Historicizing Theory

13. Afterword: Historicism and Its Limits

When I began teaching English at Columbia University in the fall of 1966, the campus atmosphere was alive with conflict but the revolution that would transform scholarship in the humanities was still in its infancy. National politics and the role of the university were the issues, not the methodology of any discipline. Every month brought demonstrations and teach-ins against the Vietnam War, the draft, the ROTC, and defense research, but the coming battle in literary and cultural studies was barely on the horizon. Caught up in the intense demands of my first weeks of full-time teaching, I missed the famous conference on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University in October at which Jacques Derrida’s seminal paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”caused a sensation. Though no one knew it at the time, it marked the arrival of poststructuralism in this country. But the previous year as a graduate student I had helped Jacques Ehrmann organize a symposium at Yale that brought together some future stars of the theory firmament , including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. These papers, most of which were later published in Modern Language Notes, showed how much theory there was before the official outbreak of Theory. They focused sympathetically on older European critics such as Georg Lukács, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Georges Poulet, Ernst Robert Curtius, Maurice Blanchot, and Gaston Bachelard, some of whose major works had 301 13 Afterword Historicism and Its Limits MORRIS DICKSTEIN already appeared in English.1 This initial phase of literary theory in America can be seen as a revolt of the younger comparative literature professors against the insular mind-set of postwar American criticism, which had settled into practical criticism—the methodical explication of texts and authors—as its primary goal. By contrast, the work of the European critics was closely allied with the history of ideas, including disciplines like philosophy, phenomenology , linguistics, and social history. Philologically trained critics like Spitzer and Auerbach and a phenomenologist like Poulet had taught here as émigré scholars and had already exerted some degree of influence. Their work had a range, erudition, and philosophical heft that was lacking in American criticism , but they did not pose as drastic a challenge to business as usual as their poststructuralist successors. Their work belonged to a long tradition of cosmopolitan scholarship and literary history, but it was not incompatible with prevailing academic techniques of close reading. During that first year of teaching, as I struggled to keep up with the heavy reading for my courses, especially Columbia’s famous survey of the Western tradition from Homer to Dostoevsky, I was trying to complete a thesis on the poetry of Keats.2 With some effort, I could probably reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere in which this project originated. Clearly, it was stamped by the exegetical techniques of the New Critics yet also reflected a growing interest in Romanticism, which those critics had scorned. As an effort to penetrate the writer’s inner life by following the shape and flow of the author’s consciousness , it showed the impact of phenomenology, but as I can see today, it was also touched by the vitalism of young Nietzsche, William Blake, and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. It brought to bear the early Romantic criticism of de Man and Hartman, still almost unknown, yet also the stoic and tragic perspective of Lionel Trilling, who had been my teacher when I was an undergraduate.3 In this stew of influence, the strongest ingredient was probably the most idiosyncratic: the homegrown phenomenology of D. H. Lawrence’s friend and rival John Middleton Murry, who had tried in numerous books and essays to convey the ripening of Keats’s poetic imagination, to write a biography of the spirit from its traces in language. These were intellectual influences—numerous, as in all apprentice works—the critical avant-garde of the moment combined with models all my own, such as Murry’s incandescent identification with Keats’s mind. Did the political upheavals of the period also act upon my little book, or did they belong to a different compartment of my life? Was my work on Keats merely simultaneous with the turmoil of the sixties or somehow conditioned by it? It would be hard to say, yet clearly the book belonged to its moment, however modestly. As an exploration of one writer’s mental world, situating subjectivity at the heart of Romanticism, it was affected...