Literature in Time

Feminism has long seemed to me an ideal focus for a special issue of MLQ. There are lessons both positive and negative to be learned; generative tensions, patterns, and challenges to ponder and scrutinize; and a fertile if often disturbing imaginative life that can complicate and unwind the fabric known to us as contemporary feminism. To the great good fortune of the journal, the readers, and (I don't mind adding) me, Margaret Ferguson agreed to take the lead in developing this collection. The lion's share of the labor and of the nutritive credit belong to her. My cub's share warrants a byline and any blame for under- or overediting. The authors (including, again, Ferguson) reap the thanks for their scholarly creativity and acumen.

I am particularly pleased that this collection is accompanied by a new cover and revised layout for the journal, beautifully designed by Sue Hall. The conjunction of a feature issue and a feature appearance is an occasion for some renewed reflections on the mission of the journal and on the study of literary history. Since 1993, when the previous design was launched with an issue titled "The State of Literary History" (later revised and reissued as The Uses of Literary History), ¹ MLQhas carried the subtitle A Journal of Literary History. The first seven volumes contained a mission statement at the front; subsequently, a version has been posted on the Web site that Lisa Simon designed while she was associate editor. The statement was a first stab at defining the scope of the journal. I have been constantly asked ever since, by contributors, friends, and (I imagine, secretly) skeptics, What is literary history? What does it mean? What is it for? What does it exclude? I have said that timeless reflections are out, as are close readings not embedded in a historical argument, along with readings so embedded that they subordinate literature to its contexts. I seek chronological arguments that give us, or give back to us, the agency and the power of written expression. Somehow, though, those characterizations have never been enough, not for me and surely not for anyone else. So I have decided to try again. If it seems a Sisyphean goal, at least no one can be too worn out by a ball rolled uphill only once a decade.

Fredric Jameson—the apostle of "Always historicize!"—has recently announced "the end of temporality." ² That throws down a heavy gauntlet at the feet of a journal identified with literary history. Men, he says, used to live in a world defined by time—by emergence in organic societies, by production in industrial capitalism, and by uneven development with the advent (in some places and in different degrees) of modernity. But in the postmodern world a geographic nexus of city and suburb has replaced a temporal axis of city and village, commercial and communicational webs now connect men and women alike with their peers around the world, and time has ground to a halt. Or so it appears. Actually, though, Jameson argues, the end of temporality is merely "a historical tendency" (717)—a fantasy masking countless forms of continued subjugation. Its image is the repetitious violence of action films, which brutally decapitates development and otherness, creating an illusion of stasis through blind speed. Time mimics space but does not really stop. Perhaps fortuitously, the delusory materialism of feminisms that fetishize the body serve as Jameson's example of the doomed postmodern attempt "to escape a situatedness in the past and the future" (712); this misdirection is, I believe, just what a collection of essays on "feminism in time" can help remedy. The end of temporality as Jameson sees it is, in truth, a telos approached but never realized, since its actualization would be tantamount to the death of humanity. The restlessly asymptotic movement defines the postmodern situation.

The end of temporality—temporality's urgency, taking its end in the directional sense that sneaks into...