State of the Art on the Art of the State

Readers of this journal will recall a forum published in its pages (and the pages of the William and Mary Quarterly) in 2008, in which Eric Slauter, author of one of the three books under review here, described what he called a “trade gap” between historians and literary scholars of the Atlantic world. Slauter’s thesis was that even as literary scholarship has become more historical in its methods and goals, historians seem to have less and less interest in that work: “During the past decade, literary scholars have produced an impressive list of books and articles in the emerging field of Atlantic literary history. Atlantic historians, however, rarely acknowledge this work and have moved away from the issues of identity and expression that made literary scholarship attractive and central to Atlantic historiography ten or twenty years ago” (153). At the end of his essay, Slauter suggests measures that might be taken to lessen the gap. One interesting proposal is that literary scholars should embrace their inner theorists: historians do not come to the work of literary scholars for more history, he suggests, but for alternative perspectives and paradigms about culture, meaning, and language. A second, related suggestion is that the text/context binary be retired: “Today historians may be suspicious of what they perceive as an essentially derivative historicist enterprise in which this or that literary text is unsurprisingly shown to have emerged from an established context already familiar to historians” (173).

Fair enough, I say: putting a text in context, while necessary, is usually tedious (to read), and in any case not terribly helpful in explaining large-scale historical change. But the dyad of text and context—as confused as its use is in most historical and literary scholarship—aims to register something important, namely that human cultures are not homogeneous fields of meaning making, but are rather defined by myriad horizons and relative autonomies, variable ratios of information and redundance, a confusing welter of tempos and temporalities. Some things pop out from the fabric while others recede, some events linger while others evanesce, and so on: calling something a text is to make it visible against a (“contextual”) background, and is thus an attempt to capture this uneven terrain. (If we are going to retire any terms, my vote is for “context,” since it is often invoked merely in a kind of policing maneuver, a more or less fuzzy ground against which the figure of any text can be limited and reduced. When the context becomes less fuzzy, we might say it becomes a text in its turn.) The text/context binary introduces a distinction into the world of meaning: historical studies that convince and endure are ones that make that cut, that form their text, in ways that respect the heterogeneity of the field of meaning. So, too, with literary scholarship: any convincing interpretation of a literary text—by which I mean an interpretation that the reader thinks was worth undertaking in the first place—is convincing not to the extent that the (apparently) pregiven text is fitted neatly into its context but rather to the extent that the interpretation compellingly tracks all that overflows the ostensible limits of the novel, poem, autobiography, and so on. Both historians and literary scholars, I am saying, deal in texts, and in text making, though they may do so with different levels of self-awareness. This shared trade in texts always emerges from specific historical situatedness: of our objects then, and our practices now. At the same time, however, an equally irreducible aesthetic dimension is in play in both intellectual enterprises. Beneath Slauter’s discussion of the “trade gap,” beneath our discomfort with the text/context...