The History in Literature: On Value Genre, Institutions (review)

REVIEWS HERBERT LJNDENBERGER. The History in Literature: On Value Genre, Institutions. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. xix + 269 pp. Herbert Lindenberger's latest collection of essays investigates the relentlessly historical nature of literary study with clarity, knowledge, and elegance. In addition to providing a sane view of some hotly debated issues, he also includes a wealth of fascinating details. The book is centered in the nineteenth century, but extends into the present with essays on canon formation, on opera, and on the new historicism, with which this collection joins forces. It begins with a useful glossary, recontextualizing such terms as canon, genre, history, institutions, literature, opera, romanticism. The essay on "The Normality of Canon Change" gives a much needed historical perspective on the subject. For one thing, it is comforting to be reminded that our predicament is not new, such a perspective may serve to lessen some of the animosity which debates about the canon have generated. Given Lindenberger's central role in such debates at Stanford, I wonder whether that diffusion of hostility may have implicitly inspired this levelheaded essay. In it he considers three instances: a current debate over a humanities reading list, the mid-nineteenth century formation of the German classical canon raising Goethe, Schiller and Lessing to star status while includingbut dimming slightly the lights ofKlopstock, Wieland, andJean Paul, and the formation of the canon of Greek tragedy sometime between the third century B.C. and the second A.D., the selectors seeming to have favored plays with catastrophic endings but not those with melodramatic action. The next essay reports on the much publicized debate about what should be included in a general course on western culture taken by all undergraduates at Stanford. Here again, we get a valuable sense of particular history, we learn, for example, that many western civilization courses stemmed from one given at Columbia in 1918, which "sought to introduce Americans to the European heritage in whose defense they were soon to risk their lives." (One might bistoridze Lindenberger's text from an interamerican comparative perspective , and note that our language is not quite pluralistic enough yet, for he, like many of us, still uses "American" rather than "North American" to refer to this continent.) Lindenberger usefully contextualizes the polemics of these debates, reminding us, for example, that Allan Bloom's criticism ofStanford's revisions of the canon as "indoctrination with ephemeral ideologies" and "surrender to the present" are strikingly similar to complaints against Rousseau in the British press during the 1790s. He ends the essay with the wise observation that the move toward a more "globally oriented" course represents not only the university's multicultural student body but also the waning of America's power in the world—an implicit testimony to the continuing importance of comparative perspectives. The chapter on opera and postmodernity includes an instructive comparison of opera house and art museum, in which Lindenberger investigates why opera houses have been less hospitable to contemporary music than art museums to contemporary art: whereas the production of new and unpopular operas tends to alienate rich patrons, the acquisition ofnew art works attracts such patrons via new display rooms named for them. 140 THE COMPARATIST Other chapters, on "RomanticPoetryandthe Institutionalizing ofValue," and on "Evaluation as Justification and Performance: The Leech Gatherer as Testing Ground," in the "Value in History" section; on "Theories of Romanticism : From a Theory of Genre to the Genre of Theory," on "The History in Opera: La clemenza di Tito, Khovanshchina, Moses andAwn," and on "The Literature in History: Danton's Death in the Texts of Revolutions," in the "Genre in History" section; and on the new historicism, in the "Institutions" section, are equally rich in historical insights and information. The book ends with an epilogue in the form of an interview, where Lindenberger ironizes to himself, expressing his views, for example, on the new historicism as both a valuable corrective to earlier trends, and "the only viable career move the past ten years," demonstrating that "canon change is as normal in criticism as in literature." Finally, he predicts that the issue for the 1990's will be style, but "style in a much broader sense, the styles...