signs of distinctiveness, difference, and otherness. We can surely sympathize with Marjorie Perloff’s injunction to respect an artwork’s distinctive ontology rather than treating it as a confirmation of our own pet theories. Yet this insight often comes at considerable cost. Separating literature from everything around it, critics fumble to explain how works of art arise from and move back into the social world. Highlighting literature’s uniqueness, they overlook the equally salient realities of its connectedness. Applauding the ineffable and enigmatic qualities of works of art, they fail to do justice to the specific ways in which such works infiltrate and inform our lives. Faced with the disconcerting realization that people often turn to books for knowledge or entertainment, they can only lament the naïveté of those unable or unwilling to read literature “as literature.” To read in such a way, it turns out, means assenting to a view of art as impervious to comprehension, assimilation, or real-world consequences, perennially guarded by a forbidding “do not touch” sign, its value adjudicated by a culture of connoisseurship and a seminar-room sensibility anxious to ward off the grubby handprints and smears of everyday life. The case for literature’s significance, it seems, can only be made by showcasing its impotence.
乍一看，这种论点似乎提供了解决问题的理想方案。如果我们想为某物的重要性辩护，还有什么比展示它的独特性更好的方式呢？事实上，文学作品的确展示了独特性、差异性和他者性，这一点几乎无可争议。我们完全可以理解玛乔丽·佩洛夫主张我们应尊重艺术作品独特本体论的观点，而不是将其作为我们个人理论的证明。然而，这一洞见往往伴随着巨大的代价。在将文学与其周围的世界隔离开来时，批评家们常常难以解释艺术作品如何从社会中产生并重新融入社会。强调文学的独特性，他们忽视了它与现实的深层次联系。虽然他们称赞文学作品的神秘与无法言喻，却未能公正对待这些作品如何深入并影响我们生活的具体方式。面对许多人转向书籍只求获得知识或娱乐的这一现实，他们只能遗憾地感叹那些无法或不愿以“文学方式”阅读文学的人之天真。事实上，“以文学方式”阅读文学，意味着我们必须认同艺术本身不允许被理解、同化或与现实世界产生后果，永远被一块“禁止触摸”的标志守护着，其价值由精英文化和书斋的品鉴者所评判，防止日常生活的污渍玷污它的纯净。似乎只有通过展示文学的无力，才能为其重要性辩护。
Some critics, I realize, would strenuously object to such a description, preferring to see the otherness of literature as a source of its radical and transformative potential. Thomas Docherty, for example, has recently crafted a vigorous defense of literary alterity as the necessary ground for a genuinely democratic politics – that is to say, a politics that calls for an ongoing confrontation with the unknown. The literary work enables an encounter with the extraordinary, an imagining of the impossible, an openness to pure otherness, that is equipped with momentous political implications. There is certainly much to be said for the proposition that literature serves extra-aesthetic aims through its aesthetic features, yet these and similar claims for the radicalism of aesthetic form overlook those elements of familiarity, generic commonality, even predictability that shape, however subtly, all literary texts, not to mention the routinization and professionalization of literary studies that must surely compromise any rhetoric of subversion. Moreover, the paean to the radical otherness of the literary text invariably turns out to be driven by an impatience with everyday forms of experience and less avant-garde forms of reading, which are peremptorily chastised for the crudity of their hermeneutic maneuvers. The singularity of literature, it turns out, can only be secured by the homogenizing and lumping together of everything else.
我明白有些批评家会对此强烈反对，认为文学的他者性正是其激进与变革力量的来源。托马斯·多赫提最近为文学的他者性提出了有力的辩护，认为这是实现真正民主政治的基础，这种政治要求与未知持续对抗。文学作品使我们能够与非凡相遇，想象不可能，敞开对他者性的接受，这种开放性具有深远的政治影响。无疑，文学通过审美特质来服务于审美之外的目标的观点是有道理的，然而，这些关于审美形式激进性的主张常常忽略了所有文学文本中不可忽视的熟悉性、类型共性，甚至是可预测性，更不必提文学研究的常态化与专业化，后者不可避免地削弱了任何颠覆性修辞。此外，对文学他者性的赞美往往带着一种对日常经验的厌恶，这种厌恶又反映了对那些不属于先锋派的阅读形式的焦躁不满，而这些形式常常因其解读方式的粗陋而遭到斥责。最终，文学的独特性似乎只能通过对其他一切事物的同质化和集合化来维持。
Those critics drawn to the concept of ideology, by contrast, seek to place literature squarely in the social world. They insist that a text is always part of something larger; they highlight literature’s relationship to what it is not. Hence the tactical role of the concept of ideology, as a way of signaling a relation to a broader social whole. Yet this same idea also has the less happy effect of rendering the work of art secondary or supernumerary, a depleted resource deficient in insights that must be supplied by the critic. Whatever definition of ideology is being deployed (and I am aware that the term has undergone a labyrinthine history of twists and turns), its use implies that a text is being diagnosed rather than heard, relegated to the status of a symptom of social structures or political causes. The terms of interpretation are set elsewhere; the work is barred from knowing what the critic knows; it remains blind to its own collusion in oppressive social circumstances. Lennard Davis, in one of the most forceful expressions of the literature-as-ideology school, insists that the role of fiction is to shore up the status quo, to guard against radical aspirations, and ultimately to pull the wool over readers’ eyes. Yet even those critics who abjure any notion of false consciousness, who deem the condition of being in ideology to be eternal and inescapable, impute to their own analyses a grasp of social circumstance inherently more perspicacious than the text’s own.
相比之下，那些倾向于意识形态批评的批评家则主张，将文学作品置于社会现实之中是至关重要的。他们认为，任何文本都是更大社会体系的一部分，它与周围的世界不可分割。因此，意识形态的概念作为一种策略性工具，标示出作品与更广阔的社会整体之间的联系。然而，这一概念也有不尽如人意的一面，即它使得文学作品被降格为次要或附属的存在，认为作品无法提供足够的洞见，必须由批评家来补充。不论采用何种意识形态的定义（我明白这一术语的历史充满曲折），其使用通常意味着文本被视为一种社会结构或政治动因的症状，而非独立的艺术表现。文本的意义被他处的权威定义，它对社会合谋的盲目无知，而批评家却自认为掌握了更深刻的社会见解。伦纳德·戴维斯在其对文学作为意识形态的有力表述中断言，虚构作品的作用在于维护现状，防止激进变革，并最终蒙蔽读者的眼睛。即使是那些拒绝虚假意识概念的批评家，他们认为人们身处意识形态中是不可避免的，他们的分析也总是暗示，批评家比作品本身更能洞察社会现状。
Of course, the notion of ideology can also be applied in a laudatory, if slightly altered, sense, to hail a work’s affinity with feminism, or Marxism, or struggles against racism. Literature, in this view, is open to recruitment as a potential medium of political enlightenment and social transformation. Yet the difficulty of secondariness, indeed subordination, remains: the literary text is hauled in to confirm what the critic already knows, to illustrate what has been adjudicated in other arenas. My intent is not at all to minimize the value of asking political questions of works of art, but to ask what is lost when we deny a work any capacity to bite back, in Ellen Rooney’s phrase, to challenge or change our own beliefs and commitments. To define literature as ideology is to have decided ahead of time that literary works can be objects of knowledge but never sources of knowledge. It is to rule out of court the eventuality that a literary text could know as much, or more, than a theory.
当然，意识形态的概念也可以以一种不同的、肯定的方式使用，比如称赞一部作品与女权主义、马克思主义或反对种族主义的契合度。在这种视角下，文学成为了潜在的政治启蒙和社会变革的媒介。然而，“次要性”的问题依然存在：文学文本似乎只是为了验证批评家早已认定的理论结论而存在，成为他们所掌握的社会知识的附属品。我的意图并不是要轻视从政治角度审视文学的价值，而是想探讨，当我们将作品仅视为意识形态的反映，排除它可能对我们自身信仰产生挑战或改变时，我们究竟失去了什么。定义文学为意识形态，意味着我们预先决定了文学只能是知识的对象，而永远无法成为知识的来源。这样一来，我们排除了文学作品可能比批评理论知道得更多的可能性。
The current critical scene thus yields contrasting convictions on literature, value, and use. Ideological critics insist that works of literature, as things of this world, are always caught up in social hierarchies and struggles over power. The value of a text simply is its use, as measured by its role in either obscuring or accentuating social antagonisms. To depict art as apolitical or purposeless is simply, as Brecht famously contended, to ally oneself with the status quo. Theologically minded critics wince at such arguments, which they abjure as painfully reductive, wreaking violence on the qualities of aesthetic objects. Close at hand lies a deep reservoir of mistrust toward the idea of use; to measure the worth of something in terms of its utility, in this view, involves an alienating reduction of means to ends. Such mistrust can be voiced in many different registers: the language of Romantic aesthetics, the neo-Marxist critique of instrumental reason, the poststructuralist suspicion of identity thinking. What distinguishes literature, in this line of thought, is its obdurate resistance to all calculations of purpose and function.
因此，当前的批评场域中，关于文学、价值和用途的对立观点并存。意识形态批评家主张，文学作品作为现实世界的一部分，始终深陷于社会等级和权力斗争中。文本的价值就是其用途，通过其在凸显或掩盖社会对抗中的角色来衡量。布莱希特曾说，描绘艺术为非政治或无目的的做法无异于与现状站在同一阵营。而神学派批评家对这种观点感到不适，认为这种观点过于粗暴，破坏了艺术对象的美学特质。随之而来的是对“用途”概念的深刻不信任：从这种观点来看，用功能性来衡量某物的价值意味着将其异化为一种手段。这种不信任可以通过多种声音表达出来，包括浪漫主义美学、新马克思主义对工具理性的批判，以及后结构主义对同一性思维的怀疑。在这种思路下，文学的独特性恰恰在于它顽固地抵抗任何关于目的性和功能性的计算。
By calling my book “uses of literature,” I seem to have cast my lot with ideological criticism. In fact, I want to argue for an expanded understanding of “use” – one that offers an alternative to either strong claims for literary otherness or the whittling down of texts to the bare bones of political and ideological function. Such a notion of use allows us to engage the worldly aspects of literature in a way that is respectful rather than reductive, dialogic rather than high-handed. “Use” is not always strategic or purposeful, manipulative or grasping; it does not have to involve the sway of instrumental rationality or a willful blindness to complex form. I venture that aesthetic value is inseparable from use, but also that our engagements with texts are extraordinarily varied, complex, and often unpredictable in kind. The pragmatic, in this sense, neither destroys not excludes the poetic. To propose that the meaning of literature lies in its use is to open up for investigation a vast terrain of practices, expectations, emotions, hopes, dreams, and interpretations – a terrain that is, in William James’s words, “multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed.”
我的书名《文学的用途》似乎把我归入了意识形态批评的阵营。实际上，我想为“用途”提出一种更广泛的理解——这种理解为文学他者性和将文学简化为意识形态功能的两种对立观点提供了一条替代路径。这种关于用途的观点，允许我们以一种尊重而非简化的方式与文学的现实层面对话，以一种对话式而非居高临下的态度对待它。“用途”不必总是具有战略性或目的性，它不一定涉及工具理性或对复杂形式的视而不见。我大胆地提出，审美价值与用途密不可分，同时我们与文本的互动方式是多样且不可预测的。按这种理解，实用性并不会破坏诗意。认为文学的意义在于它的用途，就是打开了一片广阔的实践、期望、情感、梦想与解释的领域——一个如威廉·詹姆斯所说“多元复杂、混乱纠结、痛苦且令人困惑”的领域。
I am always bemused, in this context, to hear critics assert that literary works serve no evident purpose, even as their engagement with such works patently showcases their critical talents, gratifies their intellectual and aesthetic interests, and, in the crassest sense, furthers their careers. How can art ever exist outside a many-sided play of passions and purposes? Conversely, those anxious to locate literature’s essential qualities in well-defined ideological agendas lay themselves open to methodological objections of various stripes. It is not that such critics overlook form in favor of theme and content, as conservatives like to complain; schooled by decades of semiotics and poststructuralist theory, they are often scrupulously alert to nuances of language, structure, and style. Difficulties arise, however, when critics try to force an equivalence of textual structures with social structures, to assert a necessary causality between literary forms and larger political effects. In this context, we see frequent attempts to endow literary works with what Amanda Anderson calls aggrandized agency, to portray them as uniquely powerful objects, able to single-handedly impose coercive regimes of power or to unleash insurrectionary surges of resistance.
在这一语境下，当批评家断言文学作品没有明显目的时，我总是感到困惑，因为他们与这些作品的互动显然展现了他们的批评才华，满足了他们的智识与审美兴趣，甚至推动了他们的学术事业。艺术如何能脱离这场多方面的激情与目的的博弈？反过来，那些希望将文学的本质特征限定在某些意识形态议程中的批评家，又暴露了诸多方法论问题。问题并不在于这些批评家如保守派所抱怨的那样，忽视了形式而只关注主题和内容；事实上，他们常常对语言、结构和风格的细微差别非常敏感。然而，当他们试图将文本结构与社会结构划上等号，或断言文学形式与更广泛的政治效果之间存在必然因果关系时，问题便出现了。我们经常看到批评家试图赋予文学作品所谓的“夸大作用”，认为它们能够单凭自身推翻压迫性权力结构，或激发起反抗的力量。
In some cases, to be sure, literary works can boast a measurable social impact. In my first book, I made what I still find a plausible case for the role of feminist fiction of the 1970s and 1980s in altering political and cultural attitudes and creating what I called a counter-public sphere. But when we look at many of the works that literary critics like to read, it is often far from self-evident what role such works play in either initiating or inhibiting social change. Stripped of any direct links to oppositional movements, marked by often uneasy relations to centers of power, their politics are revealed as oblique and equivocal, lending themselves to alternative, even antithetical readings. Texts, furthermore, lack the power to legislate their own effects; the internal features of a literary work tell us little about how it is received and understood, let alone its impact, if any, on a larger social field. Political function cannot be deduced or derived from literary structure. As cultural studies and reception studies have amply shown, aesthetic objects may acquire very different meanings in altered contexts; the transactions between texts and readers are varied, contingent, and often unpredictable.
毫无疑问，某些文学作品的确在社会中产生了可以量化的影响。在我的第一本书中，我曾为20世纪70至80年代的女权主义小说如何改变了政治文化态度、并创造了所谓的“反公共领域”提供了一个我至今仍认为站得住脚的论点。然而，当我们观察很多文学批评家钟爱的作品时，这些作品在推动或阻碍社会变革中的作用往往并不那么明显。它们与反对运动缺乏直接联系，与权力中心保持着一种不稳定的关系，它们的政治意图往往显得模棱两可，甚至可以被解读为相互矛盾的含义。文本本身无法规定其影响，文学作品的内在特质并不足以告诉我们它是如何被接受、理解的，更无法告诉我们它是否对更广泛的社会领域产生了影响。正如文化研究和接受理论所显示的那样，审美对象在不同语境中可能获得完全不同的意义；文本与读者之间的互动多种多样，充满了偶然性，难以预测。
None of this, perhaps, sounds especially new or controversial. Aren’t many of us trying to weave our way between the Scylla of political functionalism and the Charybdis of art for art’s sake, striving to do justice to the social meanings of artworks without slighting their aesthetic power? One of the happier consequences of the historical turn in criticism has been the crafting of more flexible and finely tuned accounts of how literature is embedded in the world. Ato Quayson offers one such account in describing the literary work as a form of aesthetic particularity that is also a threshold, opening out onto other levels of cultural and sociopolitical life. I am also thinking of my own field, feminist criticism, which has stringently reassessed many of its arguments over recent years. Rather than imputing an invariant kernel of feminist or misogynist content to literary texts, critics nowadays are more inclined to highlight their mutating and conflicting meanings. A heightened attentiveness to the details of milieu and moment and to the multifarious ways in which gender and literature interconnect allows such readings to withstand the charges of reductionism that can be leveled at more sweeping theories of social context.
这些观点或许并不新颖或具争议性。我们中很多人正努力在政治功能主义的斯库拉与为艺术而艺术的卡律布狄斯之间找到一条中间路径，既公正对待作品的社会意义，同时又不轻视其审美力量。历史转向带来的一个令人高兴的结果是，批评家们开始形成更加灵活且细致的方式，来解读文学如何嵌入现实世界。阿托·夸森提出了这样的观点，他将文学作品描述为一种美学的独特性，同时也是一座桥梁，通向其他层面的文化与社会政治生活。我也想到女权主义批评，它在近年来对自身的许多论点进行了严格的重新评估。批评家们不再倾向于赋予文学作品固定的女权主义或厌女症内容，而是更加关注这些作品在不同时代的多重与冲突的意义。这种对环境、时刻，以及性别与文学之间多重交织方式的更加敏锐的关注，能够更好地抵御对简单化的社会背景理论的批评。
Such historically attuned approaches strike me as infinitely more fruitful than the attempt to force a union between aesthetics and politics, to write as if literary forms or genres bear within them an essential and inviolable ideological core. Taking their cue from Foucault, they circumvent the problem of secondariness by treating literary texts as formative in their own right, as representations that summon up new ways of seeing rather than as echoes or distortions of predetermined political truths. Espousing what cultural studies calls a politics of articulation, they show how the meanings of texts change as they hook up with different interests and interpretive communities. Moreover, such neo-historical approaches have also shown a willingness to attend to the affective aspects of reading, to ponder the distinctive qualities of particular structures of feeling, and to recover, through their engagement with forms such as melodrama and the sentimental novel, lost histories of aesthetic response.
这种更加与历史相关的批评方法，比试图强行将美学与政治结合的做法要有成效得多，因为后一种方法通常假设文学形式或体裁内在于某种不可动摇的意识形态核心。受福柯的启发，这些批评方法通过将文学作品视为自身成型的表征，绕开了次要性的问题，将其看作是召唤出新的认知方式的表现，而非既定政治真理的回声或扭曲。它们所奉行的是文化研究中的“表达政治学”，展示了文本的意义如何随着不同的利益和解读群体而发生变化。此外，这些新历史方法也表现出愿意关注阅读的情感层面，仔细探究某些特定的情感结构，并通过对诸如通俗剧和感伤小说等体裁的研究，恢复某些被遗忘的审美反应历史。
Yet every method has its sins of omission as well as commission, things that it is simply unable to see or do. As a method, we might say, historical criticism encourages a focus on the meanings of texts for others: the work is anchored at its point of origin, defined in relation to a past interplay of interests and forces, discourses and audiences. Of course, every critic nowadays recognizes that we can never hope to recreate the past “as it really was,” that our vision of history is propelled, at least in part, by the desires and needs of the present. Yet interpretation still pivots around a desire to capture, as adequately as possible, the cultural sensibility of a past moment, and literature’s meaning in that moment.
然而，每种方法都有其盲点和局限之处，有些事它们看不到，也无法做到。作为一种方法，我们可以说，历史批评倾向于关注作品对他人的意义：作品被固定在它的诞生时刻，其意义被解释为与过去的力量、利益、话语和受众相关。当然，批评家们如今普遍意识到，我们无法再现过去的真实面貌，我们的历史视角至少部分是由当下的欲望与需求所推动的。然而，历史性分析的核心仍是试图尽可能充分地捕捉某一历史时刻的文化感受力，以及文学在那一刻的意义。
One consequence of such historical embedding is that the critic is absolved of the need to think through her own relationship to the text she is reading. Why has this work been chosen for interpretation? How does it speak to me now? What is its value in the present? To focus only on a work’s origins is to side-step the question of its appeal to the present-day reader. It is, in a Nietzschean sense, to use history as an alibi, a way of circumventing the question of one’s own attachments, investments, and vulnerabilities as a reader. The text cannot speak, insofar as it is already spoken for by an accumulation of historical evidence. Yet the cumulative force of its past associations, connotations, and effects by no means exhausts a work’s power of address. What of its ability to traverse temporal boundaries and to generate new and unanticipated resonances, including those that cannot be predicted by its original circumstances? Our conventional modes of historical criticism, observes Wai Chee Dimock, “cannot say why this text might still matter in the present, why, distanced from its original period, it nonetheless continues to signify, continues to invite other readings.”
这种历史性嵌入的后果之一是，批评家不再需要思考自己与所解读文本之间的关系。为什么选择解读这部作品？它现在对我有什么意义？它在当下的价值何在？只关注作品的起源等于回避了它对当代读者的吸引力。从尼采的角度来看，这是一种“历史作为托辞”的做法，批评家绕开了他们作为读者所持有的情感投入与兴趣。文本不能发声，因为它的发言权早已被一连串的历史证据所代言。然而，作品过去的关联、内涵和影响的累积力量并不能穷尽其当下的召唤力。它如何跨越时间的界限，产生新的、出乎意料的共鸣——尤其是那些无法通过它的原始语境来预测的共鸣——这一点又该如何解释？怀契·迪莫克指出，我们的传统历史批评“无法解释为何一部作品在当下依然重要，无法解释为何它即便脱离了原有的历史时期，仍然能够继续产生意义，并继续邀请新的解读”。
Such questions become especially salient when we venture beyond the sphere of academic criticism. Most readers, after all, have no interest in the fine points of literary history; when they pick up a book from the past, they do so in the hope that it will speak to them in the present. And the teaching of literature in schools and universities still pivots, in the last analysis, around an individual encounter with a text. While students nowadays are likely to be informed about critical debates and literary theories, they are still expected to find their own way into a literary work, not to parrot the interpretations of others. What, then, is the nature of that encounter? What intellectual or affective responses are involved? Any attempt to clarify the value of literature must surely engage the diverse motives of readers and ponder the mysterious event of reading, yet contemporary theories give us poor guidance on such questions. We are sorely in need of richer and deeper accounts of how selves interact with texts.
这些问题在我们超出学术批评的范围时显得尤为突出。毕竟，大多数读者对文学史的细枝末节并不感兴趣；他们选择阅读过去的作品，是因为希望它能够在当下对他们有所启发。而文学在学校和大学中的教学，归根结底仍是围绕着个体与文本的相遇展开的。虽然今天的学生可能会被要求了解批评争论和文学理论，但他们仍被期待在文学作品中找到属于自己的路径，而非仅仅重复他人的解读。那么，这种相遇的本质是什么？其中涉及到什么样的知识或情感反应？任何试图阐明文学价值的努力，都必然需要深入探讨读者多样的动机，并思考阅读这一神秘的过程。然而，当代理论在这些问题上给我们提供的指导却相当匮乏。我们迫切需要更加丰富、更加深入的论述，来解释自我如何与文本互动。
To be sure, it is axiomatic nowadays that interpretation is never neutral or objective, but always shaped by what critics like to call the reader’s “subject position.” Yet the models of selfhood on hand in contemporary criticism suffer from an overly schematic imperative, as critics strain to calculate the relative impact exercised by pressures of gender, race, sexuality, and the like, in order to recruit literature in the drama of asserting or subverting such categories. The making and unmaking of identity, however, while a theme much loved by contemporary critics, is not a rubric well equipped to capture the sheer thickness of subjectivity or the mutability of aesthetic response. Nor is psychoanalysis, with its built-in machinery of diagnosis and causal explanation, especially well suited for fine-grained descriptions of the affective attachments and cognitive reorientations that characterize the experience of reading a book or watching a film. The issue here is by no means one of evading or transcending the political; rather, any “textual politics” worth its weight will have to work its way through the particularities of aesthetic experience rather than bypassing them.
诚然，今天我们已普遍接受，解读从来不是中立或客观的，而是总是受到批评家们所称的“读者的主位”影响。然而，当代批评中现有的自我模型过于程式化，批评家们往往试图计算性别、种族、性取向等因素的相对影响，以便将文学纳入这些类别的建构或颠覆的戏剧中。尽管身份的建构与解构是当代批评的核心主题，但这一框架并不足以捕捉主体性的丰富性或审美反应的可变性。精神分析也并未提供适合细致描述阅读一本书或观看一部电影时所经历的情感投入与认知变化的工具。问题的关键并不是回避或超越政治，而是任何值得重视的“文本政治”都必须通过审美经验的具体性来展开，而不是绕开它。
In this regard, John Guillory helps us to see that what look like political disagreements often say more about the schism between academic criticism and lay reading. Scholarly reading, he points out, is an activity shaped by distinctive conditions and expectations. It is a form of work, compensated for by salary and other forms of recognition; it is a disciplinary activity governed by conventions of interpretation and research developed over decades; it espouses vigilance, standing back from the pleasure of reading to encourage critical reflection; it is a communal practice, subject to the judgment of other professional readers. Guillory’s point is not at all to lament or bemoan these facts, which have allowed literary study to define and sustain itself as a scholarly field. It is rather to underscore that they exercise an intense, if often invisible, pressure on the day-to-day practice of literary critics, however avant-garde or politically progressive they claim to be. The ethos of academic reading diverges significantly from lay reading; the latter is a leisure activity, it is shaped by differing conventions of interpretation, it is undertaken voluntarily and for pleasure, and is often a solitary practice. The failure to acknowledge the implications of these differences goes a long way toward explaining the communicative mishaps between scholars of literature and the broader public. That one person immerses herself in the joys of Jane Eyre, while another views it as a symptomatic expression of Victorian imperialism, often has less to do with the political beliefs of those involved than their position in different scenes of readings.
在这一点上，约翰·吉洛里帮助我们认识到，所谓的政治分歧常常更多地反映了学术批评与普通读者阅读之间的鸿沟。吉洛里指出，学术阅读是一种由特定条件和期望所塑造的活动。它是一种工作，有薪资和其他形式的认可作为回报；它是一项学科活动，受到几十年形成的解读和研究惯例的规范；它倡导警惕，要求从阅读的愉悦中退一步，以鼓励批判性反思；它是一种共同体实践，受到其他专业读者的评判。吉洛里并不认为这些事实值得哀叹或批判，正是这些条件使文学研究得以确立和维系为一门学术领域。他的目的是强调，尽管很多批评家自称先锋派或政治进步，学术阅读的这种特殊规范仍然对他们的日常实践施加了强大的、往往无形的影响。学术阅读与普通阅读之间存在着显著的差异：普通阅读是一种休闲活动，受到不同解读惯例的影响，通常是自愿进行的，并且为了愉悦而阅读，往往是一种个人的、独处的行为。未能认识到这些差异，正是学者与更广泛公众之间许多沟通障碍的根源。一个人可能沉浸在《简·爱》的阅读乐趣中，另一个人则可能将其视为维多利亚帝国主义的病态表现，这种分歧往往与他们的政治信仰无关，而更多地与他们身处的不同阅读场景有关。
As Guillory acknowledges, this distinction is not a dichotomy; professional critics were once lay readers, after all, while the tenets of academic criticism often filter down, via the classroom, to larger audiences. Yet literary theorists patrol the boundaries of their field with considerable alacrity and enthusiasm. Take, for example, the idea of recognition: the widespread belief that we learn something about ourselves in the act of reading. Theological criticism responds with alarm, insisting that any act of recognition cannot help but do violence to the alterity of the literary work. Ideological criticism is equally censorious, insisting that any apparent recognition be demoted without further ado to an instance of misrecognition. Both styles of criticism, we should note, are propelled by a deep-seated discomfort with everyday language and thought, a conviction that commonsense beliefs exist only to be unmasked and found wanting.
正如吉洛里所指出的，这种区分并非泾渭分明；毕竟，职业批评家本身也曾是普通读者，而学术批评的某些信条也通过课堂传递给了更广泛的读者群。然而，文学理论家们仍然以相当的敏锐和热情守护其领域的界限。以“认同”这一概念为例：我们普遍认为，通过阅读，我们能够学到一些关于自我的东西。神学批评对此感到不安，认为任何认同行为都会对文学作品的他者性造成伤害。意识形态批评同样感到焦虑，他们迅速将任何表面上的认同贬低为一种“误认”。这两种批评风格，都受到一种深深的不信任驱使——它们对日常语言和思想充满警觉，坚信常识信念只存在于被揭穿并被发现不足。
It is here that I would stake a claim for the distinctiveness of my argument. Rather than pitting literary theory against common knowledge, I hope to build better bridges between them. This is not because I endorse every opinion expressed in the name of common sense – quite the contrary – but because theoretical reflection is powered by, and indebted to, many of the same motives and structures that shape everyday thinking, so that any disavowal of such thinking must reek of bad faith. In retrospect, much of the grand theory of the last three decades now looks like the last gasp of an Enlightenment tradition of rois philosophes persuaded that the realm of speculative thought would absolve them of the shameful ordinariness of a messy, mundane, error-prone existence. Moreover, the various jeremiads against commodification, carceral regimes of power, and the tyranny of received ideas and naturalized ideologies mesh all too comfortably with an ingrained Romantic tradition of anti-worldliness in literary studies. In idealizing an autonomous, difficult art as the only source of resistance to such repressive regimes, they also shortchange the heterogeneous, and politically variable, uses of literary texts in daily life.
正是在这一点上，我为自己的论点划定了独特性。我的目标不是将文学理论与常识对立起来，而是希望在二者之间架设更好的桥梁。这并不是因为我支持以常识名义表达的每一种观点——事实上并非如此——而是因为理论反思本身依赖于、并借鉴了与日常思维相同的动机与结构，因此完全拒绝日常思维必然显得虚伪。回顾过去，过去三十年中的许多宏大理论如今看来更像是启蒙传统的“哲学国王们”的最后喘息，他们坚信抽象思维的领地能够使他们免受杂乱无章、充满错误的日常生活的困扰。此外，反对商品化、反对权力体制和揭露自然化意识形态暴政的种种抱怨，与文学研究中根深蒂固的浪漫主义反世俗倾向密切相关。在将自主、晦涩的艺术理想化为唯一能够抵抗压迫力量的途径时，这些批评家也忽略了文学文本在日常生活中所具有的异质且政治多变的功能。
What follows is in this sense the quintessential un-manifesto; it demurs from the vanguardist sensibility that continues to characterize much literary theory, even as the concept of the avant-garde has lost much of its credibility. There is no compelling reason why the practice of theory requires us to go behind the backs of ordinary persons in order to expose their beliefs as deluded or delinquent. Indeed, the contemporary intellectual scene also yields an assortment of traditions – pragmatism, cultural studies, Habermasian theory, ordinary language philosophy – that address the limits of scholarly skepticism and that conceive of everyday thinking as an indispensable resource rather than a zone of dull compulsion and self-deception. What would it mean to take this idea and place it at the heart of literary theory?
因此，这篇文章可以被看作一种典型的“非宣言”；它避开了仍然主导当代文学理论的先锋派精神，尽管先锋派的概念已失去大部分的可信度。理论实践没有任何正当理由要求我们绕开普通人，去揭露他们的信念是错误的或被误导的。事实上，当代的知识场域中也涌现出诸如实用主义、文化研究、哈贝马斯理论以及日常语言哲学等传统，它们关注学术怀疑论的局限性，并将日常思维视为不可或缺的资源，而非令人厌倦的强制性领域。将这一理念置于文学理论的核心，会产生什么样的影响呢？
Among other things, it calls on us to engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading – such as the desire for knowledge or the longing for escape – that are either overlooked or undervalued in literary scholarship. While rarely acknowledged, however, such motives also retain a shadowy presence among the footnotes and fortifications of academic prose. The use of the term “reading” in literary studies to encompass quite disparate activities, from turning the pages of a paperback novel to elaborate exegeses published in PMLA, glosses over their many differences. The latter reading constitutes a writing, a public performance subject to a host of gate-keeping practices and professional norms: a premium on novelty and deft displays of counter-intuitive interpretive ingenuity, the obligation to reference key scholars in the field, rapidly changing critical vocabularies, and the tacit prohibition of certain stylistic registers. This practice often has little in common with the commentary a teacher carries out in the classroom, or with what goes through her mind when she reads a book in an armchair, at home. Published academic criticism, in other words, is not an especially reliable or comprehensive guide to the ways in which academics read. We are less theoretically pure than we think ourselves to be; hard-edged poses of suspicion and skepticism jostle against more mundane yet more variegated responses. My argument is not a populist defense of folk reading over scholarly interpretation, but an elucidation of how, in spite of their patent differences, they share certain affective and cognitive parameters.
其中一个影响是，它要求我们认真对待那些通常被学术界忽视或低估的普通阅读动机——例如对知识的渴望或对逃避现实的向往。然而，这些动机尽管很少被公开承认，却在学术批评的脚注和防御体系中潜藏着。文学研究使用“阅读”一词涵盖了完全不同的活动——从翻阅一本平装小说到发表在《美国现代语言学协会会刊》上的详细解读文章，这掩盖了两者之间的巨大差异。后者的阅读实际上是一种写作，是一种公共表演，受到许多守门行为和专业规范的制约：对新奇性的追求，对反直觉解读的巧妙展示，对引用关键学者的义务，以及对某些风格语调的隐性禁止。这种阅读实践，往往与教师在课堂上的评论，或她在家中舒适地坐在扶手椅上阅读一本书时的个人体验并无太多共同之处。换句话说，发表在学术期刊上的批评文章，并不是学者们实际阅读方式的特别可靠或全面的指南。我们并不像自己想象的那样理论上纯粹；冷酷的怀疑姿态与更为丰富多样的日常反应交织并存。我的论点并不是要为“民间阅读”辩护，也不是要否定学术解读，而是阐明二者尽管存在显著差异，但它们在情感与认知的某些基本层面上具有共同性。
In the following pages, I proposes that reading involves a logic of recognition; that aesthetic experience has analogies with enchantment in a supposedly disenchanted age; that literature creates distinctive configurations of social knowledge; that we may value the experience of being shocked by what we read. These four categories epitomize what I call modes of textual engagement: they are neither intrinsic literary properties nor independent psychological states, but denote multi-leveled interactions between texts and readers that are irreducible to their separate parts. Such modes of engagement are woven into modern histories of self-formation and transformation, even as the very variability of their uses militates against a calculus that would pare them down to a single political purpose.
在接下来的篇幅中，我提出了四种文本参与模式：认同的逻辑；审美体验如何在一个据说已经“去魅”的时代与魅惑产生类比；文学如何创造独特的社会知识结构；以及为何我们有时会珍视一种被文本震撼的阅读体验。这四个类别可以归为我所谓的“文本参与模式”：它们既不是文学的内在特质，也不是读者的独立心理状态，而是文本与读者之间多层次互动的结果，这种互动无法被简化为它们的各个组成部分。这些参与模式编织进了现代自我形成与转变的历史，尽管它们的多样性和不可预测性使得我们不可能将它们归结为单一的政治目的。
Readers will detect in these terms the shadowy presence of some venerable aesthetic categories (anagnorisis, beauty, mimesis, the sublime), to which I hope nevertheless to give a fresh spin. These four categories are obviously neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive: I separate for the sake of analytical clarity strands of aesthetic response that are frequently intertwined and even interfused. But I hold fast to the view that any account of why people read must operate on several different fronts, that we should relinquish, once and for all, the pursuit of a master concept, a key to all the mythologies. As soon as critics insist that the role of literature really is to inspire aesthetic rapture, or to encourage moral reflection and self-scrutiny, or to act as a force-field transforming relations of power, it is all too easy to come up with countless examples of forms or genres that do the exact opposite.
在这些术语中，细心的读者可能会察觉到某些古老的审美范畴（如“认知”“美”“模仿”“崇高”）的影子，尽管我试图为这些范畴赋予新的意义。这四个类别显然既不具有穷尽性，也并非彼此互相排斥；为了分析的清晰性，我将那些通常交织在一起的审美反应模式分离出来。但我仍坚持认为，任何探讨人们为何阅读的理论都必须在多个层面上展开讨论，彻底放弃追求“终极概念”的幻想，那种能解开所有谜团的万能钥匙。一旦批评家们坚持文学的真正功能是激发审美狂喜，或鼓励道德反思与自我审视，或作为变革权力关系的力量场域时，就很容易找到无数反例来证明某些形式或体裁的作品根本没有达到这些目的。
While ordinary intuitions are a valuable starting point for reflecting on why literature matters, it is far from self-evident what such intuitions signify. The mundane, on closer inspection, often turns out to be exceptionally mysterious. The purpose of literary criticism, if it has any pretension to being a scholarly field, cannot be to echo what non-academic readers already know. A respect for everyday perceptions is entirely compatible with a commitment to theory; such perceptions give us questions to pursue, not answers. What follows bears little relationship, I hope, to the strain of anti-intellectualism that animates literary studies in its darkest hours, the surrendering to intuition, charisma, and an all-encompassing love of literature.
虽然普通读者的直觉是思考文学为何重要的宝贵起点，但这种直觉究竟意味着什么远非显而易见。仔细审视后，日常事物常常显得异常神秘。如果文学批评希望成为一门学术领域，它的目标绝不能仅仅是重复非学术读者早已知道的东西。对日常感知的尊重与理论的承诺完全可以相互兼容；日常感知为我们提供了追问的路径，而非现成的答案。我希望接下来的内容能摆脱文学研究中最黑暗时期的反智倾向——屈从于直觉、魅力与对文学的盲目热爱。
I also dissent from some recent reclamations of aesthetic experiences that champion the affective over the rational, the sensual over the conceptual, and intrinsic over extrinsic meaning. I retain enough of my sociological convictions to believe that aesthetic pleasure is never unmediated or intrinsic, that even our most inchoate and seemingly ineffable responses are shaped by dispositions transmitted through education and culture. I am also not persuaded that justifying the value of aesthetic experience requires a full-scale repudiation of conceptual or political thought. The pleasures of literature are often tied up with epistemic gains and insights into our social being, insights that are rooted in, rather than at odds with, its distinctive uses and configurations of language. My aim is to give equal weight to cognitive and affective aspects of aesthetic response; any theory worth its salt surely needs to ponder how literature changes our understanding of ourselves and the world as well as its often visceral impact on our psyche.
我也不同意近来某些美学体验的重新定义，这些定义试图提升情感而贬低理性，强调感性而忽视概念，赞美内在意义而贬低外在解释。我依然保留足够的社会学信念，认为审美愉悦从来不是未加中介的或内在的，即便是我们最深刻且看似无法言喻的反应，也都是在文化与教育的熏陶下形成的。我也不认为为审美体验的价值辩护需要全面拒绝概念性或政治性思维。文学的愉悦常常与认知的收获以及对社会存在的洞见密不可分，而这些洞见根植于其独特的语言与形式中，而非与之对立。我试图在审美反应的认知与情感维度之间找到一种平衡；任何有价值的理论必然需要思考文学如何改变我们对自我与世界的理解，以及它如何在情感上对我们产生冲击。
My argument also injects a modest dose of phenomenology into current theoretical debates. I refer to phenomenology with a degree of trepidation; as far as I can tell, my approach has very little in common with Husserl or the Geneva school. Nor have I found much guidance in the phenomenological wing of reader-response theory; while scholars like Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden usefully highlight the interactive nature of reading, they assume a highly formalist model of aesthetic response as a universal template for talking about how readers respond to books. Their imagined readers are curiously bloodless and disembodied, stripped of all passions as well as of ethical or political commitments. They conform, in other words, to a notably one-sided ideal of the academic or professional reader. I simply do not share the view that formal ambiguity, irony, and the unsettling of familiar schemata are always the highest aesthetic values and the only reasons why we look to literary texts.
我的论点还试图向当下的理论讨论注入一丝现象学的视角。提到现象学，我心中不免忐忑；就我所知，我的观点与胡塞尔或日内瓦学派几乎没有任何共通之处。我也未能从现象学派的读者反应理论中找到多少启发；尽管如沃尔夫冈·伊瑟尔和罗曼·英加登等学者强调了阅读的互动性，但他们假设了一种高度形式主义的审美反应模型，作为解释读者如何回应文本的普遍框架。他们想象中的读者显得冷漠、无血无肉，没有激情，也没有伦理或政治承诺。换句话说，他们描述的读者更像是学术界理想中的读者，而我对此并不认同。
Nor do I buy into the idea of what phenomenologists like to call transcendental reduction, the attempt to strip off the surface accouterments of cultural and historical difference in order to access a core subjectivity. We cannot shrug off our prejudices, beliefs and assumptions; self and society are always interfused; there is no clear place where one ends and the other begins. Subjectivity is always caught up with intersubjectivity, personal experience awash with social and political meanings. I concur with Ricoeur’s recasting of phenomenology as the interpretation of symbols rather than the intuition of essences, as well as his insistence that the self is always already another, formed at its core through the mediating force of stories, metaphors, myths and images. My approach, like Ricoeur’s, is best described as an impure or hybrid phenomenology that latches onto, rather than superseding, my historical commitments.
我同样不认同所谓的“先验还原”——这一现象学概念试图剥离文化与历史差异的表层，来接触某种核心的主体性。我们无法摆脱自己的偏见、信念和假设；自我与社会始终相互交织，个人经验中充满了社会与政治的意义。我赞同保罗·利科对现象学的重新定义——他将现象学视为符号的解释，而非本质的直观；他坚持认为，自我始终是另一个自我，其核心是通过故事、隐喻、神话与意象等媒介力量构建的。我的方法与利科的最为接近，可以称之为一种“混合现象学”，它与我对历史的承诺紧密相连，而非取代这种承诺。
What I find valuable about phenomenology is its attentiveness to the first person perspective, to the ways in which phenomena disclose themselves to the self. Phenomenology insists that the world is always the world as it appears to us, as it is filtered through our consciousness, perception, and judgment. We can learn to question our own beliefs; we can come to see that our seemingly spontaneous reactions are shaped by cultural pressures; we can acknowledge, in short, the historicity of our experience. And yet we cannot vault outside our own vantage point, as the inescapable and insuperable condition for our being in the world. Phenomenology encourages us to zoom in and look closely at what this condition of being-a-self involves. Such scrutiny, it seems to me, does not require any belief in the autonomy or wholeness of persons, nor a disavowal of the obscurity or opacity of aspects of consciousness. Everyday attitudes are neither invalidated (as they are in poststructuralism and much political criticism) nor are they taken as self-explanatory (as in humanist criticism, with its unexamined use of terms such as “self” or “value”); rather they become worthy of investigation in all their many-sidedness. Thus the titles of my chapters name quite ordinary structures of experience that are also political, philosophical, and aesthetic concepts fanning out into complex histories.
我认为现象学的价值在于它对第一人称视角的重视——对现象如何呈现给自我的关注。现象学主张，世界总是我们所感知到的世界，它经过我们的意识、知觉与判断的过滤。我们可以学会质疑自己的信仰；我们可以认识到自己看似自发的反应实际上是被文化力量塑造的；我们可以承认自己的经验具有历史性。然而，我们无法摆脱自我视角的局限，这是我们存在于世界中的不可避免且无法超越的条件。现象学鼓励我们深入探讨“作为一个自我”究竟意味着什么。这样的探讨并不需要我们相信人类主体的自主性或整体性，也不要求我们否认自我意识中的模糊性或困惑。日常态度既不会像后结构主义或很多政治批评中那样被否定，也不会像传统人文主义批评中那样被视为理所当然的（例如对“自我”或“价值”等术语的未经批判使用）；相反，它们值得被更加深入地探究。因此，我在每章中所探讨的现象学结构，既命名了某些看似普通的经验范畴，同时也指向它们在政治、哲学与美学领域中的复杂历史展开。
How can such an injection of phenomenology deepen our sense of the aesthetics and politics of the literary text? “Back to the things themselves” was phenomenology’s famous rallying cry: the insistence that we need to learn to see – to really see – what lies right under our noses. We are called on, in other words, to do justice to how readers respond to the words they encounter, rather than relying on textbook theories or wishful speculations about what reading is supposed to be. The Kantian legacy has not been helpful here: Kant was intent on developing a theory of natural beauty rather than a full-blown definition of art, and subsequent interpretations of his ideas have encouraged a misleading conflation of the aesthetic with the artistic. The mode of perception valued by Kantians – a single-minded attention to form, beauty, or expressive design that is conventionally called “aesthetic” – is one possible response to artworks, but hardly an essential or exclusive one. This is not at all to deny that art attains a degree of autonomy in modernity, but to underscore that this process is more uneven, ambivalent, conflictual, and qualified than is often acknowledged. A phenomenology of reading calls for an undogmatic openness to a spectrum of literary responses; that some of these responses are not currently sanctioned in the annals of professional criticism does not render them any less salient.
那么，这种现象学的关注如何能够加深我们对文学作品审美与政治维度的理解？现象学最著名的口号是“回到事物本身”：它要求我们真正看到那些就在我们面前的事物。换句话说，这意味着我们要公正对待读者在面对文本时的反应，而不是依赖教科书中的理论或对阅读应当是什么样的臆断。康德主义的遗产在这一点上并无帮助：康德专注于发展自然美学的理论，而非对艺术的全面定义，而其思想的后续诠释则鼓励了美学与艺术混淆的错误倾向。康德主义者所推崇的感知方式——对形式、表现设计与美的关注——传统上被视为“审美的”反应，是一种可能的艺术回应方式，但绝非唯一的或必要的反应。强调这一点并不是为了否认艺术在现代性中达到了某种自主性，而是为了指出，这一过程比我们通常认为的更加不均衡、复杂、充满矛盾与冲突。阅读的现象学要求我们对文学反应的多样性保持开放态度；其中一些反应不被当今学术批评所认可，但这并不意味着它们不再重要。
Moreover, a dose of phenomenology allows for a notably less wishful account of the political work that texts can do. Literary critics love to assign exceptional powers to the texts they read, to write as if the rise of the novel were single-handedly responsible for the formation of bourgeois subjects or to assume that subversive currents of social agitation will flow, as if by fiat, from their favorite piece of performance art. Texts, however, are unable to act directly on the world, but only via the intercession of those who read them. These readers are heterogeneous and complex microcosms: socially sculpted yet internally regulated complexes of beliefs and sentiments, of patterns of inertia and impulses toward innovation, of cultural commonalities interwoven with quirky predispositions. In the two-way transaction we call reading, texts pass through densely woven filters of interpretation and affective orientation that both enable and limit their impact. Zooming in to scrutinize the many-sided and multiply determined act of reading cannot help but reveal that the effects of literature are neither as transfigurative as aesthetes like to claim nor as ruthlessly authoritarian as some radicals want to insist.
此外，现象学的介入还允许我们以一种不那么理想化的方式去理解文学能够进行的政治工作。文学批评家们热衷于赋予他们所阅读的文本以非凡的力量，声称小说的兴起几乎单枪匹马地塑造了资产阶级主体，或假定社会动荡的颠覆性力量将从他们钟爱的戏剧或诗歌作品中自然地涌现。然而，文本无法直接对现实世界产生作用，它们只能通过读者这一中介发挥影响。而这些读者又是复杂的微观世界，他们既受到社会影响，同时也内在地进行自我调节，充满信仰与情感的结构，既有习惯，也有创新的冲动，既有文化的共性，也有个体的古怪倾向。我们所谓的“阅读”这一双向互动，是通过解读与情感定向的过滤器来运作的——这些过滤器既赋予力量，也限制了文本的作用力。深入探讨这种复杂且多面性的阅读行为，必然会揭示出文学的影响既不像审美主义者所声称的那样富有变革性，也不像某些激进派所宣称的那样具有压迫性。
This book, then, contributes to a neo-phenomenology that blends historical and phenomenological perspectives, that respects the intricacy and complexity of consciousness without shelving sociopolitical reflection. Steven Connor has been a pioneer in this new phenomenological turn, arguing for closer attention to those “substances, habits, organs, rituals, obsessions, pathologies, processes and patterns of feeling” that are occluded by the usual frameworks of critical theory as well as by formalist invocations of literariness. The current surge of interest in emotion and affect across a range of disciplinary fields contributes to an intellectual climate notably more receptive to thick descriptions of experiential states. Queer theory also comes to mind as a field that is acquiring a phenomenological flavor: inspired by Sedgwick’s afore-mentioned critique of a hermeneutics of suspicion, critics are delving into the eddies and flows of affective engagement, trying to capture something of the quality and the sheer intensity of attachments and orientations rather than rushing to explain them, judge them, or wish them away.
因此，本书提出了一种结合历史与现象学的新现象学方法，它尊重意识的复杂性，同时不放弃对社会与政治的反思。斯蒂文·康纳是这种现象学转向的先驱，他呼吁我们更加关注那些“物质、习惯、身体器官、仪式、痴迷、病理、过程与情感模式”，这些往往被传统批评理论的框架与形式主义对“文学性”的追求所忽视。近年来跨学科领域对情感与情绪的兴趣激增，创造了一种更加开放、更加敏感的知识环境，允许我们对审美经验的状态进行更加细致的描述。酷儿理论逐渐展现出某种现象学倾向：受塞奇威克对怀疑解释学批评的启发，批评家们开始探讨情感卷入的涡流与流动，努力捕捉情感依恋的质与强度，而不是急于解释、评判或解消它们。
For some readers, no doubt, any hint of phenomenology will seem too crassly unhistorical, too blind to cultural specifics, so that it may be helpful to elaborate on the delicate equilibrium of commonality and difference, of theory and history. The aesthetic responses I discuss owe much to the conditions of modernity, when reading comes to assume a new and formative role in the shaping of selfhood. I hazard no claims whatsoever about structures of thought and feeling that govern pre-modern or non-modern forms of reading. While circling around these modes of literary engagement, I strive to remain mindful of the pressures of social and historical circumstance as they inflect aesthetic response. While there are differences in how modern readers experience shock or recognition, however, there are also continuities – those very continuities that make it possible to recognize a particular Gestalt, a distinctive structure of thought or feeling. There is much to be said for attending to these continuities in the context of a critical history that has paid scant attention to their distinctive features and internal complexities as modes of aesthetic engagement. I want to ponder what it means to be enchanted as well as to document particular episodes of enchantment.
对某些读者来说，任何涉及现象学的论述都可能显得不够符合历史实际，似乎过于忽视文化差异，因此有必要对理论与历史、共性与差异之间的平衡做进一步解释。我所探讨的审美反应在很大程度上是现代性条件下的产物，在现代性中，阅读在自我建构中扮演了新的、至关重要的角色。我无意对前现代或非现代形式的阅读体验做任何主张。当我探讨这些文学参与模式时，我始终保持对社会与历史条件的敏感，承认它们如何形塑审美反应。然而，尽管现代读者体验“震撼”或“认同”的方式各不相同，但仍存在某些延续性——正是这些延续性使得我们能够识别出某种特定的“格式塔”，即一种独特的思想或情感结构。注意这些延续性对我们有帮助，特别是在批评历史的讨论中，这些延续性往往没有得到充分的注意或分析。我希望不仅探讨什么是“着迷”，也记录下那些具体的着迷时刻。
There are also times when the act of historicizing can harden into a defense mechanism, a means of holding an artwork at arm’s length. We quantify and qualify, hesitate and complicate, surround texts with dense thickets of historical description and empirical detail, distancing them as firmly as possible from our own threateningly inchoate, or theoretically incorrect, desires and investments. In this sense phenomenology offers a worthy complement and ally, rather than an opponent, to such acts of embedding. If historical analysis takes place in the third person, phenomenology ties such analysis back to the first person, clarifying how and why particular texts matter to us. We are called on to honor our implication and involvement in the works we read, rather than serving as shame-faced bystanders to our own aesthetic response. Here my argument links up with a recent ethical turn in literary studies, an exhortation to look at, rather than through, the literary work, to attend to the act of saying rather than only the substance of what is said. The act of reading enacts an ethics and a politics in its own right, rather than being a displacement of something more essential that is taking place elsewhere.
有时，历史化的批评方法可能会成为一种防御机制，用来将艺术作品置于安全距离之外。我们不断地量化、复杂化、注释与遮蔽，通过重重历史描述和实证细节将文本包裹起来，尽量避免接触自身那些不明确、不“正确”的欲望与情感卷入。从这个角度看，现象学是历史分析的补充与伙伴，而不是它的对立面。历史分析是第三人称的，现象学则将其与第一人称经验相结合，澄清为什么某个文本对我们具有重要意义。现象学召唤我们尊重自己作为读者的卷入与参与，而不是作为局外人或对审美反应感到羞涩的旁观者。在这一点上，我的论点与文学研究中的“伦理转向”产生了交集，它呼吁我们注视文本本身，而不仅仅是通过它观察其他事物，关注“说”的行为本身，而不仅仅是它所说的内容。阅读本身是一种伦理与政治的行为，而不仅仅是某种其他更根本行为的替代品。
In this context, I find myself drawn toward the idea of “emphatic experience,” a phrase that can do justice to the differential force and intensity of aesthetic encounters without subscribing to essentialist dichotomies of high versus low art. The last few decades have inspired blistering critiques of canonicity and traditional value hierarchies. Yet such critiques often lapse back into an antiquated and thoroughly discredited positivism in assuming that the problem of value can simply be eliminated. In fact, as their own arguments all too clearly demonstrate, evaluation is not optional: we are condemned to choose, required to rank, endlessly engaged in practices of selecting, sorting, distinguishing, privileging, whether in academia or in everyday life. We need only look at the texts we elect to interpret, the works we include in our syllabi, or the theories we deign to approve, ignore, or condemn. The critique of value merely underscores the persistence of evaluation in the very act of assigning a negative judgment. As John Frow remarks, “there is no escape from the discourse of value,” which is neither intrinsic to the object nor forged single-handedly by a subject, but arises out of a complex interplay between institutional structures, interpretive communities, and the idiosyncrasies of individual taste.
在这种背景下，我特别受到“强调性体验”概念的吸引，这一术语恰如其分地体现出审美相遇的独特力量与强度，同时避免了滑入“高低艺术”二元对立的本质主义陷阱。在过去几十年里，文学规范性与传统价值等级受到了猛烈抨击。然而，这种批评往往退回到了某种过时的实证主义，假设价值问题可以被简单地消除。事实上，正如批评实践本身所表明的，评价从来不是可有可无的：我们被迫做出选择，进行排序，不论是在学术领域还是日常生活中，我们始终在进行区分、分类与优先排序。只需看一看我们选择阅读的文本、列入教学大纲的作品，或者我们选择赞同、忽视或谴责的理论，就可以明白这一点。对价值的批评只不过是在分配负面评价时，体现了评价的持续性。正如约翰·弗罗所言：“我们无法逃避价值话语”，它既不内在于对象，也不由主体单方面塑造，而是从制度结构、解读共同体和个人趣味的复杂交互中产生的。
Values vary, of course, in literature as in life. Someone who praises a novel for its searingly honest depiction of the everyday lives of Icelandic fishermen is appealing to a different framework of value than another reader who lauds the same text for its subversive aesthetic of self-shattering. The following pages make a case for the variability, and in some cases the incommensurability, of value frameworks. Even within a specific framework of value, moreover, judgments differ. While aesthetic preferences are influenced by social cleavages and cultural pressures, they bear no simple or direct expressive relationship to a particular political demographic or collectivity. In this sense, attempts to circumscribe the features of a female aesthetic, a popular aesthetic, or a black aesthetic, to cite a few recent examples, are inevitably stymied by the variability of both value judgments and value frameworks within a particular social grouping.
文学中的价值，如同生活中的价值，往往因人而异。一个人可能赞扬一部小说是因为它生动展现了冰岛渔民的日常生活，另一个人可能称赞同一本书因为其自我解构的颠覆性美学。在接下来的讨论中，我将探讨这些价值框架的多样性，以及在某些情况下它们的不可通约性。此外，即便在特定的价值框架内，评价也存在不同层次。虽然审美偏好受到社会分裂与文化压力的影响，但它们并不直接或简单地表达某个特定群体的政治信念。正因为如此，近来许多关于“女性美学”、“大众美学”或“黑人美学”的定义尝试都面临着困境，因为它们难以解释某一社会群体内部的审美判断差异与框架多样性。
The idea of “emphatic experience” is capacious enough to contain multiple value frameworks while also honoring the differential nature of our responses to specific texts. It acknowledges that our attachments differ in degree and in kind, that we do not and cannot favor all texts equally, that in any given assortment of tragedies or TV dramas we are guaranteed to find some examples more memorable, more compelling, simply more extraordinary than others. Yet by leaving open the nature and content of that emphatic experience, as well as the criteria used to evaluate it, it grants the sheer range of aesthetic response: individuals can be moved by different texts for very different reasons. This insight has often been lost to literary studies, thanks to a single-minded fixation on the merits of irony, ambiguity, and indeterminacy that leaves it mystified by other structures of value and fumbling to make sense of alternative responses to works of art.
“强调性体验”这一概念足够宽泛，能够容纳多种不同的价值框架，同时也承认我们对具体文本的反应差异性。它承认我们的依恋在性质与程度上各有不同，承认我们无法、也不应该平等地对待所有文本，在任何一系列悲剧或连续剧中，我们总会发现某些作品比其他作品更为吸引人，或仅仅是更为出众。然而，强调这一体验的多样性与内涵，同时也承认了审美反应的广泛性：不同的人会因为不同的原因被不同的文本打动。这一洞见往往被文学研究忽视，后者倾向于单一地聚焦于讽刺、暧昧与不确定性等价值，而无法应对那些对文本有着截然不同反应的读者群体。
In this regard, one advantage – or stumbling block, depending on your viewpoint – of what follows is that it canvasses ways of thinking about aesthetic experience that do not hinge on the presumed superiority of literature or literariness. My focus on novels, plays, and poems derives from my own training and limited expertise; departments of literature, moreover, are especially hard hit by a legitimation crisis that is affecting all of the humanities. Yet much of what I have to say also pertains to art forms such as film, which are assuming an increasingly vital role as purveyors of epistemic insights, vocabularies of self-understanding, and affective states (I touch most explicitly on film in chapter two). If literary studies is to survive the twenty-first century, it will need to reinvigorate its ambitions and its methods by forging closer links to the study of other media rather than clinging to ever more tenuous claims to exceptional status. Such collaborations will require, of course, scrupulous attention to the medium-specific features of artistic forms.
从这一角度看，我所提出的观点的优势（或在某些人看来是一种缺陷）在于，它探讨了思考审美体验的方式，而不将文学或“文学性”的优越性作为前提。虽然我主要集中讨论了小说、戏剧与诗歌，这主要源于我的学术训练与有限的专业领域，同时也因为文学系在面临人文学科整体正当性危机的影响下，显得尤为脆弱。然而，我所讨论的很多现象同样适用于电影等艺术形式，电影正日益成为传递知识见解、构建自我理解的重要媒介（我在第二章中对电影的讨论尤为明确）。如果文学研究希望在21世纪继续发展，它需要通过与其他媒介研究建立更加紧密的联系，重新激发其雄心与方法，而不是死守那些越来越站不住脚的文学特殊性主张。当然，这种合作需要我们严谨地关注艺术形式的媒介特性。
What follows, then, is a gamble, a perhaps quixotic wager that a one-sided reflection on literature will allow its many dimensions to unfold. The last few decades have molded us into skeptical readers, forever on our guard against the hidden agendas of aesthetic forms. Even when critics strain for a measure of even-handedness, texts are all too often shoe-horned into a rudimentary dialectic of coercion versus freedom, containment versus transgression, such that the distinctive modalities of aesthetic experience are shortchanged. I offer, instead, a thought experiment, an attempt to see things from another angle, to rough out, if you will, the shape of a positive aesthetics. When skepticism has become routinized, self-protective, even reassuring, it is time to become suspicious of our entrenched suspicions, to question the confidence of our own diagnostic authority, and to face up, once and for all, to the force of our attachments.
因此，接下来的内容无疑是一场冒险，或许是一种不切实际的尝试，我试图通过对文学进行片面的反思，让其多维特质得到展现。过去几十年的发展使我们成为了怀疑的读者，永远警惕美学形式背后的隐秘议程。即使批评家们尽力追求公正，文本往往被压缩为一种简化的二元对立：控制与自由，压制与反抗。结果是，审美体验的独特模式被忽视。我提出的是一种思想实验，尝试从不同角度审视问题，粗略勾画出一种积极美学的轮廓。当怀疑成为常态，成为一种自我保护甚至令人安心的姿态时，也许是时候怀疑我们的怀疑了，质疑我们作为诊断者的信心，并直面我们情感依恋的力量。
The point is not to abandon the tools we have honed, the insights we have gained; we cannot, in any event, return to a state of innocence, or ignorance. In the long run, we should all heed Ricoeur’s advice to combine a willingness to suspect with an eagerness to listen; there is no reason why our readings cannot blend analysis and attachment, criticism and love. In recent years, however, the pendulum has lurched entirely too far in one direction; our language of critique is far more sophisticated and substantial than our language of justification. For the span of a few pages, I plan to pursue an alternative line of thought and err in a different direction. Is it possible to discuss the value of literature without falling into truisms and platitudes, sentimentality and Schwärmerei? Let us see.
关键并不是抛弃我们已经磨练的批评工具，或放弃我们已获得的洞见；无论如何，我们不可能回到无知或天真的状态。长期来看，我们应该采纳利科的建议，将怀疑与倾听结合起来；我们没有理由不能将分析与依恋、批评与热爱相结合。然而，近年来钟摆已经过分偏向一侧；我们在批评时的语言远比我们用来为文学辩护的语言复杂且有力得多。接下来的讨论将探索另一种路径，冒险朝着相反方向前进。我们是否能够在探讨文学的价值时，避免落入陈词滥调、感伤主义或激情狂热的陷阱？让我们拭目以待。
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