Myth, Symbol, and Culture [antikvár]

introduction The rasTORY of the making of a book will sometimes throw light on its contents. This book has a history worth telling. It began with an invitation to scholars, principally from the fields of anthropology and literature, to a conference to discuss what Paul de Man and I chose to call "The Systematic Study of Meaningful Forms." Invitations went out to twelve scholars, in this country and abroad, to meet in Paris for a planning conference. In our letter of invitation, we asked whether the question of the relationship between the social sciences and the humanities is not often approached in the wrong way. We wrote, in part, as follows: General efforts to connect the work of scholars we take to be occupied with "The Humanities" with those we take to be occupied with "The Social Sciences" tend to adopt a "two cultures" sort of formulation. The "relations" between humanistic and social scientific methods, outlooks, concerns, ambitions, and achievements are described in a rather external fashion, as though two- wary sovereign powers were drawing up a treaty of mutual coexistence in order to allow a certain level of carefully regulated commerce between them while guaranteeing their mutual autonomy and right to live their separate lives. Thus one gets discussions, whether or not they are actually called such, of "The Implications (Impact, Convergence, Irrelevance . . .) of Structuralism (Evolutionism, Gestalt Psychology, Generative Grammar, Psychoanalysis . . .) for History (Literary Criticism, Musicology, Law, Philosophy . . .)" and so on. (The Sciences being masculine and the Humanities feminine, the causal arrow is only rarely pointed in the other direction.) Some of these discussions have their uses, if only as statements of a larger faith—or, in some cases, lack of it; but they tend not to contribute much, or at least as much as the grandness of their conception would seem to promise, to the specific development of the fields of study thus "related." They are, a few exceptions aside, part only of parascholarship, public declarations for public occasions which, like Auden's "poetry," make nothing happen. Yet, in the face of all of this, the conviction continues to grow among leading ix