Periods and Resistances

Susan Bassnett provides the plank from which this collection of essays jumps off. In her handbook Translation Studies Bassnett writes of "one great pitfall: periodization, or compartmentalization of literary history." She then comments as follows:

It is virtually impossible to divide periods according to dates for, as [Jurij] Lotman points out, human culture is a dynamic system. Attempts to locate stages of cultural development within strict temporal boundaries contradict that dynamism. A splendid example of the kind of difficulties that arise from the 'periodization approach' emerge [sic] when we consider the problem of defining the temporal limits of the Renaissance. ¹

Periods are entities we love to hate. Yet we cannot do without them. For whatever the vitalist continuities of Bassnett's principles, her practice cannot escape a truism formulated by Michel Foucault, who writes, "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting." ² And cut she does. The table of contents for "History of Translation Theory," the section of Bassnett's book from which my quotation comes, begins with "Problems of 'Period Study'" and continues with "The Romans," "Bible Translation," "Education and the Vernacular," "Early Theorists," "The Renaissance," "The Seventeenth Century," "The Eighteenth Century," "Romanticism," "Post-Romanticism," "The Victorians," "Archaizing," and, finally, "The Twentieth Century." If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Let that be today's motto.

Periods are the chapters of history. No one is required to write history. But whatever you write must have its parts. When was the last time you read an academic book without chapters? Chapters can be pure irritants, the extreme case being Joel Fineman's great study Shakespeare's Perjured Eye, whose chapters are called "Chapter One," "Chapter Two," and so forth. Or chapters can be markers of impotence, as in Patricia Spacks's learned and informative early book The Insistence of Horror; after an introduction, her chapters are "Supernatural Horror in Poetry, 1700-1740," "Supernatural Horror, 1741-1780," "Supernatural Horror, 1781-1800," "Personification, 1700-1750," and, finally, "Personification, 1751-1800." ³ A collection such as ours is designed to confront the arrogance of the one critic and the timidity of the other, to help us think about why we need chapters of time, how we can make use of them, and how we can resist their seductions better than Fineman or Spacks.

Labels make many people uncomfortable. Anne K. Mellor and Robert J. Griffin write here about some of their discomforts: the distorting spectacles that identify a span of years with an individual or a group. They may provoke a reader to think back to René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1942), once the gold standard for literary studies. Wellek's notorious obsession with period definitions leads him to claim that "the concept of period is certainly one of the main instruments of historical knowledge." ⁴ His periodizing essays "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship" and "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History" are by far the longest chapters in his collection Concepts of Criticism, and few of us return to them for either enjoyment or profit. But not even Wellek was complacent about his periodizations. Periodization is the very last topic in the definitive version of Theory of Literature (once the original concluding chapter about graduate education was dropped), and its location in the book marks it as both the crown of Wellek's ambitions and the biggest thorn in his side. Every statement he made about periods was both defensive and provisional. Not even the greatest advocate of this kind of literary history was much at ease with it.

The purpose of the essays in this collection is to turn our discomfort to use. David Perkins has written perhaps the most sensibly on this matter. Periods, he observes, are "necessary fictions . . . because one cannot write history or literary history without periodizing. Moreover, we require the concept of a unified period in order to deny it, and thus make apparent the particularity, local difference, heterogeneity, fluctuation...