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  • "Historical Context" in Historical Context:Surface, Depth, and the Making of the Text
  • Bruce Holsinger (bio)

Historical context. Few terms have lived a more contradictory life in academic discourse over the last quarter century. Simultaneously embraced as critical necessity and reviled as bourgeois relic, historical context signifies across a range of disciplines and critical practices with an array of connotations for our habits of reading and interpretation. For some the phrase is simply shorthand for reading and thinking historically, for others a mode of critical commitment to the real, for still others an antiquated notion superficial in its analytical method and suspect in its political affiliations.

The phrase surely carries with it a lot of antidialectical baggage. Thus Ann B. Dobie, writing on the rise of New Historicism as a dominant mode of contextualism, avows that "the concept that a text imitates life—that it reflects its historical context—has either disappeared or seen serious changes. Gone are those approaches that used history, even history of the text, as background to literature and that saw the work as a replication of a period's people and behavior."1 Jonathan Culler finds that the whole notion of context "frequently oversimplifies rather than enriches discussion, since the opposition between an act and its context seems to presume that the context is given and determines the meaning of the act."2 For Sande Cohen historical context is nothing less than a "tortured symbol" promising "an iconic and indexical satisfaction (answers, resolution, clarity concerning what is thought to have occurred), but which is not realizable other than by the repression of meanings. All 'returns of history' are so many wish-projections."3

These are weighty charges, and it would be easy to invoke them against the "wish-projections" and "repression of meanings" supposedly at work in a book like, say, Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, an influential medievalist collection published the year before Cohen's tendentious polemic against historical context.4 Yet for its practitioners, reading for and within historical context (however defined) continues to provide a powerful critical incentive, as when the editors of a new collection on contemporary Francophone African writers insist on its [End Page 593] indispensability to the political work of the African novel: the "literary commitment" of Francophone writers "is embedded in a specific cultural and historical context, born of the effects of the world wars, the Négritude movement, the Sartrian legacy, the fight against colonialism and the international rise of nationalist movements, and finally the percolating ideas of such anticolonial theorists and pan-African scholars as Cheik Anta Diop, Césaire, Fanon, and Memmi."5 Here a commitment to historical context on the part of critic and novelist alike is tantamount to political commitment, and its abandonment would signal a retrenchment into the purely imaginative. In a very different vein, a major recent study of literary transculturalism in the global age evokes the phrase to name the critic's "sense of literature as a cultural practice that produces meaning in a social, political, historical context."6 The list could go on, and it suggests that in our own moment "historical context" as deployed in literary-critical practice remains a richly layered enterprise, hardly the homogenizing, superficial, or obscurantist interpretive mode Cohen and others have made it out to be.

Part of the difficulty in assessing the present state and the future prospects of historical context lies in our rather glib assumptions about its past. If it's true that, as Jonathan Gil Harris aptly puts it in his contribution to this issue, "for more than a quarter century, context has ruled the roost in literary studies" (615), it is also true that the current "hegemony" (Harris's term) of historical context is one part of a very long argument in the Western hermeneutical tradition over the virtues and limitations of historical-contexualist interpretation. This will be a difficult pill for some to swallow, given the many deeply engrained assumptions about premodern forms of historical thinking informing recent writing on the subject: that premodern writers had no sense of anachronism, that the Middle Ages saw the past always and only as sacralized totality, and so on...

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