New Academic History

Times have changed. Once there were no journals in literary theory. The subject was circumscribed by René Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature, which taught that literature was a structure of norms. People were grateful for this thoughtful work. The bases were covered. The study of literature had a framework and made sense. Critics who once considered their calling to be to evaluate literature changed their task to finding the organic unity in each work. Students took up this program and went to graduate school. Literary history was the collection of great works of literature that could now be organized and analyzed as part of scholarship and pedagogy.

In the times of Wellek and Warren, I. A. Richards and Northrop Frye, theory in science was a model and a plan for creating new experiments in order to find out how things "really" worked. Positivism was how one studied science. Theories changed by being disproved, making way for consensus on new theories. Those who read Wellek and Warren and who observed the conventions of theory and practice used by scientists went about finding that same structure in works of literature. Others tried to describe how one measured "aesthetic distance." Still others articulated recursively how every work of art fit into the taxonomy of genres that the "anatomy of criticism" formulated to emulate the confidence of positivism. Even though theory did not work in literature the way it worked in science, there was no other sense in which theory was understood, regardless of the fact that Wellek and Warren's theory was not positivistic.

A similar account might be given for literary history, which at the time was exemplified by Albert C. Baugh, A Literary History of England, in addition to the Oxford and Cambridge Histories. History and literature were conceived in similar ways—literature circumscribed by fixed genres, history by fixed periods. Literary history consisted of permutations of fixed genres and periods. Lattices and taxonomies became part of the curricula, the bases of examination structures, of the thinking of thousands of faculty members, of the policies of hiring committees. "We need a modernist" and similar sentences were spoken in the departmental sweathouse when new faculty lines were available.

This was the scene that Ralph Cohen renewed, the time that Ralph Cohen changed. A journal of theory and interpretation called New Literary History announced that it aimed to study history differently. Something old, something new. Not criticism; not exegesis; not chronicles or lists; not taxonomies. Not normal. Times had changed. After NLH, journals of theory and interpretation proliferated and graduate students responded with enthusiasm. Professional conferences were loaded with debates and disputes. The "normal science" of New Criticism and rigid taxonomies had given way to something else. People thought that theory and interpretation mattered. People now thought that writing history was hard, perhaps impossible as an account of "what actually happened."

Ralph Cohen did not invent literary theory, nor did he make literary history new. But he did make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. That purse was the reinvigoration of our profession. There was a rush of imagination, of reading, interest, small talk, gossip, a new willingness to listen and to speak to others, a new motivation for writing and teaching. Finally there were things to teach that were not "normal science." I remember wondering in graduate school, after finding the organic unity in dozens of works and showing this technique to undergraduates: there must be something more to the scholarly, critical study of literature. In NLH, there were papers and teachers whose next sentences could no longer be predicted. There was new room for crackpots and fanatics. When the taxonomists and strict periodists were joined by people with fresh imaginations, earlier attitudes remained, but were put in perspective. A broad range of new combinations found their way into discussions of language, literature, philosophy, psychology, science, history—actually, every subject in the academy has been represented at one point or another in NLH. Every subject. Is that language and literature? It was for me.

Since it entered the academy in relatively modern times, literature has been a...