Federal troops occupying line of breastworks on the north bank of the North Anna River in Virgina (1864)
Written by Justine Murison (English)
The title of this conference offers the chance for linguistic play around the word "ends": is this the ending of history and/or historicism? Or are we discussing the aims of historicism? In other words, are we marking a periodization in which literary scholars "end" being "historicists"? Or are we declaring a proliferation of the methodological goals of historicist literary scholarship? As is often the case, all of the above, if not more. But let me consider this question more narrowly by qualifying what we mean by "historicism" since it seems to me that we are here, in part, to mourn the passing of the "New Historicism," a name given to the method somewhat haphazardly and that nobody seemed to like.
On the one hand, we live in the post-New Historicist era, in which the traditional methods of the New Historicism (that is, anecdote, juxtaposition, and a constrained synchronic archive) can no longer respond adequately to the weight of evidence produced by the proliferation and accessibility of digital archives. Nor have these critical maneuvers survived the other major shift, arguably born out of the historical turn and digitization, toward book history, print culture, and bibliography. The new capacities for searching and analyzing data provided by the work of digital humanities has put increased pressure on how we assemble an archive and what we do with it. On the other hand, the recent turn to such modes of analysis like Heather Love’s revival of description and observation, Best and Marcus’s invitation to "surface reading," or Rita Felski’s calls for new formalist strategies all seem to follow from the deconstructive logic of New Historicism, in which historicist research is inevitably incapable of a complete and totalizing summary of the text and thus the world. The "ends" of history seem therefore also to express the limitations of ideological critique and utopian aspirations in criticism. While the scale of the archive seems to stretch ever wider, the scale of the claims about that archive modestly shrinks.
We face a twinned question about the scale of evidence and the purpose of accruing that evidence, and I would submit then that our question is as much existential as it is methodological. What is the purpose of literary study itself at this moment in time, post-9/11 and Iraq, in an era of global warming skepticism and economic collapse? In other words, we are talking about a historical shift in the history of literary criticism. As Eve Sedgwick and Bruno Latour suggest in distinct but complementary ways, we came to the past decade armed with subtle critiques of the invisible machinations of power in liberalism only to be surprised by the very overt, visible, and spectacular methods of power in the War on Terror or, conversely, how the Arab Spring united traditional protest (that is, bodies on the line) with the networking capabilities of new technologies.
If what we are marking in this conference is the end of an era of literary method, I would like to briefly sketch the other "ends" that our renewed interests make visible and also possible, fully cognizant that in doing so I seek to proliferate historical narratives rather than to set them aside. Curiously, these lines of inquiry seem, at first blush, to be paradoxical. They are roughly in affect and phenomenology, on the one hand, and the vast scale of quantification, on the other hand. To be sure, what connects these methods is a renewed sense of what we mean by "materialism." The first method recognizes that our responses, reactions, emotions, and very bodies have a material life inextricable from the texts we assign and interpret, responses that may not be "deep" in the psychoanalytic sense but are nonetheless material and meaningful. In turn, new methods of quantification expressly respond to a scale of evidence that risks becoming so wide that it demands a seemingly opposite perspective: that is, counting, graphing, mapping, and other presentations of data advocated by Franco Moretti. We might thus consider these methods as reflecting (and, arguably, in contention with) not a smoothly functioning liberalism but its inversion in modern warfare in which the fragility of the body’s and brain’s surface and integrity have become as intensely scrutinized as the "distance" of drone attacks.
The question, then, might ultimately be ethical, as Stephen Best suggested in his talk this morning: how to maintain a sense of the urgencies, sensitivities, and, above all, limitations at both ends of these scales. This is the quandary expressed, for instance, in Herman Melville’s and Walt Whitman’s reactions to the Civil War. Rather than running from quantification and trying to embrace the "depth" of meaning of the dead, both instead try to account for the different scales of modern warfare through lyric, lists, and numbers. Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War marries the material bodies of soldiers and the physical destruction of the war to quantifications of both by annotating his poems with statistical and factual information. Shifting from lyrical to numerical, from poem to endnote, Melville attaches the two inextricably together but recognizes that they are not synonymous, just as Whitman would in enumerating the war dead through statistics that end with lyrical prose like "the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead— [. . .] ours all, (all, all, all, finally dear to me)." Whitman certainly evokes the "melancholic subject" of history; Melville, however, does not. In his poem, "Shiloh," Melville instead finds a way to express within the poem itself the cumulative effect of moving from lyric to quantification, elsewhere separated in the book. He does so in his remarkable parenthetical aside that distinguishes the temporal break before and after battle: "(What like a bullet can undeceive!)" This line suggests not simply the loss of ideological innocence, or the unveiling of the materiality of that ideology. Instead, it evokes both simultaneously. In fact, it is both a shout and a secret: it appears in parentheses but ends with an exclamation point. It announces and hides, unveils and recovers.
A shout and a secret: in the materialisms we turn to now we contend with what seems overwhelmingly manifest and obvious in the weight of evidentiary expectations, but we are also grappling with the obscured ethical responsibility that evidence entails. This may well be the connecting thread in this reconsideration of history and method across the literary disciplines – that it is a response, ultimately, to the ethical constraints of our scholarly relation to the material world.
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Acton
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Benjamin
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Best
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closing roundtable
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Ends of History
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flaneur
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historicism
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Jay
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Latour
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Marcus
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Mark Steinberg
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Thompson
by Unit for Criticism
A covered arcade in 19th-century Paris.
Written by Mark Steinberg (History/Slavic Languages & Literatures)
I want to pick up on a couple of large themes provoked by the background readings for this conference as well as today’s papers and discussions—especially a few in the work of literary scholars that spoke to my own work as a historian (most recently of city stories, especially in newspapers, as an account of what "modernity" might mean in early 20th-century Russia as well as, more recently, the meanings and uses of violence and freedom in the Russian revolution) and as a history teacher where questions of method are constantly at issue.
Above all, I was struck by appeals—often gathered around talk of a descriptive turn in literary studies—to allow ourselves to become intimate with the past, to engage in a sustained, susceptible, and generous attentiveness, enabled by a willful uncertainty about meanings (most of these terms are taken from the essay by Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus). Or as Rita Felski suggests, in her recent critique of the fetishization of historical context in literary studies, that scholars need to "slow down at each step, forgo theoretical shortcuts, and attend to the words of our fellow actors rather than overriding—and overwriting—them with without own." In other words—to invoke the often-quoted Bruno Latour—the problem is "stopping description when you are too tired or lazy to go on," and failing to recognize that we need "more not less, multiplication not subtraction." Most historians would find all of this rather encouraging, even feel ourselves to be rather superior in doing this already so well: we love more, we love attending to the words of others; we love description. Like Walter Benjamin's flâneur, we sometimes feel a certain "intoxication" in endlessly wandering in the past, taking in everything, looking for every connection.
Too much so, in fact.
The problem in a great deal of history work is often going beyond attentiveness, susceptibility, and multiplication. I see this often in dissertations, but also in submitted scholarly articles (as editor of a journal), and not only in the discipline of history. Of course, it used to be worse: especially when historical work was dominated by the old-historicist faith that "all information is within reach and every problem has become capable of solution" (the infamous declaration of the editor of the first Cambridge Modern History, Lord Acton, in the 1890s). Most historians now consider it a commonplace that we cannot "reach" every fact (and, as E. P. Thompson famously put it, that facts often "lie"). Still less can we see and understand all of the connections, and it is the connections that are most important—what Felski calls the "sociability" of texts.
In some ways, these doubts have pushed historians more in the direction of description. In the fact of inevitable interpretive uncertainty, the impossibility of closure, we might as well revel in the fragmentary and incoherent traces of the past, in the Romantic ruins of evidence, in the pleasures of intimacy with echoes and ghosts. It is indeed, as Baudelaire famously said, an "immense joy" to be the "the passionate spectator"—the "perfect flâneur" who "set[s] up house...amidst the ebb and flow...the fugitive and the infinite." Working on Russian city texts, I found just this sort of pleasure in reading the daily papers of a century ago—agreeing with Walter Benjamin, in his essay trying to explain his "Arcades Project," that "to seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper"—which, for me, meant favoring the unboxed temporality of the newspaper.
Latour is right, but in the opposite way he seems to mean: we cannot stop here, we have to work our way through and beyond description. And this means not being too deferential to the texts of the past. It is not enough to "talk with the dead" because we cannot, however much we dream of this. For the dead tend speak only in response to our questions—which shape the answers we get. And they sometimes lie. So we need to interrogate them—though short of "torture" (say with the splinters-under-the-fingernails of grand theory), which can produce, as torture tends to, new lies and substitute the interrogators strong voice for the fainter voices of the past.
Does this mean, as Felski’s critique suggests, that the we know more than the texts that precede us? I think it does, but this is nothing to be arrogant or complacent about (or tired and lazy, as Latour says). It requires hard critical work: not only in a more intense and immersive encounter with the residues of the past, but also more "suspicion" not less: and not only past texts and voices (what is said and is not said), our own vision and voice, (especially how we question the past) but also what we cannot read because it is absent, or we are not intellectually ready to hear.
Which brings me to my last theme: the much contested concept of "historical context." Felski and others are right to warn against a notion of context that forces everything we find into a "box" of teleological or structural argument. Or, as the historian Martin Jay recently wrote in characterizing this crude approach to contextualization, we cannot situate every event in terms of "deep, abiding structures," every text into a "single, homogeneous discursive whole," every story into a coherent and totalizing teleological narrative, including not only reified historical "periods" but also sometimes over-determining boxes like class, gender, and race—which should be questions not answers.
But context can be (and is, in much good history) a landscape rather than a box, a way of exploring and questioning, not answering. Something never closed. Something that is both singular and rich in its particularity (like a literary text, as Heather Love commented) and linked to other times, and places, and questions. Context is where we wander and work (slowly, attentively, susceptibly...but also full of questions and doubts), not where we end our walk because we have become tired.
Also, we cannot (and should not) be too sure of what we may find. It has been said (by Susan Buck-Morss, echoing Benjamin) that it is the work of the historian to "surprise" the present with the evidence of the past…. It is no less our work to surprise the past from the perspective of the present. And, hopefully, surprise ourselves.
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Mad Men
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Opening Remarks
by Unit for Criticism
[On February 10, 2012, the Unit for Criticism partnered with the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society for a symposium, The Ends of History. Published below are the symposium's opening remarks from Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Director of the Unit for Criticism.]
Welcome everyone to this February 2011 Winter symposium, a product of the Unit for Criticism’s ongoing partnership with Gordon Hutner, American Literary History, and the Trowbridge Office on American Literature, Culture, & Society. For their invaluable support, I also want to thank the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Department of English, and the School of Literatures, Cultures, & Linguistics; I want to thank J. B. Capino, the Unit’s Nicholson Associate Director, for all of his support and the Unit’s Research Assistants, Mike Black and mc Anderson for their indispensable contribution to the organizing and publicizing of this event. I also thank the distinguished scholars who have gathered here today from campuses as far as UC Berkeley and as near as University of Illinois, Chicago; and the Illinois moderators and closing roundtablers who will be participating today. Not least of all I thank this wonderful audience for joining us this morning.
The last time I had the pleasure of convening a co-organized winter symposium with Gordon it was two years ago and the topic was serial television: in particular AMC’s Mad Men. Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, the collection of essays that grew out of that event is now in production with Duke University Press. It may seem to be a very different kind of topic, except of course that Mad Men is a show about history: American history, the history of the 60s, global history, feminist history, civil rights, and above all—as my co-editors Lilya Kaganovksy, Rob Rushing, and I argue in the introduction to the volume—the history of the present-day neoliberalism which we continue to inhabit today. Mad Men is also a formally interesting television text: highly aestheticist, and demonstrably—indeed, for some, addictively—serial. Whatever their particular engagements with past and present, when audiences engage serial forms, following storylines that develop slowly over time, part of what they experience is a kind of formal allegory of the actuality of living in history.
This is to say that forms and formalism are not, as has sometimes been postulated, antithetical to history and historicism. Rather, since form and history stand in relation to one another, formalist and historicist standpoints should occasion dialogue. In the months leading up to the organizing of this conference Gordon and I observed a number of critical questions pressing us to consider the relation of form and history: for example, Franco Moretti’s work on digital archives; Bruno Latour’s question of why critique has run out of steam; mounting interest in formal structures such as the web, matrix, network, or tree; Rita Felski’s ongoing critiques of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and Sharon Marcus’s and Stephen Best’s wonderfully stimulating special issue of Representations, "The Way We Read Now." The result was this symposium and the occasion to invite this veritable dream team of speakers all of whom are working at the cutting edge of this topic. I am really excited about this event.
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