historical scholarship

51
Historical Scholarship Catherine Gallagher

Upload: aravind-nair

Post on 09-May-2015

1.553 views

Category:

Education


0 download

DESCRIPTION

A postgraduate class presentation on the essay 'Historical Scholarship' by Catherine Gallagher.

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Historical Scholarship

Historical Scholarship

Catherine Gallagher

Page 2: Historical Scholarship

Historical Scholarship

• Historicism• Aim: to historicise that is, to understand

any phenomenon as a part of history

• A historical turn in literature departments 1980-90-present– Frederic Jameson: ‘Always historicise’.

• A broadening of the range of topics handled by literature depts.

Page 3: Historical Scholarship

• What does it mean for literary scholarship?– Challenging the text/context distinction– Posing historical questions about literary

works– Answering historical questions with

literary evidence and critical analytic tools

Page 4: Historical Scholarship

• Also influenced the underlying assumptions of literary criticism

• We no longer study literature as a product of historical periods (English Renaissance Lit etc)

• Historicism also looks at– Construction of authorship– Canons– Reading practices– Nationhood– Idea of the literary

Page 5: Historical Scholarship

– Historicising history itself and analysing its literary character

– Understanding the place of literature in human culture. Literature is a recent phenomenon. Why did it emerge?

Page 6: Historical Scholarship

• Historicisms of the 80s– Frederic Jameson ‘Always historicise’– Literary history is not an

epiphenomenon– History is a field for the chronological

investigation of cultural differences which are reflected in and created by literary texts

–Many historicisms, little consensus

Page 7: Historical Scholarship

– The idea of what is history has not been settled yet.

– Historicism has had to deal with its own success

– The movement has done a fair bit of introspection in order to settle its foundations.

Page 8: Historical Scholarship

• Jameson – the path of the object and the path of the subject – the historical origins of the things themselves and the intangible historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand those things.

• Historicism tried to follow a balanced approach.

Page 9: Historical Scholarship

What drives historicism?

• Technology• Curiosity• Inclusivity – The need to include previously excluded

groups as a part of history

• Methodological self consciousness

Page 10: Historical Scholarship

Historicising The Author

• The author was central to literary study upto the 1970s ie, till the advent of postmodernism

• Till then, the author was– The historical link between a work and its

environment of production– R S Crane (1935): A literary history is a narrative

of the changing habits, beliefs, attitudes … of individual persons…it is not a history of literature but of literary men.

• Author-centered, contextualising historical criticism

Page 11: Historical Scholarship

• 1970|1980 – New Historicisms– Discursive Criticism – Foucault & Annales

school– Ideology Criticism – Marxist Structuralists –

Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey– Cultural Poetics/Cultural Studies – Raymond

Williams & Annales school

• Deemphasized the author• No difference b/w literature and its

historical context.

Page 12: Historical Scholarship

New Historicisms

• Discursive Criticism – connected texts (and other representations) across generic boundaries. As parts of ‘unauthored’ discourses.

• Texts are vehicles of discourse, carrying the “effects of social power” deep into “the secluded recesses of consciousness”.

• It is discourse that creates consciousness. Individual consciousness (the author) is not the ultimate historical cause or source of a literary work.

Page 13: Historical Scholarship

• These movements sought to destabilize the idea of the subject.

• Getting rid of the author was only part of this project.

• The author is a modern figure, a product of our society…it discovered the prestige of the individual…it should be this positivism,the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the “person” of the author.

-Roland Barthes

Page 14: Historical Scholarship

• Deconstructionists – the subject is made and unmade as a textual phenomenon.

• Lacanians – the subject is an effect of language.

• Althusserians – the modern subject was called into being by the ideological apparatuses of the state.

• They all agreed that the author is a construction.

Page 15: Historical Scholarship

Terry Eagleton

– Texts are composed of a variety of ideologies (ie, texts are overdetermined)

– The authorial ideology (AuI) is only one of these. There are a lot of other ideologies too (GMP, LMP, AI, GI)

Page 16: Historical Scholarship

Jerome McGann:Romanticism vs. Historicism

• Author figure in English Romanticism– During the romantic period, writers began

claiming primacy for themselves and their consciousnesses.

– Influence of Kant and Fichte’s subjectivity.– They tried to place the author at the centre of

the literary process. They tried to erase history and replaced it with a record of pure consciousness.

– Literary historians (McGann) during the 70s and 80s attempted to reclaim the historicity of these works.

Page 17: Historical Scholarship

Retrieving historicity from Romantic Writers

• The form of a literary work retains its historicity even if the author tries to impose his/her consciousness upon it.

• The work/poem is a record of the struggle between the author and historical aspects of the time.

• Close reading can reveal the elisions and intentional antihistorical actions engaged in by the authors.

• Romantic authorship was overdetermined by a number of ideologies. Althusserian influence.

Page 18: Historical Scholarship

History and Textuality. Paul de Man & Lacan

• According to de Man– The author is an ideological formation.– What disrupts ideology is called textuality or literariness.

• New Historicists equated textuality with history.

• History is the process by which ideologies are formed.

• It fractures the “centred, totalizing and rational subject”.

• History is often unspecifiable like the Jacques Lacan’s idea of the real.

Page 19: Historical Scholarship

Stephen Greenblatt

• Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning.– questioning the subject/author.– the subject which emerged during the

renaissance was not autonomous or stable.– It was an improvisational self. It could tolerate

nonidentity. – Iago: “I am not what I am.”

• Greenblatt was influenced by Foucault’s idea that the subjectivity was a historically flexible conduit of power.

Page 20: Historical Scholarship

Foucauldian New Historicism

• Foucauldians refused to privilege nonidentity as a subversive alternative to subjectivity.

• Althusser: Elisions, fissures, gaps, ruptures and slippages in the text indicate instances when subjectivity breaks down.

• Foucault: But these may serve another hidden power/agenda.

• The author was an endlessly labile (mutable, changeable) self that could be fashioned for a variety of discursive purposes.

Page 21: Historical Scholarship

• In ‘What is an Author?’, he argued that the ‘Death of the Author’ is never absolute.

• The author is always reconstituted in the form of an ‘author function’.

• The author function is how the name of the individual writers operate in various discourses – legal, institutional etc.

• Modern literary authorship arises from the juridical need to hold individuals responsible for certain kinds of publications.

Page 22: Historical Scholarship

• Foucauldian critics looked at how writers constitute themselves into authors – under certain legal systems, inside certain ideologies, within the rules of certain institutions and with the help of certain productive forces.

• The ‘author’ is not the starting point of literature.

• The author is a product. The writer is only one of the ingredients that make an author.

Page 23: Historical Scholarship

Legality and Censorship

• Foucault identified the state’s need to hold individuals responsible for their writing.

• New impetus to studies of suppression and censorship. Examples of studies – page 177 paragraph 1

• Censorship not only suppresses authorship, it requires it.

• It authorizes and deauthorizes.

Page 24: Historical Scholarship

Copyright and the Author

• Writers derive certain benefits out of censorship. The idea of copyright is one. (Woodmansee, Rose)

• Britain had the earliest copyright law – 1710.

• The writer becomes the author-proprietor.

• Carla Hesse – ‘The Rise of Intellectual Property’

Page 25: Historical Scholarship

The Author as a part of the Economy

• The author is both economic agent and commodity.

• This authorial function started with the beginning of the ‘print culture’ in the early modern period.– Increasing availability of printed commodities– opening up of the public sphere– the ability to make one’s living by writing.

• Habermas, Pocock, Brewer. Pg 178 Para 0

Page 26: Historical Scholarship

The threat of Commodification to Authorship

• Economic and Legal factors may have prompted textual production & authorship.

• But the model of an autonomous and perfectly self-expressive author developed as a reaction to these conditions.

• The aspect of authorship which was most threatened by commodification was masculinity.

Page 27: Historical Scholarship

Gender and Authorship

• Historically the default gender of the author was assumed to be male.

• Feminist projects to recover the history of women writers.

• How and why did women become authors at specific points in history?

• Authorship at these points in time took on a feminine aspect and conversely also helped constitute the very idea of femininity.

Page 28: Historical Scholarship

Minority Authorship

• How and why did certain authors create textual effects of minority consciousness?

• How did these affect the idea of authorship?

• David Lloyd, Abdul JanMohamed, Regenia Gagnier

Page 29: Historical Scholarship

Revisiting Historicised Authorship

• Economic, Legal, Psychological, Gender, Minority, Commodification etc have effects on authorship.

• Barthes’ idea of the author as a sovereign subject is incomplete.

• Historicization has uncovered the complexities of authorship.

• Is the process of historicization complete?

Page 30: Historical Scholarship

• Do we need to continue to historicize after we have removed the ‘sinister hegemony’ of the subject?–We are only beginning to have a

detailed picture of historical authorship.– Historicizing authorship is becoming an

important part of literary biography.– A rich variety of theoretical and critical

methods are available.

Page 31: Historical Scholarship

Historicizing the Text

• Author, text, reader, literature etc are fundamental categories that are deeply interconnected.

• Barthes – “The text is plural.”• Barthes attempted to distinguish between text

and work– Text: an open-ended network or weave of signifiers

or a methodological field– Work: a closed system that seems to convey a

definite intention.

• These (text and work) were radically new concepts.

Page 32: Historical Scholarship

• Defining a text is difficult• Not all things written by an author are

texts.• There can be texts without authors ie,

anonymous texts.• During the 1980s this plurality of the text

was being explored by textual historians– They focused on the materiality of written

artifacts; their versions, modes of production, preservation, and dissemination.

Page 33: Historical Scholarship

• These early textual historians noted the role of editors

• They postulated that ‘editing’ was invented as a deeply historical discipline in the 18th & 19th C.– Editing (re)constructs texts out of the

indeterminacy and plurality which surrounds them.

Page 34: Historical Scholarship

18th and 19th C practice of Editing - McGann

Editing

Recovery

Reconstitution

Exploration

• RECOVERY of the entire cultural and historical context of the original

• EXPLORATION of the entire critical history

• RECONSTITUTION of the words in terms of these two historical matrices.

Page 35: Historical Scholarship

Problems with this concept of Editing

• It narrowed the field of possible historical questions about texts.– It hides the variety of texts available as well

as the history of the text’s production, dissemniation and reception

• Because historicization of texts tend to dissolve them, authorial intention has been a necessary way of protecting the concept of the text from the plurality produced by historical criticism.

Page 36: Historical Scholarship

1990s – New Philology

• Celebration of heterogeneity of texts• Fundamental variability in the

transmission of texts• Textual variability helps understand

conditions of production and dissemination

• Texts are not finished products but ongoing processes.

Page 37: Historical Scholarship

New areas of consideration in textual scholarship

• History of the book• History of

printing/manuscript transmission

• Histories of theater• oral performance• Illustration• Photography• religious customs• formal and informal

censorship• Licensing• Libraries• Markets• Paper making• Taxation• Copyright• University curricula• Film, television,

internet etc

Page 38: Historical Scholarship

• Textual historical criticism has merged with media studies

• Textual historians read between texts to understand the operation of various discourses in society.

• Challenges: – Loss of historical perspectives (time and

space)– ‘Permanent presentness’ of texts

Page 39: Historical Scholarship

Historicizing the Reader

• Hand Robert Jauss, “The historicity of literature rests on…the experience of the literary work by its readers”

• “The historical context in which a literary work appears is not a factical, independent series of events that exist apart from an observer”

• The text happens wherever it is read.• Wolfgang Iser: The virtual text of the reading

process is multiple in time and space.

Page 40: Historical Scholarship

Two Possibilities for Reading

• The text does not have a history; nor does the reader.

• Barthes, ‘the reader is without history, biography, psychology: he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted’.

• A new field in the history of reading is possible.

• We can study the differences between how a reader in the 13th century read a work and how it is read now.

• Jauss: ‘their horizons of expectations’ would be dissimilar

• Para 0, pg 182 – 2 different readings of Perceval

Page 41: Historical Scholarship

Reception histories

• 1970s – texts are simply their readings

• Canons are made by readers• Human subjectivity differs widely• Various Theories emerged– German Reception Theory– American reader-response theory– French cultural history

Page 42: Historical Scholarship

1990s – History of Reading

• From “Who, what, when and where did people read?” To “Why and how did they read?”

• Robert Darnton – “First steps toward a History of Reading”

• Transitions in reading practice – from orality to writing, from manuscript to print, from hand press to industrial printing.

Page 43: Historical Scholarship

The impact of Printing

• Printing displaced older reading habits.

• In the medieval period, printing created not only a new type of reader but a new type of person.

• Meaning of a text depends on its reading.

• Reading depends upon its material and cultural conditions.

Page 44: Historical Scholarship

A negative vision and a positive one

• Richard Hoggart, Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu:– Popular literacy is a form of

political manipulation– It implants a recessive

subjectivity and self discipline

– This is required for the modern state to maintain habitus

– Habitus: a culturally specific way of thinking, behaving and understanding which is regarded as natural by those inhabiting it.

• Readers actively moulded texts for their own purposes

• Readers are not passive consumers

• Modern reading subject is socially self conscious and resistant to oppression and exploitation.

Page 45: Historical Scholarship

Disintegration of the reader

• The author subject and the reader subject depended on a certain mode of textual production: the medium of the book.

• Changes in the nature of this medium are changing the nature of the reader and the author.

• Readers who can access texts simultaneously and instantaneously.

• A great revolution in reading.

Page 46: Historical Scholarship

Historicizing Literature

• Terry Eagleton: There is no essence of literature

• Literature is a functional term.• A definition of literature must take into

account a lot of overlapping phenomenon– The public sphere– National identity– Capitalism– The print market etc

Page 47: Historical Scholarship

Canon Wars of the 80s

• Literary canons are artificially constructed• Jane Tompkins: the fluctuating reputations

of certain authors illustrate how the idea of literary value is continually refashioned.

• Canons expanded with access to previously unavailable material through microfilm archives etc.

• Inclusion of many women and minority writers.

Page 48: Historical Scholarship

Historicizing Nation, Race & Empire

• Discovery of intimate connections between literature and development of modern nations

• The nation was beginning to be understood as a very unstable category.

• Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha• A student of Japanese Literature

should take neither Japan or Literature for granted.

Page 49: Historical Scholarship

• The question of Empire– Britain itself is a conglomeration of nations– How did it control a vast global empire?– Is English Literature a national literature, an

imperial literature or global literature?

• The making of the American Nation and its literature– The history of colonisation of America

• Racial Identities and literature– The nation as a constantly changing system

of racial differences.

Page 50: Historical Scholarship

Concluding Remarks: Historicizing History

• Tracing the development of history as – a discipline,– a category of consciousness,– A method of defining periods– A narrative practice

• Hayden White, F. R. Ankersmit, Dominick La Capra

• History (with a capital ‘H’) >> history

Page 51: Historical Scholarship

• Limits to self questioning• One cannot examine history without

using the principles of the discipline• Self-questioning -> the path of the

subject• Opening up new areas -> the path of

the object• Effecting a synthesis between the

two.