Anglo-Saxon Styles

Introduction

Introduction In his classic paper “Style,” published in 1953, the art historian Meyer Schapiro defined style as “the constant form—and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression—in the art of an individual or group.” This definition is cited in a number of the papers included in the present volume as one that is still relevant to stylistic analysis across the disciplines today. Schapiro’s essay was originally written for the international conference “Anthropology Today” and appeared in the proceedings published under the same title.1 The purpose of both the conference and the volume was to document post–World War II developments in anthropology and explore the possibilities offered by the new interest in other lands, other peoples, and the “inter-relatedness of all things.”2 While the search for constants and commonalities was not an invention of the postwar era, it certainly became a dominant part of theory and scholarship at that time. Art historians embraced formalism, the study of color, line, shape, brushstroke, and so on; and form came to constitute style and to serve as the sole carrier for content. Form was something that all works had in common, regardless of the time and culture in which they were produced, or so critics thought. The rise of the New Criticism provided a literary parallel to the art-historical interest in form. What concerned literary critics was the unity and merit of the work, its language, which could not be separated from form or content. Language was a universal in literature, as form was a universal in art, and style was the vehicle through which language and form were expressed. Neither group was particularly interested in the cultural , historical, or personal factors that influenced artists, writers, or scholars. Nor were they interested in the arbitrary, the exceptional , or the fragmentary—though words and marks were, of course, ultimately fragments. Works of art and literature became objects to 1 2 Introduction be analyzed and researched using methodological tools borrowed from the sciences. Not surprisingly, the period also saw a dramatic increase of interest in linguistics. By the early 1960s critics in both fields were beginning to ask different questions, and Schapiro’s paper made the leap from the social sciences (anthropology) to the humanities (philosophy) when it was reprinted in Aesthetics Today, published in 1961.3 In the 1950s philosophers too had been concerned with the language of philosophy and “unmasking the linguistic confusions” of philosophical inquiry.4 Aesthetics, a “value-oriented” branch of philosophy, was not central to this concern but by 1961 was growing in popularity . The marginal was moving towards the center. Still, there was much concern with universals, with defining terms, and fields, and methods of communication. Interestingly, Schapiro’s “Style” was also included in the 1981 revised edition of the book alongside essays by Edward Said, Michael Fried, Arthur C. Danto, and Jacques Lacan, essays that called into question or flatly rejected the ideas of constant form, universal language, linear development, and humanistic unity upon which Schapiro’s essay rested.5 By its very inclusion in that volume, the paper had not only successfully crossed disciplines, but also had successfully jumped the divide between the modern and the postmodern. The reason for this may have been that at the same time that he searched for universals, Schapiro charted differences and exceptions; while focusing on form as content , he never lost sight of the historic, the cultural, and the individual as shapers of content; above all, he never lost sight of the integrity of the object.6 Anglo-Saxon England was, for Schapiro, one of the periods in which the complications of style were demonstrated most clearly. Similarity and difference existed side by side. Today, with our interest in the personal, the ephemeral, and the fragmentary, the work as process rather than object, “style” is a frequently overlooked, if not diminished, critical tool and a problematic subject of analysis. The papers in this volume demonstrate just how vital style remains as a methodological and theoretical prism, regardless of the object, individual, fragment, or process studied. Like Schapiro’s essay, these essays cross disciplines and media to consider the definitions and implications of style in AngloSaxon culture and in contemporary scholarship, seeking to identify constants, while at the same time marking out differences. More importantly, they demonstrate that the whole idea of style as “constant form” has its limitations. How can we talk about “constant form” in works that...