Politics: Divide and Rule

Established literary judgments are anchored in arrays of corollary claims, not the least of which pertain to the contours of history, in which literature is presumed to play itself out. For scholars and critics, and even for the lay reader, the path to the work or the author passes through a landscape of periods, the timing of literature, which structures the possibilities of reception. The importance ascribed to the period or the "historical context" of a work is so great that it shapes the reading altogether. Indeed, a constitutive element of contemporary reading is the need to integrate into our "horizon of expectations" the expectations of an earlier period. ¹ It is a truism only because it is an unquestioned habit that Shakespeare is read as Elizabethan, and hardly a performance of Brecht goes by without reflections on the Hitler era: two examples of explicitly political periodizations that set boundaries for sanctioned receptions. Other periodizations may not stamp the face of a sovereign on the coin of literary judgment, but they nonetheless order and regulate reading in ways that are equally influential: Hugo in the Romantic period, or Woolf and modernism.

If periodization functions as the road map for literary judgment, then it is only logical that revisionist literary historiography calls it into question, as two recent examples of critical scholarship demonstrate. To dismantle established claims regarding literary accomplishment, it can appear necessary not only to subvert individual judgments of quality, not only to advocate for undeservedly forgotten writers, not only to expose hidden agendas, but to rethink the very curve of the time line, the groupings, the borders, and the turning points. In this case, literary scholarship turns into an effort to rewrite history aggressively, as, for instance, Joyce W. Warren's programmatic call in the introduction to a recent feminist anthology, Challenging Boundaries:

One of the most obdurate institutional restraints in literature is its periodization. . . . Originally created by a critical establishment that was male-dominated for a predominately white male tradition and sanctioned by a chronological inevitability, such literary periods have always been fictions, but fictions with the tenacity of convenience and convention. Now, however, as the profession disentangles itself from the white male establishment, it confronts the inadequacy of the old periodization of literature. ²

Clearly, Warren's target is not some putative objective inaccuracy or the fictionality of inherited periodization schemes. Instead, her point is to indicate their effective functionality within a presumably obsolete regime of power and value and thereby to make the case for alternative time lines in a restructured hegemony. The new regime demands a new calendar. For example, the "American Renaissance," as a literary-historical category of the ancien régime, privileged the standing of Emerson; a different periodization, and not just a different label, would be necessary, Warren suggests, for an adequate approach to Dickinson. Similarly, standard treatments of modernism imply relative judgments on Pound and Stein that would be up for fundamental revision in a feminist critical culture no longer committed to elevating the former to a "high modernism," to the latter's disadvantage (x).

The potential contest over the shape of literary history between Dickinson and Stein (or between Emerson and Pound) provides a good example of the politics at stake in issues of periodization. Yet such debates over the organization of decades in a single national literature are only small versions of the questions associated with the foundational assumption of ancient, medieval, and modern periods. The energetic interventions in the controversies over postmodernism reflected profound political investments in a notion of "modernity" and "modernization" that is related to the "modernist" literary movement only by an enormous stretch of the critical imagination. The stabilization of postmodernism as an accepted category subverts the heroic claims of modernity as the enlightened alternative to the medieval world. It also unsettles the assumed consonance between a "Renaissance," the Enlightenment, and modernity or modernism. Yet even where the inherited periodization remains relatively intact, discomfort with...