TOWARD LITERARY TEXT PRODUCTION: AN EMPIRICAL AND THIRD FORCE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF LITERARY MEDIATION BETWEEN AUTHORS AND EDITORS BY JOHN THOMAS FRANKLIN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1994 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARES Copyright 1994 by John Thomas Franklin to ABDs: it can be done ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the following persons and institutions: Graduate School and Dept. ofEnglish, U. Florida, particularly Kathy Williams; Dept. ofEnglish and Philosophy, Stephen F. Austin State University; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, U. ofTexas; the people I interviewed, including those whose transcripts do not appear in this dissertation; the members ofthe dissertation committee, particularly the chair: Robert de Beaugrande; and, the people who have helped with the word processing: Margaret, Patty, Carolyn, Jill and Debbie. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT vii CHAPTERS THE CASE FOR EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF LITERATURE 1 1 Literature as an "Empirical" Phenomenon? 1 The Present Project 14 DISCOURSE INTERACTION AND PERSONALITY TYPE 2 EXEMPLIFYING LOWER DEGREE OF COLLABORATION 31 Typical Moves ofExpansive Authors 31 Discourse Moves Away from Expansiveness 54 Expansive Solidarity 66 Living with Expansiveness: The Editor's View 72 Conclusion 86 3 DISCOURSE MOVES AND PERSONALITY TYPES IN SITUATIONS OF HIGHER COLLABORATION 89 Between Expansiveness and Self-Effacement: Primarily Fitzgerald's Great Hopes and Great Doubts for The Great Gatsby 89 Conclusion 123 4 WHEN EDITORS EXPAND: STEERING THE DEGREE OF COLLABORATION 125 Editors' Strategies for Managing without Appearing To Do So 125 Negotiating Book Covers 130 Increasing the Pressure 137 More Drastic Expansions 156 Conclusion 171 5 CONCLUSION 174 REFERENCES 186 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 192 VI Abstract ofDissertation Presented to the Graduate School ofthe University ofFlorida in Partial Fulfillment ofthe Reqviirements for the Degree ofDoctor ofPhilosophy TOWARD LITERARY TEXT PRODUCTION: AN EMPIRICAL AND THIRD FORCE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF LITERARY MEDIATION BETWEEN AUTHORS AND EDITORS By John Thomas Franklin April, 1994 Chairman: Professor Robert de Beaugrande Major Department: English Drawing from an empirical analysis ofcorrespondence among Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Maxwell Perkins as well as interviews with contemporary writers and editors, this dissertation identifies lower and higher degrees ofcollaboration, determines editorial attempts to insure collaboration, and explains the psychological motivation for discourse strategies in terms ofThird Force psychology as both authors and editors attempt to meet their literary needs. Pedagogical applications are implied in that the student-professor writing relationship is analogous to the author- editor literary collaboration. vu CHAPTER 1 THE CASE FOR EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF LITERATURE Literature as an "Empirical" Phenomenon? Since ancient times the study oflanguage has largely been equated with the study ofliterature. Scholars were doubtless aware that literature represented a special area oflanguage rather than the language as a whole; but they presumably believed literature to represent language at its best and hence to be the most meritorious domain for study and description. This view would have been all the more entrenched when the literary text in question also had a religious quality, as we can see for instance in extensive study ofSanskrit texts combining literary with sacred matters and techniques. The study ofliterature as an academic discipline in contrast is a relatively recent creation. It has its roots in the study ofclassical languages, notably Latin and Greek, for which we have to be content with the study of surviving texts. To the degree that literature was cultivated and its survival encouraged, it naturally continued to occupy center stage. Other types of texts such as historical, philosophical or scientific treatises were also studied, but often from rather literary standpoints, e.g., with a close attention to "style." Moreover, the academic decorum ofancient times had not yet promulgated the strict separation between the "literary" and the "scientific" so forcefully imposed in our own century. The most direct forerunner oftoday's "literature programs" was the trend ofreapplying methods for the study ofclassical to medieval and modem languages. Again the focus ofattention was literary texts, but several shifts ofemphasis can be detected. The fact that medieval texts were much less well-preserved or that classical Latin texts had been transcribed compelled the scholars to pay much more attention to the niceties ofthe language system itself, such as patterns of sound and grammar. As a result, a train ofstudy split offfrom the purely literary into "philology," which eventually gave us "modem linguistics" (Beaugrande, 1991). The coexistence between a study ofliterature and the study oflanguage as systems ofsounds and forms has understandably been a bit uneasy as Beaugrande (1993) has also noted. Language departments have been typically divided into two relatively autonomous subdivisions with regrettably small interaction between them. The literary scholars tend to view the linguists as insensitive to the finer sides oflanguage, often overlooking the richness, complexity and ambiguity as eminently presented by poetry. The linguists tend to regard the literary scholars as somewhat subjective and unsystematic in their treatment ofdata, and particularly in their disinterest in clarifying the status of literature as a brand oflanguage and notjust as an aesthetic category or a stream within the history ofculture and ideas. Beaugrande (1993) argues that the standoffbetween literary studies and linguistics stems from cogent motivations in terms ofprocedures and agendas but is currently in the process ofbeing resolved. On the one hand, "literary theory" represents the genuine attempt to come to grips with the status ofliterature as language. On the other hand, discourse analysis has greatly increased the sensitivity of linguists for the complexities ofdiscourse represented among other domains by literature and poetry. An important strand within this recent convergence has been an attempt to situate hterature as a phenomenon ofhuman communication. The "empirical fact" that hterature is produced under certain personal and social conditions has been increasingly highlighted from a range of perspectives. Whereas traditional studies tended to "monumentaUze" the literary author as a solitary and exceptional being struggling along in a vitalistic process ofinspiration and creativity, we are now more interested in the concrete factors influencing the day-to-day activities involved in literary authorship as a category ofcommunication production, involving labor, collaboration among an army ofinstitutional necessities such as authors, editors, pubUshers and so forth. We see this outlook not so much as a contradiction or defiance oftraditional literary concern for the author but as a complement to it. The public image ofauthors is an intimate part ofthe general construction and negotiation ofliterary domain. But a literary study which so strongly contributes to these images in its daily work might reasonably be made an object ofinquiry in its own right. The question then is notjust which authors are "great" or "minor" and so on, but how the role and status ofauthors come to be established in the first place, given the fact that everybody has to begin somewhere outside the literary establishment. Moreover, literary history is filled with instances in which the status of "great" or "minor" has undergone considerable fluctuations with respect to particular authors. Not surprisingly, "contemporary literature" tends to be the least stable in this regard, because here is the domain in which so much ofthe actual "labor" ofproducing text and constructing images has to be A carried out without the advantage ofhistorical hindsight. relatively recent and lesser known undercurrent in this general trend has been constituted by lines ofinquiry whose basic principle is to regard literature as an "empirical