The Art of Distinction

Abstract

Abstract: In this brief essay, I consider the following question: can systems thinking offer us a general theory of literary form? By "general theory," I mean the highest level of abstraction, akin to Thomas Kuhn's notion of a paradigm; I'll largely (though not entirely) pass over the "middle-level" concepts that Marjorie Levinson and Jonathan Culler call "poetics" and, lower still, the ordinary science of literary criticism that we call close reading.1 As a scholar trained in modernist poetry, I know that such abstractions are intrinsically risky; "no ideas but in things," William Carlos Williams warned.2 But I also believe that pursuing such a general theory can help us self-reflectively describe what we actually do as literary scholars, while also suggesting new modes of critical practice. Given that the last decade in literary studies was marked by a perhaps excessive attention to methodology, in this piece I'm less interested in proposing a cybernetic "way of reading" and more interested in systems thinking's capacity to help us understand why our discipline fosters so many ways of reading, more or less successful, to begin with.