Willem G. Weststeijn

On The Poetics of Literary Analysis. Jan Van Der Eng’s Theory of Narrative Semantics

        When we consider the entire oeuvre of a novelist or a poet we can often ascertain recurring subjects, thematic constants in it. Although a writer, partly due to the influence of the time in which he lives and the experiences he goes through, improves and develops himself, it is often the case that certain themes appear again and again in his work. These themes may be expressed in various ways, but remain present throughout the entire work, as a kind of foundation or basic principle. They direct the work and, in all probability, are the driving forces of the work. The author is ‘obsessed’ by particular themes, which he endeavours to express again and again, each time in a different manner.
        These basic principles can also be found, be it, and perhaps, not as often and not so clear as in the case of writers of artistic products, in the work of those who are employed with the artistic products in a professional way, the literary scholars. Some of them conform to modern standards and when there is a change of paradigm in literary theory, they abandon their views in favour of new ones which have come into vogue.¹ Others, however, adopt a more critical attitude towards the new developments in literary theory and utilize them selectively; they borrow what seems to be useful, without giving up their principal ideas. On the contrary, by employing the new developments in literary theory effectively, they sometimes succeed in expressing their principal ideas all the clearer, which may lead to an increasingly coherent and consistent formulation of a theory.
It will be clear to those who know something of Jan van der Eng’s work that Van der Eng belongs to the latter group of literary scholars. When reading his scholarly work, which spans almost forty years, one is struck by the remarkable unity of this work. Basic assumptions and premises cherished at the beginning of his professional career are basic assumptions still. They are, after forty years of scholarly work, formulated in a different way, more explicitly and more to the point perhaps, but have not substantially changed. This is all the more remarkable because literary theory has developed rapidly and has known some radical changes during the last forty years, a process from which Van der Eng definitely did not stand apart. By his active participation in the scholarly debate he not only succeeded in expressing his views ever more succinctly, but, in his turn, also made an important contribution to contemporary literary theory, in particular the analysis of the literary text.
    What are the constants in Van der Eng’s work and in which way did he express his personal views gradually in an integrated theory of the analysis of the literary text, more specifically the narrative text? These are the questions that will be discussed in this article, in order to come to a general assessment of the unity and the internal coherence that is such a marked characteristic of Jan van der Eng’s work.
     One of Van der Eng’s basic ideas, which lies at the core of his thinking about literature, is that literature, ‘great’ literature, irrespective of the genre or the period in which it is written, confronts man with life in all its aspects and provides him with a better insight into this life and with a better understanding of the truth of life and of the human soul. The initial impetus to this idea Van der Eng probably found in his study of many years of the work of Dostoevskij, one of his favorite authors, on whom he wrote his doctoral thesis, Dostoevskij romancier (Van der Eng 1957). This book, Van der Eng’s first serious scholarly publication, begins with a chapter on the controversy between Goncarov and Dostoevskij about the task of the realist novel writer. Whereas Goncarov wants to describe types that are well known to the reader and scrupulously conforms to established forms and conventions, Dostoevskij, on the contrary, wants to offer something new. According to Dostoevskij, Goncarov, with his limited view, presents only a part of the historical and sociological reality. Dostoevskij breaks with the idea that the hero of a story should be an already fixed character, in which the most important conceptions and beliefs of the time are reflected. It is not the task of the novelist, he maintains, to describe the social milieu; the novelist has to deal with human character and the very depths of the soul, which are universal, eternal and unfathomable. In this way Dostoevskij rises above sociological determinism. In Van der Eng’s words:
“...l’artiste fournira un message moral, philosophique ou religieux, et aidera ses contemporains dans leur recherche de la verite, du bien et du mal. C’est ainsi que l’art veritable nous apportera une connaissance nouvelle de l’ame humaine, qu’il nous fera entendre une note toute nouvelle”. (1957: 15).
     One of Van der Eng’s latest articles, “Expressive, Referential and Phatic Aspects of the Aesthetic Function”, published in 1988 begins with a statement which sounds as an echo of the passage from the dissertation:
            “A good work of literature confronts the reader with the totality of life: the reader is not only stimulated to ponder upon the meaning of human existence, a literary text also offers various points of view from which this question can be approached. In its representation of life, a literary text does not generally restrict itself to a specific ‘model’; it will play off various conflicting aspects of life against one another, such as, for instance, religious, philosophical and social aspects”. (1988: 51).
          The fact that the two passages, which are separated from each other by a period of more than thirty years, strongly resemble each other does not mean that the ideas of the scholar did not show any development during this time. Nothing is further from the truth. Whoever studies Van der Eng’s work will be struck not only by the constants, but also by the remarkable evolution of his thoughts, an evolution that is accompanied by a profusion of ideas and valuable suggestions. In other words, between the two quoted passages from 1957 and 1988 there is a resemblance, but at the same time a world of difference. The former statement was intuitive, unsubstantiated; the latter is founded on extensive argumentation, which is embedded in particular in what can be called Van der Eng’s theory of the analysis of the narrative text.
      The main source of inspiration of Van der Eng’s theory is, without doubt, Russian Formalism. Although during a stay in Paris in the fifties Van der Eng made himself familiar with French existentialism, which led to a brief flirtation with the ideas of Sartre, Camus, Gabriel Marcel and others, it was clear from the beginning that in his scholarly work he did not concentrate on the philosophic premises themselves, but on the way in which the author gave expression to life in all its aspects, the philosophical ideas included. At the end of the third chapter of Dostoevskij romancier he says the following:
“...nous nous proposons de mettre en lumiere comment Dostoevskij a su representer, dans ses romans, toute la vie, avec ce qu’elle comporte d’irrationnel, d’idees contradictoires, de “fantastique”, de tragique, de comique. En d’autres termes, nous voudrions montrer par quels procedes Dostoevskij fait vivre a nos yeux cette realite a la fois si complexe et si mysterieuse”. (1957:59).
       The keyword in the quotation is the word “procede” (device), “priem” according to the terminology of Russian Formalism. This central notion of the theories of the Formalists, who focused all their attention on the construction of the literary work, can also be considered the central notion of Van der Eng’s theory. The device is for him, to paraphrase the title of one of his most important articles, the ‘central factor of the construction of the literary text’², it is the essence of the artistic, with the aid of which the world created by the author is elucidated and appraised (Van der Eng 1973a: 30).
In his conception of the role and the function of the device Van der Eng is not so much an adherent of the undisputed champion of the device Viktor Sklovskij (“Iskusstvo kak priem” – “Art as a device”) as of the more critical Zirmunskij. In his article “Zirmunskij contra Zirmunskij” (1964) Van der Eng discusses with approval two of Zirmunskij’s articles, “Zadaci poetiki” (“The Tasks of Poetics”), 1921 and “K voprosu o formal’nom metode” (“On the question of the formal method”), 1923,³ in which the latter makes a stand against Sklovskij’s view that the work of art coincides with the sum total of its devices. Zirmunskij has a more sophisticated conception of the function of the device in the work of art. According to him an artistic product does not have any independent, autonomous devices, but all the devices are attuned to each other. Stylistic, thematic and compositional devices condition each other, and create together the artistic unity. The device cannot be considered independently from the work of art in its entirety, it is not an isolated trick, a piece of jugglery, but “een artistiek-teleologisch feit, bepaald door de functie die het heeft in de stijleenheid van het kunstwerk” (“an artistic-teleological fact, determined by the function it has in the unity of style of the work of art”) (Van der Eng 1964: 115).
        Zirmunskij, who opposed the too formalist approaches of the Formalists, emphasized that also the thematic element, in particular the selection of themes, can be seen as a device, as an aesthetically relevant fact. In “Zadaci poetiki” he maintains that the theme of a literary work is the result of two formative operations which both have an aesthetic aim: selection of the thematic material and arrangement of that material in a specific mutual relationship. In the substantiation of his allegations Zirmunskij confines himself, however, to poetry and ignores the composition as arrangement of motifs and thematic components in a narrative, ‘fabular’ structure. He does not discuss at all the organic connection between stylistic and thematic-compositional devices in narrative prose. Van der Eng calls this connection one of the most important chapters of the ars poetica (1964: 120). It is precisely this connection which has become the main object of his investigations and which has produced a valuable theoretical model of the analysis of the literary text.
       Although Zirmunskij in his discussion of the theme of the literary work restricted himself to poetry, he has made some useful suggestions about the thematic composition. Starting from the fact that lyrical poets often work with word-themes, he has observed that these word-themes can be connected with each other in various ways: through parallelism, contrast, repetition and comparison.
The article “Zirmunskij contra Zirmunskij” shows that apart from Zirmunskij also the Formalist Boris Tomasevskij has made some suggestions that have been of importance for Van der Eng’s theory. Tomasevskij has offered, especially in his book Teorija literatury (“Theory of Literature”), 1925, more adequate definitions of the elements of thematics than Zirmunskij. He introduced the notion of ‘motif’ as the atom, the smallest, not further divisible part of the theme; the theme he defined as the unity of the meanings of the separate elements of the literary work. This made it possible to apply these notions also to narrative texts. Moreover, he introduced the term ‘motivirovka’, by which he understood the motivation of the selection and arrangement of the motifs. There are different kinds of 'motivirovka1: realistic, artistic, compositional and thematic; Tomasevskij emphasizes the fact that a motif can be motivated in various ways:
      “Belangrijk is dat de kunstenaar steeds zo veelzijdig mogelijk zijn gegeven functioneel maakt en bijv. een statisch motief van beschrijving tegelijk verbindt met de psychologie van de handelende persoon en met de actie: het pistool dat aan de muur hangt moet een beschrijvend accessoire zijn, een psychologisch onthullend gegeven en een moment in de handeling markeren als de held er het noodlottige schot mee lost”.
       (“Important is that the artist always as variedly as possible makes his subject functional and, for instance, relates a static motif of description with the psychology of the characters and with the action simultaneously: the pistol that hangs on the wall has to be a describing accessory, a psychologically revealing fact and has to mark a moment in time when the hero fires the fatal shot with it”.) (Van der Eng 1964: 120).
       Between “Zirmunskij contra Zirmunskij” and the first article in which Van der Eng for the first time extensively unfolds his theory, “Priem: central’nyj faktor semanticeskogo postroenija povestvovatel’nogo teksta” (1973) lie nine years. It is a period in which Van der Eng’s ideas about the analysis of the literary text, and in particular the narrative text, generally take shape, as appears, for instance, from studies on the work of Puskin (1968a), Dostoevskij (1971a; 1971b; 1973b) and Tolstoj ( 1968b). In all these studies emphasis is laid on the devices of construction, because, according to Van der Eng, these serve as the basic prerequisite for the aesthetic effect that the work of art produces and, consequently, determine the aesthetic object. Although in most articles specific devices are described, for instance devices of suspense in the novels of Dostoevskij (1971a; 1973b), devices of description in the work of Babel’ (1963) and devices of the structuring of the story in Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina (1968b), it is always stated expressis verbis that the devices function in a complex unity, from which they are dependent and which they help to constitute.
        The appearance of “Priem: central’nyj faktor...” (1973) marks an important point in the development of Jan van der Eng’s work in the field of literary criticism and literary theory. This article, together with the study “On Descriptive Narrative Poetics”, which appeared five years later in English, presents a narrative model that is highly applicable in the practical analysis of a novel or a story and at the same time does justice to the extreme complexity of the artistic text.
       The question that lies at the basis of Van der Eng’s narrative model is how the reader, who is confronted by and often carried away by the literary work of art, can discover and ascertain the essence of the artistic quality of the literary work. This essence is, according to Van der Eng, firmly rooted in the devices of the hidden author, by means of which the world he creates is elucidated and evaluated. In other words, everything hinges upon the deciphering of a labyrinth of semantic knots, the arranging and structuring of motifs which function through the entire text, belong to different levels of the text, and together create a complex, but at the same time accessible, often compelling semantic structure.
         Primary responsible for the semantic structure is the narrator, or, rather, the hidden or implied author.⁴ As narrative medium he chooses the degree of knowledge with which he tells the story (varying from all-knowing to nothing-knowing). In his implicit composing function he arranges and groups the ingredients of his story. For the construction of his text the narrator has at his disposal three categories of devices: devices of selection from the thematic material, devices of its arrangement and specific modes of phraseological expression (lexical selection). These categories were already mentioned by Zirmunskij and Tomasevskij. Van der Eng emphasizes that the categories are interlinked and are not only determined by the internal system of thematic motivation, but also by two external features: the relation of a literary text to other texts and the relation of the literary text to extra-textual reality.
        This leads “to a conception of a narrative model based upon a set of fundamental narrative attitudes, in its relation to a set of fundamental narrative systems and a set of fundamental anthropological data” (Van der Eng 1978: 21). The fundamental narrative attitudes concern the intellectual and emotional attitude towards the information and the extent of knowledge about it. The fundamental narrative systems rest upon specific relationships between the thematic levels (i.e. the action, the characterization and the social setting) and, what is very important in Van der Eng’s theory, the hierarchy of these levels. The fundamental anthropological constituents concern the universal aspects of the thematic levels, which determine the comprehensibility of the narrated world (Van der Eng 1978: 21).
        In his theory of the analysis of the literary work Van der Eng emphasizes in particular the devices of the arrangement of the thematic material. Arrangement he defines as “a system of repetitions and changes, drawing the reader’s attention again and again to the characterization of a personage and the gradual development in it, to an action-pattern and its characteristic gradual leading towards some climax etc” (Van der Eng 1978: 39). The basis of the arrangement, or, rather, its primary material, is the motif in the way Tomasevskij defined it: the ultimate thematic particle. Van der Eng calls this the ‘narrative element’. The motif or narrative element has a dynamic quality, i.e. it displays a great many relations with other elements/motifs of the narrative structure and, apart from that, with elements from other literary texts, with historical facts and with human experience in general. In his theory – and in view of the definition of the arrangement he gives this is not surprising – Van der Eng is particularly concerned with the intratextual relations between the motifs. In his discussion of this problem he develops a much more differentiated and sophisticated view of the function of the motif in the thematic structure than Tomasevskij. Whereas Tomasevskij only gave a definition of the motif and distinguished between several kinds of motifs, Van der Eng describes extensively the dynamic function of the motif in the network of motifs that together form the semantic structure and the possible relations which exist between the motifs.
        Together with Vladimir Propp, Van der Eng is of opinion that a sentence does not coincide with one motif, as Tomasevskij maintained, but can contain several motifs which belong to any of the three thematic levels of the narrative structure: the action, the characterization and the setting. Every sentence may contain bits of information on these three levels. A motif is primarily connected with the sentence in which it occurs and with the immediate surrounding text, the paragraph. Secondly the motif is connected with other text-fragments. The result is – and this is one of the crucial points of Van der Eng’s theory – that the motifs have what he calls a ‘chameleonic pertinence’. Within the sentence they can have, dependent on the attitude of the speaker (narrator, character), a principal relevance for one of the thematic levels, for instance the social setting; through their relations with other text-fragments the same motifs can have relevance for another thematic level, the characterization or the action. Such motifs have a double function. A well-known example is the description of the furniture in the house of the landowner Sobakevic in Gogol’’s Dead Souls: while using motifs of the setting the narrator explicitly underlines their importance for the characterization. “The table, the arm-chairs, the chairs, everything breathed of the same heavy, uncouth mind, in short, every piece of furniture, every chair seemed to say: I am Sobakevic too!, or: I am a chip of old Sobakevic!”. Other interesting examples in which motifs of the setting have a direct, but in this case a much more implicit characterological import Van der Eng described in his analysis of Tynjanov’s story “Podporucik Kize” (1982a).
          One of the cornerstones of Van der Eng’s theory of narrative analysis is his discussion of the various forms of arrangement that can be discerned. The semantic structure and function of a motif can only be fully grasped when the reader is aware of the various connections this motif has with other motifs in the same sentence, the paragraph and through the entire text. “Its semantic weight is, as it were, ‘filled up’ by these connections, which are based upon comparable semantic features, often irrespective of causal, logic or temporal links” (Van der Eng 1978: 44). The connections between the motifs – Van der Eng calls them oppositions – can be of various types, dependent on the dominance of either similar or dissimilar semantic features. Van der Eng distinguishes six basic types⁵:
1)    parallelism; in this type of opposition dissimilarities prevail, e.g. two characters of different age, different background and different appearance have different opinions, character traits, etc.;
2)    analogy; in the analogy the similarities prevail; e.g. two characters of different age, different background and different appearance are compared to each other to underline the fact that they have the same opinions, etc.;
3)    antithesis; in the antithesis the dissimilarities have an antinomic character, e.g. two characters who have the same importance in the story are set against each other as angel and demon;
4)    contrast; in the contrast the dissimilarities reinforce each other, e.g. against the background of the angelic character of the one more light is thrown on the demonic character of the other;
5)    contradiction; there is a contradiction when the antinomic features of both terms exclude each other, e.g. the same person is described as both an angel and a demon;
6)    variation; in the variation the central similarities prevail; the difference with analogy is that in the latter the dissimilarities have an independent status, whereas in the variation the dissimilarities can be considered additional elements, e.g. a character's fear is described in various situations.
       These are the basic types of opposition. They can occur in an unlimited variety, depending upon the way in which they are expressed and upon their location in the text. Oppositional motifs can occur in one sentence, but can also be parts of textual units that lie wide apart. Van der Eng underlines the important role the reader has in establishing the links between the motifs and gradually weaving the net of oppositions, the semantic structure of the text, in the course of his reading. This entails a permanent activity of the reader, both a regressive and a progressive orientation, as the motifs which form an opposition may be scattered through the text and often will be semantically influenced by the text that lies in between the passages relevant for the opposition. The reading process is a permanent process of interpretation in which the reader, on the basis of ever-increasing semantic information, gradually uncovers and evaluates the implicitly and explicitly comparable semantic features in the various (oppositional) text-fragments.
         In his interpretation of the text the reader is greatly assisted by the fact that oppositions of a certain type, especially when connected with the same thematic element, often occur in series or chains, i.e. an opposition is repeated again and again in the text and, as it concerns the same thematic aspect, greatly enhances the semantic weight of the oppositional motifs. Van der Eng uses the word ‘gradation’ in this respect, by which he means to say that the “features of a set which is constituted within a chain, are being emphasized with an increasing expressivity” (1978: 50). As an example we can take Tolstoj’s story “The Three Deaths”, in which the series of antitheses between a pale, sickly mistress and her ruddy, healthy maidservant comes to a climax in an opposition in which ‘death’ is explicitly referred to.
         Van der Eng distinguishes two kinds of chains, ‘frame-work series’ (‘obramljajuscie rjady’) or ‘integrational chains’, and ‘dispersive chains’. Integrational chains connect semantic oppositions of the three thematic levels, action, characterization and setting, which are linked causally, temporally and spatially. In such a chain one of the thematic levels dominates the others. Dispersive chains consist of oppositions of one thematic level, without any direct actional causality and temporal and spatial continuity. Just as there is a hierarchy in thematic levels, there is also a hierarchy in the arrangement of the chains. This hierarchy is determined by the extent a chain participates in the essential thematic issues of a narrative text. As every new chain supplies the reader with answers to questions raised by earlier chains, but at the same time raises new questions and complications, the final chain, which answers the questions and solves the contradictions of the preceding ones is, as a rule, the most important. Such a chain pervades the story in a regressive way, clarifying what has remained unclear, tying up all the loose elements’ and heightening the reader’s understanding of the text. Van der Eng illustrates this important function of the final chain with his analysis of Sinjavskij’s story “Pchenc” (1983)⁶ and of stories by Cechov, e.g. “Dama s sobackoj” (“Lady with a Lapdog”), 1978 and “Na podvode” (“On the Waggon”), 1982.
         After having outlined Van der Eng’s theory of the analysis of the narrative text, I shall now proceed to making a critical assessment of this theory. To what extent Van der Eng adds something to the scientific debate about literary analysis and which position does he take up within contemporary literary theory?
        From what I said above it is clear that Van der Eng’s ideas are rooted in Russian Formalism, the movement which has proved to be so fundamental for twentieth century literary criticism and literary theory. Just like the Formalists, Van der Eng sets great store by the device, which he considers the basic element of the semantic structure of the literary text. Van der Eng, however, goes further than the Formalists, because he emphasizes the coherence and interdependence of the various devices, stylistic, compositional and thematic, and formulates a theoretical model of the analysis of the literary text in which these devices are studied as an integrated complex of structural elements. This idea of integration, which in his theory is combined with the concept of hierarchy, leads him into the direction of structuralism. Among the many structuralist narrative theories Van der Eng’s model, for various reasons, features conspicuously. In the first place his theory concerns all the thematic levels of the text, whereas the structuralist narratologists on the whole are mainly interested in the level of the action.⁷ In the second place – and this is closely connected with what has just been said – his theory emphasizes the dynamic aspect of the artistic construction, whereas the structuralists generally regard this as something static.⁸ Many structuralist theories have produced a workable model for the analysis of the structure of action in the narrative text, Van der Eng's theory is one of the very few by which the complete thematic structure of a literary text can be analyzed. While some structuralist theories are definitely reductive, Van der Eng’s theory can be characterized as integrated and all-embracing.
         A third reason why Van der Eng’s theory stands out is his already mentioned attention for the extra-textual aspects of the literary work. Although his model, by establishing textual patterns of meaning, serves to produce the semantic potential of the text as the basis for the interpretation and is particularly oriented towards the semantic structure of a literary text in all its complexity (the primary prerequisite for the aesthetic effect), his theory does not confine itself to text-internal factors, that is to say, for him the semantic structure is not an end in itself.
          Modern literary theories and methods employ three key terms: structure, function and communication (Iser 1989: 220). The concept of ‘structure’ has an all-pervading importance in contemporary theoretical discourse and has led to a kind of analysis of the literary text which “makes possible an intersubjective and plausible description of the composition of the subject-matter; it also facilitates description of the production of meaning” (Iser 1989: 223). Structural analysis, however, has its limitations; it is in particular aimed at the semantic dimension of the text and considers structure as such as the fundamental and ultimate thing. “...The structure concept allows for a minute description of texts, but it cannot describe, let alone explain, more than texts. (...) ...the structures of the literary text become relevant through the function of the text” (Iser 1989:
224).
            For Van der Eng the functional approach has always been of paramount importance. He does not stop after having described the interplay of techniques which leads to the establishment of the semantic structure of the text, but relates this semantic structure to something which lies outside the text. In other words, he looks for the meaning of meaning, or the function of meaning. This question, the function of meaning, brings us back to the fundamental principle of Van der Eng’s conception of literature: literature confronts the reader with life in all its aspects and provides him with a better insight into this life. In the expression of this idea Van der Eng emphasizes the sensuous, concrete aspects of literature, which make literature much more accessible than, for instance, philosophy. Agreeing with statements by Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, who were interested in the novel as a mode of voicing philosophic views, but who realized that novelists express concrete, perceivable events and convey their experience not rationally but through imagination, Van der Eng states:
            “Though the novel is an alternative source of learning the world's reality for those, who consider philosophic writings deficient, it is also a source of learning for the philosophically ignorant. I think that for both the first and the second categories of readers the communicative capacity of the novel and the short story rests upon the clear and concrete presentation of human facts preceding any abstract reflections upon them. What is more, the accessibility of the novel is heightened to a great extent by an intricate set of regressive and progressive orientations towards the text, producing stronger and stronger mnemonic, catalytic and anticipatory effects”. (1977: 112)
         The quotation brings us to the third key word of contemporary literary theory: communication. In Van der Eng’s theory the reader, who ultimately answers the question of the continued validity of the literary text, plays a prominent part. It is the reader who “completes the indexical information, adjusting the informatory elements to literary and non-literary textual systems and to human patterns beyond textual fixation. He fills in the premeditated gaps and the gaps that arise when a literary work has to be adjusted to a new period with different values, with modified forms of human life and culture. (...) He is a co-creator, grasping all the devices of the short-range and the long-range arrangement and the selective (indexical) and phraseological organization of the literary text; he rounds off the information by adjusting the fictional data to intratextual, intertextual and extra-textual patterns”. (Van der Eng 1982b: 139). Van der Eng assumes a close cooperation between the author and the reader: “...the arranging author (poet) should accord full play to the reader’s aesthetic feeling, to his artistic taste, to his psychological insight, to the depth of his religious comprehension. In doing so, he meets all the necessary conditions that enable the reader co-creator to be aware – in contradistinction to the specialist – of the synthetic aspect of the knowledge conveyed in a great work of literature. Such a literary work gives rise to multifaceted forms of cognizance: the isolated clues may pertain to sensuous aspects of human society, to psychological patterns, to philosophical trends, to religious beliefs and practices”. (1982b: 147). In this way literature, great literature becomes a model of life and at the same time functions as a means, one of the best and interesting means we have, to understand life. His remarkable susceptibility of what great literature is and what great literature can do has led Van der Eng to a well-considered, valuable and, what is not the least important, excellently applicable theory. Besides, his views are firmly grounded in contemporary literary theory. By realizing that a structuralist taxonomy has to be supplemented with a functional approach and that both the concepts of structure and function have to be incorporated by the concept of communication, Van der Eng has devised a model of the analysis of the literary text which comprises the essential elements of the most important literary theories of this century: formalism, structuralism and reader-response criticism.⁹

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