Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

When I was offered the opportunity to edit this volume, I couldn't accept quickly enough. The idea of a “companion” to Henry James was suited to the way I think about and try to practice James studies, a discipline in which companions are valued. Henry James himself referred to the significance of those readers who would be companions when he wrote in “The Art of Fiction” that “[a]rt lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints” ( James 1984 : 44–5). For James, it is in the engagement of individuals with the text, with art, and with each other that art “lives.” Kenneth Burke's “parlor” of criticism — a metaphor that depends obviously and fundamentally on the relation of “parlor” to parler and thus to the notion of companions — for neither the parlor nor parler make sense without companions — serves to dramatize James's understanding of the process through which “art lives” through the company of companions: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone ... log in or subscribe to read full text