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• W1537143476 abstract "LITERARY CRITICS make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. The less pleasing the literature's historical context (it used to be), the more prestigious the scholar. One knew genuine erudition by his unflagging patience, his technical expertise, the endless reserve of masochism that kept him wheezing in the stacks till after dark, red-eyed from book-dust. History for literary critics has always been what hurts, penance for staking their lives on a frivolous pasttime in defiance of the factual. Over the last century Renaissance studies has swung from penitent to defiant and back again, a pendulum in step with the literature's own facticity and its implicit claim, as fiction, to rise above mere facts. An old teacher of mine once spoke derisively of an eminent, older-school Shakespearean, his Doktorvater of years before, who had a personal key to Widener and every detail of Shakespeare's theater committed to memory: did he know about poetry? Nothing. That is the voice of the New Criticism, and only as a reaction against it, among those of us who never really grasped the agony of Old Historicism, could historicism become at this late date again fashionable. The New varieties differ from the Old in the following realization: literature's context obeys no clear boundaries and includes, along with all the exotic anecdotes culled from obscure sources, the present. This strikes me as a tremendous advance, but its disadvantages are many. Faced with a literary form or text whose history was not forthcoming from immediate appearances, historicists used to resort in the main to scansion, philology, and bibliography. They could establish if nothing else authenticity, provenance, dates. Their throwbacks still produce indispensable apparati. Today's more up-to-date practitioner like myself, steeped in theory rather than paleography and falling at random on a tract from the Short-Title Catalogue, resorts to interrogation. Does the frequency of this term in certain quarters not suggest a secret nostalgia for the Elizabethan police state? The Jamesonian impulse to establish through historicism some solidarity with the past despite its resistance succeeds too often as an academic recapitulation of the tactics of Francis Walsingham. If only we could interrogate whatever has lured us into this livelihood--the forced march through reams of tedious, non-, or sub-literary documents in search of literature's complicity when the literature itself refuses to confess--we might in a single act of punishment both spare ourselves the tedium of the search and bring those responsible for it to a final account. O for the days that Foucault anatomized, when the author was whomever the authorities chose to torture! Historicists have always been masochists, good old English empiricists. Sadists have since joined the ranks with the blessing of the French. What unites historicisms old and new is a strong disinclination to inquire very far into aesthetics, that strange membrane separating literature from the materials that surround it, from the sea of sermons and tax rolls and official communiques between heads-of-state, a membrane thin and porous like a cell wall but no less essential. Frankly I do not know what literature is, but I notice we tend to bestow the title on the kind of document whose relation to the facts of history traditional historians are trained to doubt. Basically historical, literary texts on their own seem somehow incapable of transmitting their basis reliably--otherwise who would need historicism? Not without enormous and almost incalculable mediation does literature reflect what is. Among the various mediating factors perhaps the most fundamental to the aesthetic domain is the constant interference of what is not. Theorists have a lot of useful names for this type of confusion: ideology, fantasy, repression. A preferable, more inclusive term for the early modern period might be religion, to which a number of critics have recently turned their attention in hope of locating Renaissance literature's historical bias. …" @default.
• W1537143476 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W1537143476 date "1985-12-31" @default.
• W1537143476 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
• W1537143476 title "The Promise of History" @default.
• W1537143476 doi "https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110872439" @default.
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