Reckoning with New Literary History

For forty years, thanks to Ralph Cohen, I have used the term "new literary history" to name the ambition of my work, starting when I was first formulating my dissertation and continuing to the present. My wish to share this banner testifies to the power of print and the utopian community of learning. I subscribed from its beginning to New Literary History, but it took some years before I encountered Cohen in person—first at the English Institute, next through the Society for Critical Exchange, finally at an NLH conference—and then memorably in 1995, Ralph, Libby, and I spent a week together at meetings in Jinan and Dalian, in China.

The conviction that there is such a thing as new literary history has sustained me over the years through long encounters with deeply serious, admired interlocutors—actual or imagined—who came to doubt that literary history can be accomplished, whether from the positivist side with David Perkins or the skeptical side with Paul de Man.¹ The pragmatic, inclusive example set by Cohen's journal has made evident that wherever the mind leads can lead to new literary history. Establishing New Literary History as a journal—not a conference, not a book, not an encyclopedia—quietly but powerfully defined new literary history as a project, something ongoing and exploratory, more the Schlegel side of German Romanticism than the Hegel side. Against the dream or myth of history as total and of history writing as complete stands the actual hopeful dialogue among partialities, in debate. This continuing hope among a partial, plural, open group is why throughout these reflections I use lower case for the common noun phrase new literary history, in contrast to the capitalized journal title.

The most obviously new thing about New Literary History when it first appeared was its subtitle: a journal "of theory and interpretation." Who knew exactly what these terms meant? But they made clear that new literary history was a matter of mind, not of note cards. Appearing in fall 1969, the journal's first issue predated the remarkable Spring 1970 issue of Daedalus on "Theory in Humanistic Studies." In that issue, epoch-making performances by Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Hillis Miller (all of whom also appear within the first four years of NLH) began to project an influential notion of what "theory" might mean.² Morton Bloomfield, who helped organize the Daedalus issue, was also a founding member on the NLH masthead, so the two projects could hardly have happened unbeknownst to each other. This is an aspect of institutional history I'd love to learn more about.

Bloomfield was a great scholar of the middle ages and a deep thinker about language, and he chaired the English department at Harvard in the years around 1970, the department in which I completed my BA in 1967 and where I was pursuing my PhD, leaving for my first full-time job in 1973. You might think, then, that NLH just offered more of what was already there. But that was not my experience. To make palpable how necessary and essential I found New Literary History for my education, I offer an institutional sketch of "Literary History at Harvard" circa 1970, a piece that for some reason never appeared in that intriguing back-of-the-journal feature on "Literary History in the University," including Yale (1.2), Hopkins (1.3), Stanford (2.1), Berkeley (2.3), Indiana (3.2), Irvine (4.1), Stanford (4.2), Wisconsin (4.3). Part of the generative power of New Literary History has been its concern with such institutional practicalities of pedagogy and curriculum, as well as larger arguments on the university and society, such as the early pieces by Richard Ohmann and Louis Kampf (5.2).

I still don't understand how any Harvard student could have accessed in person the character of mind evident in Bloomfield's contributions to Daedalus and NLH. The combination of a traditional curriculum, plus Bloomfield's commitment to the primary necessity of philology for medieval studies, meant that what he offered as a teacher seemed far less compelling than...