Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siecle, and: Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse

These are works of politically progressive scholarship that are concerned to recover and celebrate early modern transformations in European intellectual culture. DeJean’s book, focused upon the final decades of Louis XIV’s France, offers a new interpretation of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, over antiquity’s continuing superiority in letters. She links the Moderns’ cause in the conflict to contemporary nontraditional literary communities that are said to have evolved the cultural riches of the modern novel and a sentimental ethos. Weimann’s work attempts to document the emergence of self-legitimated representational practices in Renaissance religious and imaginative prose—he found these practices in Elizabethan drama in his Shakespeare und die Macht der Mimesis (1988). Both books are preoccupied with the matter of how new deployments of symbols and concepts, especially in literature, produce liberating political effects by changing existing configurations of sociocultural power; and both treat this subject with much specialized learning and creative thought. They should appeal to all scholars interested in early modern discourse and politics. However, Weimann and DeJean do not pitch their books this way. Rather, they identify and value their projects as missives narrowly directed at particular voices in post-1968 academia which they consider politically retrogressive.

In the case of DeJean, this voice is the cultural right in the recent wars over literary pedagogy. Stating in her preface that her work is “an inherently American attempt” to understand the French Querelle and its context from the situation of one “in the thick of what have now become known in this country as Culture Wars,” she delivers patently biased and often dubious historiography. This includes casting the preeminent Ancient Boileau as one of “those gloom-and-doom forecasters such as Allan Bloom and Alvin Kernan” (27–28) and tarring him as a “hysterical” conservative reactionary (52), zealous misogynist (67–68), and self-obsessed perpetrator of a final edition of his works designed to shore up his critical authority in the Querelle (97–98). And it includes valorizing the “cultural flexibility promoted by the Moderns” (22): not only embraced by “twentieth-century Moderns” (146) but as displayed in Perrault’s possible authorship of the gender-bending story “Histoire de la marquise-marquis de Banneville” (1695–96), which features two cross-dressed heterosexual lovers (118–22), and in Fontenelle’s farsighted remark in his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688) that it may not be impossible “to see one day great authors who are Lapp and Negro” (126). In a final chapter we find a capsule history of our end-of-the-century culture wars, along with a rousing call enjoining the cultural left to work together, “taking time away from its newly public performances” (146), so as successfully to implement their, and their seventeenth-century forbears’, progressive ideas in our pedagogical institutions.

DeJean, looking at the dynamics of intellectual trends as fueled and sustained by conflict, maintains that the Querelle expressed rival views about the constitution of the cultural sphere: The Moderns committed themselves to its revolutionary democratization, and wished to use literature for this purpose. But the Ancients were anxious to preserve a courtly world of letters controlled by a traditional intellectual elite (of which they were a part); and so they appreciated, herein, the accessory role of an exclusively classical literary canon. Hence the surface exchange of the Querelle—which Perrault opened by provocatively speculating in his Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (1688) on what transcendent greatness Homer would have achieved had he lived in the refined age of Louis XIV; he followed up with a more elaborate nationalistic theory of literary supremacy in his multivolume Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688–1697); Boileau sniffily countered in...