What do these considerations mean for the teacher-interpreter of literature? They mean that if a change in the conceptions of language, history, truth, myth, art, and understanding is involved, this is not a matter of changing a method of interpreting but the rules of the game; or perhaps, making it a new game. If postmodernity brings this kind of fundamental change the hermeneutical task must take on a new shape.

Obviously this new shape cannot be described in detail, and even my own image of it is but an interpretation, a construction. But I would look forward to a greater dignity for the teacher of literature. I find pale and thin the job-descriptions teachers carry in their minds. Interpreting texts is an important matter. It is not just a dialogical matter, although it must be this: it is an ontological matter, a matter of existing fully. To interpret (should I say perform) a text can be an act as meaningful as any external action one might take. An act of understanding a text can alter one's consciousness, redirect one's life, seal one's fate. Teachers are not hucksters of "aesthetic experiences," they are helpers and builders in the business of "soul-making"—to use a phrase of James Hillman. As the name hermeneutics suggests, one may be the agent of the gods, and one must be able to interact with the "gods." Not the monotheistic God but the gods that shape our lives.

Teaching literature is creative and delightful, for we are in the fictive, ontological, playful business of "creating a world." To read Homer, Dostoevsky, or Joyce is not a mere amusement with no implications for the soul; it is learning what soul is about. When a teacher of literature plays his game according to objectivistic rules, he loses. He yields to a self-understanding and sense of task that technologizes understanding and renders his work irrelevant to his audience. As teachers of literature, we are closest to the visionary and auditory imagination of man. The imagination and its doors of perception must be cleansed of the effects of modern thinking and modern education.

Teachers of literature are not scientists or librarians, and these should not function as models for our interpretive task. We need a clearer understanding of our roles as mediators, of what mediation does, and of the status of mediation (as ontological event). To be seen in terms of being an "expert on styles" or an encyclopedia of information on cultural history or an aesthetician of the "pleasures of poetry" cheapens our function as interpreters—and this cheapening is precisely the consequence of modern objectivizing modes of thinking and valuing. The modern world views teachers of literature as in love with the past, not in touch with the present. This is in part because we ourselves do not have a hermeneutically adequate view of the interpretive present. To interpret a text in a way that restores its power, the interpreter is dialectically engaged both with the present and with the past—at a depth not attained by moderns. It is not through mere analytical dexterity or imaginative sympathy that a mediator is able to bring a text to life. Because he is grounded in the present world and in the present dimensions of his own existing, he can catch the resonances of the text more fully. Without the engagement with the present the past would be meaningless.

So I argue that a more adequate hermeneutics, and a critical sense of the limits of modernity, will give a new dignity to the teaching of literature and, to the teacher himself, a deepened interpretive self-awareness.

NOTES

¹ See Andrew Hacker, The End of the American Era (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

² Robert Hunter, The Storming of the Mind: Inside the Consciousness Revolution (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972). Hunter is only one of many who are "storming" the modern mind. However, I personally am out of sympathy with his view that electronic media, especially television and rock music, are the true transformers of consciousness, and that one can thus dispense with such oldfashioned pursuits as philosophical reflection. Hunter is heavily influenced by the media-determinism of Marshall McLuhan and the gestalt psychology of Fritz Perls.

³ See José A. Argüelles, The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975), p. 248.

⁴ "The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, August 11, 1975, p. 19.

⁵ In his history of postmodernism in Spanish-American literature, Octavio Corvalan has in mind the general period between the two world wars, in which major Spanish writers reacted against the aesthetics of modernism that had come into Spanish literature under the influence of French Symbolism. See El postmodernismo (New York: Las Americas Publishing Company, 1961): "La denominación postmodernismo abarca el período cuyos límites históricos son las dos guerras mundiales. Claro está que las primeras manifestaciones de una estética nueva aparecen algunos años antes de 1914 . . ." (p. 7).

⁶ William M. Ivins, Jr., On the Rationalization of Sight: With an Examination of Three Renaissance Texts on Perspective (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973). For a full treatment of modern consciousness as based on perspectival consciousness arising in the Renaissance, see Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, 3 vols. (Munich: DTV, 1973), forthcoming in translation through Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio. Gebser emphasizes the way in which perspective spatializes thought and mechanizes time.

⁷ See such works as Heidegger's The End of Philosophy or Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1973 and 1969).

⁸ I am indebted to John Romano, Columbia University, for this delightfully pungent phrasing in his critique of my paper. I wish to thank Professor Romano and also Professor Leon Goldstein of SUNY-Binghamton for their frank criticisms as respondents at the Symposium. In the light of these, I have made important deletions and attempted to sharpen the distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity.

⁹ See C. E. Black, Dynamics of Modernization (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

¹⁰ See Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

¹¹ See William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), and Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

¹² See Gebser's Ursprung und Gegenwart, cited above.

¹³ I devoted a series of public lectures in the spring of 1976 to thinking beyond modernity, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and may publish them under the title Beyond Modernity. In a book that appeared in the fall of 1976, Frederick Ferré approaches the problem of transcending modernity in a way parallel to my own. See his Shaping the Future: Resources for the Post-Modem World (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Ferré uses the term "post-modern" (with a hyphen) in the broader historical sense I am suggesting.

¹⁴ It may be of interest to note that the first draft of this paper was entitled "Some Versions of Postmodern" (echoing Some Versions of Pastoral) and was intended as a lengthy preface to a discussion of the "postmodernity" of Heidegger. (The latter was contributed to the special issue of boundary 2, "Martin Heidegger and Literature," Winter 1976.) Its purpose was to stretch the meaning of the term "postmodern" in the direction of Heidegger's postmodernity by showing a spectrum of efforts to transcend the increasingly manifest limitations of modern culture. I have here added to it a short section before and a short section after, but the central purpose has remained the same.

¹⁵ Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

¹⁶ See Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, vol. 2, Die Manifestation der aperspektivischen Welt, for examples from the natural and social sciences as well as the arts.

¹⁷ Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), especially pp. 301-17. See also his postscript to a collection of Nietzsche's epistemological writings: Friedrich Nietzsche, Erkenntnistheoretische Schriften, Nachwort von Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968).

¹⁸ See Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 318.

¹⁹ For a little fuller account of Nietzsche as door to a postmodern interpretive self-awareness, see my article "Toward a Postmodern Interpretive Self-Awareness," Journal of Religion, 55 (July 1975), esp. 322-26 (special issue on the theme of hermeneutics), and also my paper for the Heidegger Circle, "The Contribution of Heidegger to a Postmodern Interpretive Self-Awareness," forthcoming in the published proceedings of the 1975 meeting, through Ohio University Press.

²⁰ See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, cited above.

²¹ "Metaphysics, morality, religion, science—in this book these things merit consideration only as various forms of lies: with their help one can have faith in life." The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), 853, p. 451.

²² See Gebser's much fuller account of this argument in Ursprung und Gegenwart, cited above. I devote a lecture to Gebser in my series of Minnesota lectures, mentioned above, note 13.

²³ Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Earliest Childhood."

²⁴ Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969); Where the Wasteland Ends (Garden City: Doubleday, 1972); Unfinished Animal (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

²⁵ Philip Slater, Earthwalk (Garden City: Doubleday, 1974), p. 19.

²⁶ Slater, Earthwalk, p. 129.

²⁷ See especially Marcuse, Reason and Revolution (Boston: Beacon, 1960), which gives an excellent introduction to Hegel; Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955); and One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1965).

²⁸ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 238.

²⁹ See Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and Identity and Difference, cited above, as well as the valuable new collection of Heidegger's later major essays, Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1977). Three volumes by Gadamer have appeared recently: his masterwork, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury, 1975); a selection of his major articles, Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. David Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); and Hegelian Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). In Nietzsche, see principally The Will to Power, cited above, especially Book III.

³⁰ See the opening part of Gadamer, Truth and Method, esp. pp. 39-73.

³¹ See Ihab Hassan, "The New Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind," boundary 2, I (Spring 1973), 547-69, later included in Paracriticisms (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975), pp. 121-47. Subsequent references to Paracriticisms in text, abbreviated P.

³² Hassan, "Models of Transformation: Ideology, Utopia, and Fantasy in America," Paracriticisms, pp. 151-76; citation is to p. 151.

³³ See C. E. Black et al., The Modernization of Japan and Russia (New York: Free Press, 1975).

³⁴ Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); A Separate Reality (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971); Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); Tales of Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

³⁵ See Janheinz Jahn, Muntu (New York: Grove, 1961), especially Chapter 5.

³⁶ I allude here to Wittgenstein's remark on the difficulties of gaining a perspicuous representation of our language. Philosophical Investigations, 122.

³⁷ Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), and in his larger Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 1955, 1957).

³⁸ " . . . und wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?" says Hölderlin in "Brot und Wein," to which Heidegger has reference in the famous essay "Wozu Dichter?" in Holzwege (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950), pp. 248-96; Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 91-142. Karl Löwith took the phrase for the title of his book on Heidegger, Heidegger: Denker in dürftiger Zeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1953), and after him William Barrett used it more generally in his recent Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

³⁹ This is one of the bases of the I Ching, as well as the individual-centered astrology of Dane Rudhyar.

⁴⁰ Lyall Watson, Supernature (New York: Bantam, 1974).

⁴¹ Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, (New York: Pocket Books, 1973), and Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg (New York: Pocket Books, 1975); originally published by Julian Press.

⁴² Irving Oyle, The Healing Mind (Millbrae, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1975).

⁴³ See the biographies by Thomas Sugrue or Jesse Stearn, or the many publications of the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

⁴⁴ John Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone (New York: Bantam, 1973); originally Julian Press, 1972.

⁴⁵ Martin Buber, I and Thou, newly translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).

⁴⁶ Von Däniken, Chariot of the Gods (New York: Bantam, 1971), and others. Von Däniken assumes the intervention of beings from outer space in the initiation of "human" life on the earth.

⁴⁷ De Santillana, Hamlet's Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969).

⁴⁸ Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians (New York: Avon Books, 1968).

⁴⁹ Colin Wilson, The Philosopher's Stone (New York: Warner Books, 1974).

⁵⁰ José Argüelles, Mandala and The Transformative Vision (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1972 and 1975, respectively).

⁵¹ Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, I, 61.

⁵² See "Bewußtseinsmutationen," Gebser, I, 24-26.

⁵³ Herbert Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972).

⁵⁴ Anthony Barton, Three Worlds of Therapy (Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, 1974).

⁵⁵ See Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968), and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 1971).

⁵⁶ Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: Norton, 1969).

⁵⁷ R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1967).

⁵⁸ Jules Henry, Pathways to Madness (New York: Vintage, 1973).

⁵⁹ Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

⁶⁰ Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Random, 1973).

⁶¹ See the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

⁶² Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

⁶³ Vol. 55 (July 1975).

⁶⁴ I was recently asked to lecture on the relevance of hermeneutics. The text, "Hermeneutics and Postmodern View of the Psyche," is to be published in a collection edited by Robert Romanyshyn and Robert Sardello.

⁶⁵ See Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: du Seuil, 1966).

⁶⁶ James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). See also his earlier work, The Myth of Analysis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972).

⁶⁷ The English title of Les Mots et les choses is The Order of Things, cited in footnote 18 above.

⁶⁸ See Derrida's La voix et le phénomène (Paris: PUF, 1967), available in translation through Northwestern University Press.

⁶⁹ See Derrida, De la granimatologie (Paris: de Minuit, 1967), translation by Gayatri Spivak forthcoming from Johns Hopkins.

⁷⁰ Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

⁷¹ Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).

⁷² Joseph Riddel, The Inverted Bell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974). Miller's review appeared in Diacritics, "Deconstructing the Deconstructors," 5 (Summer 1975), 24-31. Riddel replied in a subsequent issue.

⁷³ Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).

⁷⁴ "Modernism and Postmodernism," 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1971).

⁷⁵ See J. W. Cullum, "Nathan Scott and the Problem of a Postmodern Ethics," boundary 2, 4 (Spring 1976), 965-72. Cullum rightly distinguishes postmodernism from postmodernity: "The Anglo-American literary quirk called Modernism lasted scarcely fifty years; the age called modern has endured for some four hundred and fifty. The passing of our cultural modernity into postmodernity is therefore a far more significant event than the passing of Modernism into Postmodernism" (p. 965).

⁷⁶ Forthcoming from Berkeley: University of California Press.

⁷⁷ Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

⁷⁸ See Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief (New York: Vintage, 1969), and Karl Kerényi, Hermes: Guide of Souls (Zurich: Spring, 1976).