Editorial Statement

The image of dwarves seated on the shoulders of giants is a familiar one, but it resonates with special poignancy during a time of editorial transition. "We frequently know more," writes John of Salisbury, "not because we have moved ahead by our own natural ability, but because we are supported by the mental strength of others and possess riches that we have inherited from our fathers. Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to puny dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants. We see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature."1 If the readers of New Literary History have come to know more and see farther, it is thanks to Ralph Cohen's stature and his exemplary record of achievement over the last four decades. His mental strengths and his remarkable qualities as editor, teacher, scholar, and friend were amply documented in the last issue. As a reader of New Literary History for three decades, I am all too conscious of the riches I have inherited.

Let me elucidate the singular strengths of New Literary History as I see them. First, its nonpartisan nature. New Literary History does not cheerlead for New Historicism or deconstruction, for formalism or feminism, though it welcomes essays from these perspectives, as from many others. Its distinctiveness as a scholarly journal lies in its commitment to scrutinizing the principles and procedures of interpretation, to questioning and rethinking theory and method, to standing back from and scrutinizing the buzzwords and bywords of academic fashion. Its frequent use of the special issue format encourages a multiperspectival and agonistic approach to specific themes, methods, or intellectual problems. It is often purposefully untimely, gambling on the future interest of embryonic or quirky ideas, reviving and reframing topics that have been widely dismissed as retrograde and old hat. Here I see minimal connection between my own intellectual biography and my obligations to the journal and its readers. In my role as editor, I am on the lookout for essays that surprise and energize, that call up fresh ways of seeing, that rattle ingrained assumptions, my own included, and that speak to the diverse interests of our international and interdisciplinary audience. I look forward to publishing many essays with whose arguments I disagree.

When New Literary History was founded, the reigning orthodoxy was New Criticism, and one of the journal's primary goals was to challenge the sovereignty of close reading as a critical method and to encourage sustained reflection on the goals, assumptions, and procedures of literary study. The need for reflection remains unchanged, but academic orthodoxy now looks very different. Ideology critique, symptomatic reading, and various kinds of historicism are now firmly entrenched as the default settings of contemporary criticism; suspicious reading constitutes our intellectual common sense. Scholars everywhere take delight in proving that what appears to be nature is really culture, that what we imagine to be agency is always already a reflex of structure, that what we hold to be truth is just another entrenched prejudice or invisible illusion. A sense of weariness with this endless task of demystification is beginning to make itself felt, signaled not only in the dramatic upsurge of interest in aesthetics, ethics, and religion but also in diverse efforts to reimagine the very shape of history and politics. To mourn—or to crow over—the end of theory is to seriously misjudge an intellectual climate in which criticism is redefining its relations to its recent past and in which literary theory is taking on new forms and testing alternative idioms. Ordinary language criticism; new hybrids of literature and science; a revitalized phenomenology; actor network theory and its largely untapped implications for literary studies—these are just a few of the current strands of thought that strike me as especially promising.

Another fundament of New Literary History is its internationalism. The journal has a long-established history of translating and publishing the work of distinguished theorists working outside the United States. We continue to welcome essays from around the globe—in the last five...