The Ends of History: Afterword

This collection of essays was designed as a response to a loosely affiliated network of other essays that have recently called for alternatives to historicist “critique.” The editors Lauren Goodlad and Andrew Sartori have helpfully provided a common denominator for conceptualizing the current debate by stressing the influence of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (or ANT) on a disparate set of anti-critique critics—Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Rita Felski.¹ As the editors also note, though, the anti-critique group seems to have little besides a tendency to quote Latour in common: its members may be humanistic or antihumanist; they may take postmodernist Marxism, hermeneutics, or New Historicism as their specific target; they may be worried about reducing the text to its context, or they may complain that historicist critique has merely maintained the supposedly surpassed humanist ideal of the singularity and richness of the text. They may think of themselves as promoting a new kind of formalism, a more empirical historicism, or a more stringent antidote against that old postmodern bogey, the “subject.”

The surrounding debate thus has too many facets to be reduced to a binary pair of clear-cut sides. Moreover, to mix my metaphors, it sounds like an echo chamber for almost every debate regarding historical criticism that has emerged since the 1950s. Although the names have changed, many of the arguments in this swirl of controversies are familiar rather than unique to the current critical moment; they were the well-established nodes of contention not only separating various kinds of Marxists but also perplexing the non-Marxist founders of interdisciplinary “studies” movements of the postwar years, including “Victorian studies.” For example, accusations of reductionism against the recent practices of historicist critics echo a long series of similar charges going back at least to Raymond Williams’s 1958 critique of Christopher Caudwell. Then Williams was in turn accused by Althusserian critics (just as Heather Love accuses all “deep” textual interpreters) of propping up bourgeois humanism, while Marxist humanist historians like E. P. Thompson said the Althusserians created monolithic totalities in the place of dynamic experiential histories, a charge echoed by Felski against anyone who tries to thicken the “context.” Moreover, the counterclaims against the anti-critique party also have a familiar ring. Goodlad and Sartori fault Latour for having positivist tendencies because he seems to overlook the dimension of critical resistance in the objects he analyzes, just as Marxists once mounted similar critiques of Latour’s bête noire, Pierre Bourdieu. And, of course, New Historicism of the Foucauldian variety, like surface reading now, was once thought to be formalist because it declared itself interested in the “‘textuality of history’ as well as the ‘historicity of texts’” (Montrose 23), and it was also accused of lacking a political edge. So Latour now appears in the role formerly played by Bourdieu, New Historicists are cast as suspicious reductionists uninterested in form, and actor-network theorists repeat formerly deconstructive lines about the shortcomings of hermeneutics generally. “Plus ça change …,” one is tempted to comment.

Even though the disputes have a familiar ring, each of the specific contributions to this special issue reverberates with a unique arrangement of echoing judgments about the legacy of the last several decades’ worth of historical literary criticism. Two of the essays—those by Caroline Levine and Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan—are in the anti-critique mode, while the introduction, Hylton White’s article, and Ariana Reilly’s article defend the practice of critique against what the authors see as Latourian misreadings, distortions, and simplifications. Levine’s article, which draws on Felski’s ideas, argues that Victorian texts have been straightjacketed in their contexts of production, put into a separate historical “box” that does not interconnect with the critic’s own time, and wrongly cut off from the relevant networks of dissemination and reception. Paying attention to such networks, she claims, would take us beyond an uncritical reliance on such national period labels as “Victorian.” Buurma and Heffernan, however, draw a strikingly different conclusion from their anti-critique inspirations, noting with approval the “nineteenthcentricity” of the current...