Underwood 2013: Difference between revisions
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:"Until Gerald Graff wrote ''Professing Literature'', many late-20th-century histories of literary study were actually histories 'of literary criticism,' constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that ran from Matthew Arnold thorugh the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring the institutional history of the university curriculum. It's especially worth addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary study may be about to rehearse early-20th-century debates bout the threat of 'scientism' and 'factualism' in our discipline." (135) | :"Until Gerald Graff wrote ''Professing Literature'', many late-20th-century histories of literary study were actually histories 'of literary criticism,' constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that ran from Matthew Arnold thorugh the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring the institutional history of the university curriculum. It's especially worth addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary study may be about to rehearse early-20th-century debates bout the threat of 'scientism' and 'factualism' in our discipline." (135) | ||
== Stories of Parallel Lives == | |||
last 40 years haven't abandoned a sense of historical continuity "but have been characterized on the contrary by a growing confidence in continuity. Cultural intellectuals have rightly perceived this as a crisis, however, because the prestige of historical cultivation has long hinged -- as parallel-lives stories remind us -- on the premise of discontinuity. If history is radically discontinuous then intellectuals can argue that present-day social standards have to be qualified by historicist culture, which serves as a placeholder for an infinite variety of possible alternate perspectives." If, on the other hand, we have reached a point where the present is finally right to imagine that it holds a privileged perspective, then the supplement of historical cultivation (of 'culture' as we have known it for the last two centuries) is no longer particularly urgent." (156) | |||
Revision as of 19:44, 5 October 2013
- Underwood, Ted. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization
literary historians took up Foucault because he was saying what the discipline already did -- "Foucauldian 'genealogy' may have been controversial in history departments, but in literary study it offered an eloquent, philosophical rationale for an approach to history that was already dominant." (134)
blind spot in the discipline -- "widespread amnesia about the whole history of the discipline before New Criticism" (134)
- "Until Gerald Graff wrote Professing Literature, many late-20th-century histories of literary study were actually histories 'of literary criticism,' constructing an imaginary genealogy of the discipline that ran from Matthew Arnold thorugh the likes of T. S. Eliot, and largely ignoring the institutional history of the university curriculum. It's especially worth addressing this oversight now, because there are growing signs that literary study may be about to rehearse early-20th-century debates bout the threat of 'scientism' and 'factualism' in our discipline." (135)
Stories of Parallel Lives
last 40 years haven't abandoned a sense of historical continuity "but have been characterized on the contrary by a growing confidence in continuity. Cultural intellectuals have rightly perceived this as a crisis, however, because the prestige of historical cultivation has long hinged -- as parallel-lives stories remind us -- on the premise of discontinuity. If history is radically discontinuous then intellectuals can argue that present-day social standards have to be qualified by historicist culture, which serves as a placeholder for an infinite variety of possible alternate perspectives." If, on the other hand, we have reached a point where the present is finally right to imagine that it holds a privileged perspective, then the supplement of historical cultivation (of 'culture' as we have known it for the last two centuries) is no longer particularly urgent." (156)