Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?

The title of this essay seems to announce a repetition of what I consider to be one of the worst habits in literary studies and in the humanities at large. For it may indeed look like one of those very dramatic self-referential questions that critics like to ask—with the implicit promise of arriving at the most reassuring answers, reassuring answers, to make things worse, whose merit seems to grow thanks to the pretension of having opened up, for a moment, the vision of a preoccupying future. I can certainly promise that my own question has a much more straightforward intention and will produce much less optimistic predictions—for a variety of reasons. In the first place, I believe that the humanities are subsisting—rather than existing—today in an institutional, economic, political, and even cultural environment where certain questions that used to be “barely rhetorical” may have turned, behind our backs, into perfectly serious and indeed threatening questions. In this sense, and secondly, we have every reason to pay attention to the, in and by itself banal, fact that all institutions, among them the academic disciplines in which we are working, had their historical beginnings and will therefore come to a historical ending one day. This is specifically obvious, thirdly, in the case of a discipline like ours whose historical origin, as I will try to demonstrate, was particularly improbable. After all, whether we are ready to admit it in public or not, literary critics know all too well that humankind would easily survive without literary criticism—and most likely even without the humanities at large.

With these rather candid, I hope, opening remarks, I have already traced the structure of the argument in which I will try to cope with my assignment, that is, in which I will address the problem of what we can do and what we should do, under present-day conditions, with the intellectual and discursive heritage of “literary history.” More precisely, my reaction will have five parts. I will begin with a very brief description (1) of the historical emergence, in the early nineteenth century, of literary studies as an academic discipline, whose initial institutional form, as it is important to underline, did not yet contain the subfield of “literary history.” On this basis, I will then show how, a few decades later and in the epistemological context to which we have been referring, since Michel Foucault, as “the crisis of representation,” literary history emerged as a specific intellectual fascination and as a discursive possibility (2). In the third and central part of this narrative, I will speak about the situation of literary studies towards the end of the nineteenth century when, paradoxically, a first crisis of its institutional form not only triggered the emergence of literary theory as a further subfield of the discipline but also inaugurated a golden age of literary history through a remarkable proliferation of new perspectives and questions. In the subsequent step (4), I will claim that the very type of historicity that had been the basis for the emergence of literary history in the earlier nineteenth century has vanished as recently as since the final decades of the twentieth century. This thesis, quite obviously, will lead back to the situation of our initial, our final, and our very serious question (5)—it will lead back to the question what we shall do, today, with the intellectual and institutional legacy of literary history.

I

While it is certainly true that multiple professional ways of dealing with texts called “literary” have existed since the age of Hellenism, I propose that we do not identify these mostly philological practices as the historical beginning of “literary criticism”—for they are not related to our present within any institutional and intellectual continuity. A strong claim can be made for our own tradition to go back to a number of German (more precisely, Prussian) universities in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.¹ The larger sociohistorical context for this development was an emerging tension, in the early postrevolutionary or postreform “bourgeois” states, between a...