The Personal Rule: Pope, Hume, and literary theory

One of the problems facing literary theory today is the extent to which people's social and cultural identities individuate them. "The Personal Rule" argues that since its invention in a recognizably proto-modern, secular form in the eighteenth century, literary theory has possessed a warrant for fitting personal experience together with conventional, typical meanings. This warrant draws its power from the early history of literary formalism, especially from poetic and philosophical ambivalence towards the emerging notion that a work of art is autonomous--not of its social and political contexts, but of its origins. Versions of this notion begin to appear in John Dryden's later criticism (1680-1700) and are clearly in place in his "Preface to the Fables" (1700). We can find it in both John Dennis's and Samuel Johnson's writings on works by Shakespeare and Pope (indeed for both critics, Pope's failure to give his poems the meaning he intended is the great theme of his career), and in Pope's own writings on Homer. Among the many consequences of aesthetic autonomy, I focus on how writers wonder whether personal aesthetic responses, and even personal identities, can similarly unhinge from the persons having them. Both Alexander Pope and David Hume explore the relation between a person and her attributes, seeking paradoxically to justify a connection between them on the grounds that the "personal" is formal, artificial, and indeed powerfully literary. Yet neither author finds much to celebrate in this configuration of ideas, realizing that little separates the formally artificial from the merely fake. Nevertheless a recognition of the historical power of criticism's warrant for putting people and meaning together might complicate attempts to divorce a literary theory of identity from the literary as such.