Literary Studies and Well-Being

Front matter

Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare Ronald Schleifer

Books by Ronald Schleifer

Modernist Poetics in China: Consumerist Economics and Chinese Literary Modernism (with Tiao Wang)

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Thesis and Contexts: The Real and the Construed; or, the Double-Take of Literature

2 Introduction: On the Discipline of Literary Studies 3 Disciplined Knowledge and the Experience of Meaning 4 The Nature of Value and the Nature of Language

Chapter 1

THESIS AND CONTEXTS: THE REAL AND THE CONSTRUED; OR, THE DOUBLE-TAKE OF LITERATURE

Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

—Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”

Ihave chosen to call this book Literary Studies and Well-Being because “wellbeing” is a concept and a word that brings together imagined fulfillments of life experiences and also a more mundane sense of simple good health; it’s a term that joins together what I am calling the “worldly work” of literature and healthcare. A good part of the sense of well-being I pursue in this book is encompassed by Aristotle in his ancient deployment of the Greek notion of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is usually translated into English as “happiness,” but it can, as Ian Johnson argues, plausibly be translated as the flowering forth or realization of human potential, which he explicitly describes as human “well being” or “living well” The English rendering of eudaimonia as “happiness,” he writes, causes some difficulties if we do not remind ourselves that by the term Aristotle means something much wider than the word happiness might suggest to us. Eudaimonia carries the notion of objective success, the proper conditions of a person’s life, what we might more properly call “well being” or “living well” Thus, eudaimonia includes a sense of material, psychological, and physical well being over time, for the fully happy life will include success for oneself, for one’s immediate family, and for one’s descendants. This notion links the Ethics directly with the Greek traditions, especially the Iliad, in which the happiness of life includes a sense of posthumous fame and the success of one’s children as vital components. We may better get a sense of what

Aristotle means by the term if we take the advice of one interpreter and see eudaimonia as the answer to the question “What sort of a life would we most wish for our children?”

(cited in Schleifer and Vannatta Chief Concern 62-3)

This unpacking of the meaning of eudaimonia—it is an example of philological philosophy I describe throughout this book—is of great importance because it allows me to articulate the worldly work of both literature and healthcare in relation to one another. Both literature and healthcare, I argue here, promote “living well” insofar as they promote what the novelist Stendhal describes, in defining aesthetic beauty, as “the promise of happiness” (66). This is also the promise Derek Mahon articulates in a wonderful hospital poem I discuss at the end of Chapter 5, that “everything is going to be all right” (Mahon 240).

One of the most striking features of the American Declaration of Independence is the phrase “the pursuit of Happiness.” Many historians— but not all—suggest that Thomas Jefferson and then The Committee of Five, who wrote and edited the Declaration, were influenced by John Locke’s late seventeenth-century writings about civil life. Thus, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke describes “civil interest” as “life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things” (Letter 26); and in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding he asserts that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in the careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness” (Essay 2.21.51). I should note, as I do at the end of this book discussing the concept of “philosophical physician,” that Locke himself was a physician. I also suggest that Jefferson’s term Happiness is related to Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia. And I further suggest the idea, most likely outside Jefferson’s understanding, that a strong working definition of Happiness is related to the even more ancient Chinese concept le (AR), a word-concept carrying several different meanings in Chinese, including “the feeling of joy, happiness, optimism and well-being ... [so that] it can describe the melody of music, the sound in harmony. Moreover,” as Defeng Yang and Zhou Han note, “the original meaning of ‘Le in ancient times, is basically the well-being gained when recovering from illness and when finally healing” (82). I begin, then, by “unpacking” Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia—along with Jeffersons term Happiness—to make clear my contention in Literary Studies and Well-Being that part of the salutary work of literature in general is to create Stendhal’s “promise of happiness” (66) in his larger description of the nature of beauty. Such “work” makes clear, I believe, how much our understanding of literature can benefit from thinking of literature in relation to what I call throughout this book the work—the “worldly work’—of healthcare: its pursuits of healing, well-being, and reflective everyday care that contribute to the betterment of all our lives. In my argument I contend that the pursuit of eudaimonia contributes to the worldly work of literary studies as well.

Let me spell this out in more historical terms—in a “double-take,” so to speak, on the purposes of this book as a whole. During the past twenty years, much admirable work in the “health humanities” has focused upon what studies of literature contribute to the understandings and the practical work—the “worldly work’—of healthcare. Such a project aims at developing healthcare practitioners who bring greater care to those who come to them ailing or in fear or faced with terrible suffering. The overall goal of Literary Studies and Well-Being turns this inside out by noting the intergenerational caretaking of healthcare in a manner which allows us to comprehend the nature and discipline of literary studies in new ways. The literary arts represent and provoke experiences of understanding and emotion—what I call “the experience of meaning”—and in this study I examine how the practical pursuit of well-being in healthcare reveals purposes at the core of our engagements with and understanding of literature itself: its deployment of aesthetic experiences to shape action in the world, its ability to clarify “habits of thought” that define our cultural lives (structures of experience beyond individualist psychology), its ability to occasion moral education— and perhaps most of all its capacity to articulate and deepen shared senses of human well-being.

The Thesis in Short

In pursuit of this end, Literary Studies in Well-Being: Structures of Experience in the Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare examines the discipline of literary studies by defining and justifying its object of study, namely “literature”; by articulating the goals and purposes of its study; and by setting forth the methods the discipline has developed in order to achieve those goals and purposes. It defines “literature” as verbal and narrative discourses, which present and provoke “experience,” and it spends some time examining the nature of “experience,” particularly in relation to the matters-of-fact studied by the physical and social sciences (see Exhibit 1.1).

Exhibit 1.1: The Experience of Meaning

When I contend that literature provokes as well as presents “experience, I am agreeing with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation, examined in Chapter 4, that we experience as well as (cognitively) comprehend meaningfulness and that the experience of meaning is characterized by the feeling or “force” of understanding such as the feeling we have when we figure something out or, perhaps more vividly as a feeling, the sense of bewilderment we experience when we cannot figure something out. Michael Clune describes one understanding of literary art as “not the transmission of experience but the communication of meaning, which gives “voice to truth” (45). Such an understanding, which he traces in relation to the work of Henri Bergson, assumes that “the infiltration of our experience by language pollutes that experience” (45). Clune also suggests an alternative to this stark understanding of literature as “communication of truth,’ namely the understanding of literary art as involved with the experience of readers rather than with the renown/knowledge of authors. This is Wittgenstein’s “experience of meaning,’ which is close to what Clune describes as “the desire to preserve and intensify sensation” as opposed to “the desire to preserve a person’s name and image.’ The two conceptions of literature Clune sets forth characterize the opposition—or the “double-take’—between Classicism and Romanticism (16). This is the “double-take” of knowledge and power in language and discourse I describe in this chapter. (It is also the “double-take of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle [see Schleifer Modernism and Time, Ch. 5 “Analogy and Example” which maps Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in relation to the “coupling” of propositional and performative language in J.

L. Austin’s speech—act theory.] For a fascinating unfolding of Heisenberg’s principle, see Benjamin Labatut’s description of “Heisenberg’s discovery” [161]: namely, that “certain properties of a quantum object, such as its position and quantity of motion, were coupled, and the relationship between them evinced strange properties. The more precisely the one was identified, the more uncertain the other became” [159]. Labatut calls his book “a work of fiction based on real events” [190]. I might call the present chapter—and the present complex book of chapters and chapter-lectures—the “gathering” of many—voiced apprehensions of literature, which combines fiction and reality, construed value and the reality of knowledge.) Moreover, when Clune describes “semantic richness” (in relation to Nabokov) as “the fact that in it we find new meanings, and new relations between old meanings” (69)— and when, more forcefully, he argues that “what science misses, and what literature supplies, is a way of understanding the special role of experience” (80)—he is suggesting that one aspect of “the special role” that literature fills is to emphasize the “experience of meaning,’ which Wittgenstein apprehends in language more generally. For further elaboration of the experience of meaning, see Chapter 3 and Exhibit 3.7: Religious Experience.

The goal and purpose of literary studies—like the goals and purposes of intellectual disciplines more generally—are to focus on its object of study, “literature,” in order to allow us to engage with and comprehend more fully the complex set of features and relationships its object of study entails. Disciplines in general pursue this goal: to develop a vocabulary, particular procedures, and strategies of attendance, which encounter—and perhaps even define—particular features of the world on a particular level of engagement. Finally, Literary Studies and Well-Being contends—here is the thesis in short—that such purposeful engagements with literature, particularly in relation to the human activities of caretaking pursued in healthcare and in the health humanities, allow us to see more fully structures of experience by means of a “double-take” of engagements provoked by verbal and narrative discourses. Such structures of experience, I contend, govern the sense of meaningful value that inhabits much—if not all—of human experience altogether, and certainly the human project of caretaking. The term meaningful value, I suggest in a kind of philological unpacking I talk about in a moment, is an instance of saying the same thing twice in a manner that calls upon a double-take of language: to be meaningful is to be valuable. (See Exhibit 1.2.)

Exhibit 1.2: The Worldly Work of Literature and Healthcare

The special vantage of analyzing the discipline of literary studies in this book is the engagement with—really the particular starting point from—the health humanities. The taking up of the practical work of healthcare—which involves the cure, care, and compassion for human suffering—allows one to isolate the features of “literature” in the context of the thorough-going materialism of what Aristotle described as “practical wisdom” or phronesis. In his history of the term “experience’—which offers an extended version of the philological philosophy discussed later in Chapter 1—Martin Jay explicitly understands the “sedimented meanings” of what Aristotle defines as phronesis to include “experience” (12, 15-16). The work of philology, I note, is to “unpack” such semantic sedimentation. Towards the end of his study, Jay examines Michel Foucault’s inspiration occasioned by “non-philosophers in the traditional sense: “What struck me and fascinated me about them; Foucault asserts, ‘is the fact that [such non-traditional philosophers] didn’t have the problem of constructing systems, but of having direct, personal experiences” (cited in Jay 391). In fact, Literary Studies and Well-Being aims to comprehend together the work of literature and healthcare under a category with which I end this book, that of the “philosophical physician” —who inhabits, actually or vicariously, a disciplinary position between a strict empiricism and a self-contained idealism. Such a disciplinary position is found in practical literary studies and worldly, materialist philosophy. These disciplines—literary studies, healthcare, even “materialist” philosophy (which I describeas “philological philosophy”)—are, as Joel Whitebook notes, “simultaneously scientific and philosophical .... They [are] philosophical in that they [reject] scientism—that is, the claim that empirical science exhausts the domain of legitimate knowledge .... And they [are] scientific in that they [reject] philosophy’s pretensions at self-sufficiency” (100). These disciplines do so, as I note in my conclusion—but also throughout this book as a whole—in pursuit of the worldly work of human well-being.

The Exposition in Short

As is already noticeable, the exposition of Literary Studies and Well-Being is somewhat complex: it offers an argument punctuated by “exhibits” and, after this “thesis” chapter and an introductory chapter, a series of chapter-lectures—also punctuated by exhibits—based upon a lecture series presented to Chinese scholars who teach English language and literature to Chinese engineering students at the Harbin Institute of Technology. In this way, the style of this book—like the explicit work of healthcare and, I argue, our implicit engagements with literature—is actively collaborative and actively improvised. What I have learned in many years of engaging people committed to careers in healthcare with the literary humanities—of learning from people pursuing the practical work of health and well-being even as I share with them the well-being promoted by literary studies—is that the complexity of different frameworks and agendas is, very often, the starting situation of serious healthcare problems and problems of well-being more generally: patients and healthcare workers aren't quite sure what is going on or what is relevant or irrelevant in the narratives they encounter and re-narrate. In short, in serious or complex medical situations often it is not clear whether particular instances of information are “distractions” from a proper focus on the matter at hand or matters that require the “active absorption” of what I am describing as the “double-take” demanded by literature as well as healthcare in order to grasp a fuller understanding of what is going on. This, as we shall see, is the problem of the necessary “double-take” of literature: the “agendas” of literature as the articulation and shaping of the mores of a particular cultural moment and its simultaneous—and seeming contradictory—provocation of aesthetic “experience”; its knowledge and its power; its confusion of categories of fact and fiction.

Both healthcare and literature, moreover, call upon and emphasize the “practical wisdom” of phronesis, which aims to discover what, Martha Nussbaum argues, “is to count as the end” of action (61, n15). Thus, in Chapter 6 I note that the goal of phronesis is to be able to discern what counts as the “ends” or goals that practical wisdom pursues such that a full awareness of the work of practical wisdom is precisely what the study of literature adds to the learning and practices of healthcare even as the worldly practical results of healthcare widen our sense of the “work” of literature. That is, practical procedures do not simply find the best strategies to pursue the end of an action by some form of instrumental reason, but rather “entwine” or “entangle” wisdom and worldliness, knowledge and power. Thus, in short the complicated and not-altogether linear exposition of Literary Studies and Well-Being aims to promote—as literature does and the practical reasoning of healthcare often requires—the “active absorption” of experience by replacing or supplementing the authority of argument with the experience of engagement. Like the close reading of literary texts, it aims at widening experience along with accumulating knowledge: it entangles in its very exposition, so to speak, construed value and the reality of knowledge.

To accomplish this, Literary Studies and Well-Being pursues an exposition that mimics a particular experiential fact, namely the manner in which, as Dr. Rita Charon and Maura Spiegel argue, narratives that emerge from suffering differ from those born elsewhere .... Not restricted to the linear, the orderly, the emplotted, or the clean, these narratives that come from the ill contain unruly fragments, silences, bodily processes rendered in code[, which include] ... shameful, painful, prelingual limitations, absences, breath-taking fears.

(vi)

Needless to say, I am not suggesting that the complicated exposition of Literary Studies and Well-Being is a discourse of illness. Rather, the patient-provider interchange in the clinic participates in the same organizational structure of the “double-take of literature” I am describing in this chapter: at once it encourages the informed pronouncement of the healthcare professional (e.g., “everything is going to be all right: you simply have a low-hydration headache”) and at the same time it encourages a worldly ongoing conversation revolving around sharing the values that both the patient and the provider bring to the clinic. Ina similar fashion—which takes its place among the many similitudes, analogies, homologies, etc. which this book focuses upon and pursues—literature both offers and provokes the “communication of meaning” and “the transmission of experience” Clune mentions (45): experience to be understood and undergone, the real and the construed. Thus, later in this chapter, when I discuss the lecture format of this book—which I designate by the odd phrase lectures-book and also set forth the further oddity of referring to its last four chapters as chapter-lectures—it is my hope that these somewhat awkward gestures of defamiliarization, like the punctum Roland Barthes experiences in relation to photographs discussed (along with defamiliarization) in Chapter 5, remind readers of the idea/experience of double-take and, perhaps more importantly, what I am calling the experiential fact of discourse in the clinic and in literature.

Such an experiential fact, like the phenomenal experience Charon and Spiegel describe as they characterize the language of the clinic, can be understood to be “artefactual.” In analyzing the projects of Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, Patricia Waugh argues that scientific facts are artefacts: but that does not mean they are fictions. When Latour talks of [“building ... arenas and new spaces, shelters ‘in which to gather;”] it sounds hospitable and welcoming, ... but he is actually calling for more understanding across the humanities and sciences. For the assemblage is not simply a ‘gathering’ in the sense ofa hospitable coming together of groups of people, it is a concept resonant with the new systems of thinking in the biological environmental and molecular sciences that model complex systems which are entangled, unpredictable at different scalar levels, emergent and uncertain.

Latour’s “gatherings” are worldly: one such gathering, I am arguing, takes place in the clinic; another in our engagements with literary texts. In this, lam suggesting that the discourses of illness can help us understand the discipline of literary studies in an experiential rediscovery of “things as we know them to be, yet reordered and redescribed, shimmering in a transformed light” (Felski 102). That is, my focus on vicarious experience throughout this book and these lectures—throughout this lectures-book—examines how literary texts situate us alternatively inside and outside experience itself; how they situate us alternatively in both the power and knowledge of experience itself, in the double-take I am describing here. The pursuit of such an examination, I believe, needs to call upon experience in its very exposition—the “new systems of thinking” Waugh describes—in the manner in which the face-to-face (or imagined) collaborative interchange of lectures supplements the disciplined “constructed systems” (to quote Foucault [cited in Jay 391]), which the systematic exposition of “traditional” philosophical thinking sets forth. (For a more extended discussions of the book’s exposition—which follows Martin Jay’s understanding how Montaigne’s essay “On Experience” “performatively instantiates what it substantively argues” [25]—see Exhibit 1.9: Montaigne’s Many-Voiced Style and the section on the “discipline” of improvisation in Chapter 3, which examines Stanley Cavell’s analysis of how “a passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire” [185]; also, in a more thematic vein touching on the overall purport of the book as a whole, see Exhibit 5.6: A Well-Being Theory of Value.) In Chapter 3, in analyzing the discipline of improvisation, I note that Stanley Cavell argues that the transformations of lectures into books in Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and Aristotle’s texts themselves entail the disciplined attention to the engagements of interlocutors and to particular discursive situations (perlocutionary persuasion embedded in what he calls “the scene of instruction” [204]); in this, Cavell might be suggesting some of the improvised expository strategies that a “lectures-book,’ such as Literary

Studies and Well-Being, might pursue (see Exhibit 1.3).

Exhibit 1.3: Exhibitive Form

As I mention in a moment, the subtitle of this book was inspired by Raymond Williams's articulation of “structures of feeling” in 1977, when he notes that “structures of experience” might have been a “better and wider” description of the phenomena he is trying to articulate (132). Still, half a dozen years before Williams discusses “structures of feeling” the philosopher Richard Kuhns published a book entitled Structures of Experience. In that book he contrasts the discursive practices of philosophy and literature—he focuses, in part, on classical tragedy—and offers a more-or-less metaphorical description of the kind of exposition I set forth in this book in relation to the “dramatic” situation—the performance—of a series of lectures. “Drama, he writes, “is philosophical in the sense that it reveals a truth in the totality of its exhibitive form, not in the individual statements which make it up. It matters not that poets may be dreamers and ‘possessed’ as Plato depicts them .... But [drama] is, if it has any merit, poetical, and poetry is a different mode of statement from history and from philosophy. It is, however, like philosophy in that it aims at general statements of a theoretical kind, even though it is unlike philosophy in rejecting argument. But if it lacks argument, what is its structure?” (7-8). Kuhns answers his question by thinking of Artistotle (and the Poetics): “Aristotle’s answer; he avers, “is that [drama] has a motion and a progress of its own peculiar to itself: the progress of what I shall call affective rhythm” (8). It seems to me that the “affective rhythm” Kuhns describes might be better set forth as a strategy of defamiliarization described by the Russian Formalists (see Chapters 4 and 6 below). In any case, it is my argument here that this lectures-book pursues the counterpoint and harmonies of the affective rhythm of a many-voiced exposition.

The Argument

Literary Studies and Well-Being grows out of a series of lectures presented in Harbin China in 2020. But those lectures themselves grow out of the author's long-time practical work in the health humanities teaching and writing with people trained in the biomedical sciences. My colleagues had been accustomed to understand the humanities as not susceptible to the discipline of the exact and generalizing treatment pursued by the nomological (“law-like”) sciences such as mathematical physics and chemistry and by the retrospective and often statistical discipline of the social sciences. Such sciences focus on facts and events that are “commensurable,” which describes phenomena that allow investigators to conceive of similar facts and events to be identical, at least for purposes of analysis. In the “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism, which calls for a disciplined program for literary studies—an essay that first appeared entitled “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’ a title he borrowed from Matthew Arnold—Northrop Frye describes how physics transformed itself when, instead of “taking the immediate sensations of experience, classified as hot, cold, moist, and dry, as fundamental principles,” it discovered that “its real function was to explain what heat and moisture were” (44).

The issue of the “commensurability” and “incommensurability” of worldly phenomena is of centralimportance in understanding the nature of disciplinary knowledge. The abstract commensurability of different phenomena—which allows for quantified mathematical models of phenomena—claims to focus on whatis “real” about the world as opposed to the manner in which human beings interact with or construe the world. In this opposition set forth by nomological or “positive” science, the interactions of human “experience’—and human “meanings” connected with experience—are taken to be “constructed” on the bases of changing (and ephemeral) social systems of meaning rather a solid pre-existing “reality” independent of human meanings. Such “constructed” engaged understanding, many have argued, somehow “denies” reality. In this, however, “reality” is understood to be curiously beyond worldly experience, such as the immediate sensations of hot, cold, moist, and dry.

Still, the strategy of “constructed” understanding might better be understood as the practical reasoning of inferential understanding—what philosophers call “inference to the best explanation’—in making sense of the world, and particularly it might be better understood, as I note in Chapter 3, in relation to the semiotic category of purport. (I should point out that we construe the purport of statements, which might be described as their “insinuations.” The term purport, articulated by the linguist Louis Hjelmslev, is, I suggest in Exhibit 3.4: Hjelmslev’s Purport, closely related the Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic notion of “interpretant.”) Francis Steen, whose work I discuss in Chapters 3 and 5, describes such inferential understanding as the activity in social creatures under the category of construal: his example is the playfights of rhesus monkeys, in which older monkeys engage with younger monkeys in play designed to teach the younger cohort what to expect in real combat, to create inferences about the world. As we will see, anthropologists call such playing acts of “keying” experience, which is to say acts of marking “features” in experience as worthy of attention for actual members of a cohort, which Steen describes as adaptive intergenerational lessons design to teach younger members of a social cohort how to “construe” the future. Such “keyings”—and literature itself, in my argument—constitute the scene of instruction.

It is my contention that the term “construe” is better than “social construction” because it describes species activities whose purpose is to make living (and survival) easier in a practical worldly fashion rather than engaging in arguments about the metaphysical or ontological “nature” of reality itself. It is also my contention throughout this book that construing present and future engagements with the world—engagements of feeling and affect as well as understanding—is the work of literature and the goal of the discipline of literary studies. It is a contention borne of my engagements with intergeneration caring in the work of healthcare. Thus, when a scholar like Joseph North in his thoughtful and passionate history of literary criticism in the twentieth century somewhat casually dismisses the “therapeutic” work of the health humanities and more specifically the “directly therapeutic ... field of ‘narrative medicine” (188) as simply “marginal” to literary studies, he couldn't be more wrong. The intergenerational caring of healthcare is positioned to teach us—to allow us to construe—the worldly work of literature and the discipline of literary studies.

The Scene of Instruction. Such intergenerational caring constitutes the scene of instruction I mentioned a moment ago. In his essay “The Wittgensteinian Event,’ Stanley Cavell meditates on intergenerational caring when he describes “the scene and consequences of inheritance and instruction and fascination [the child observing his elders]” (202: Cavell’s bracketed emendation), and he goes on to say “how the child is imagined to be treated is a fateful matter, bearing, for example, on nothing less than Wittgenstein’s response to skepticism” (203). He sums up these observations as “the scene of instruction,’ which takes its place along with

Charles Taylors “dos and don’ts[—the cultural ‘pattern’ for behavior and belief—]that people accept and mutually enforce, without there being (yet) an explicit rationale. And as children, we learn some of the most fundamental patterns at first just as such” (271; see Exhibit 1.12: A Note on “Habits of Thought”). Cavell ends his discussion of instruction with an observation that might apply to North's political history of literary criticism: in “emphasizing society’s resemblance to a prison rather than to a schoolroom, [philosophical thinking] may push too hard to fix the power between generations” (207). In addition, in his analysis of Wittgenstein Cavell addresses North’s denigration of therapy. “Has not philosophy itself, at least since Plato, claimed for itself the task of therapy, or say liberation from bonds of illusion, superstition, bewitchment, fanaticism, self-distortion? ... I hope I have never denied that the process of acquiring genuine knowledge may itself be therapeutic” (211).

Commensurability and “Reality? Errol Morris offers a detailed— and often a wonderfully fascinating—account of the debate between “commensurability” and “constructedness” in The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) (especially Ch. 5). Morris’s text is a sustained critique of Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “paradigms” insofar as “Kuhn's defence of science as a paradeigmatic process fundamentally weakened science’s claims to epistemological distinctiveness and authority” (Waugh 94). (Morris's title comes from the fact that when he was a student, in a moment of pique Professor Kuhn hurled a cut-glass ashtray at him.) This concept of “paradigm” in Kuhn governs what can be taken to be or construed as “reality” within a particular scientific community; Morris associates it with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” or “life forms” (Lebensform) (92-4). In Literary Studies and Well-Being I take up the term of Thorstein Veblen (borrowed from his teacher Charles Sanders Peirce), “habits of thought” and, in passing, a term of Owen Flanagan, “space of meaning” to describe something like this conception of Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm? (Joseph North nicely sets forth a description of “aesthetics,” a description which unpacks Veblen’s and Peirce’s notion, in his gloss of Lauren Berlant’s “tracking affect” in literary studies: Berlant’s “aesthetics, he argues, is “the structured/creative ... and heuristic ... activity by which subjects encounter and remake elements of their experience as sources of value, using the common experiential resources of the culture at large” [177; see Berlant Cruel 15-16].) I say habits of thought are “something like” this notion of Kuhn's “paradigm” because Morris argues quite vociferously that Kuhn is an “antirealist? by which he means that Kuhn is a full-blown “social constructionist; who believes that all accounts of the “real” world are constructed from systems of meaning rather than being discoveries of or encounters with what exists—facts and events—separate from systems of meaning (see Exhibit 1.4). I contend, at the end of this chapter, that Veblen’s/ Peirce’s notion of “habits of thought” does not present itself as an alternative to realism but rather as a particular species of material realism (see Exhibit