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  • Genre Theory and Historical Change: Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen by Ralph Cohen
  • Donald R. Wehrs
Ralph Cohen. Genre Theory and Historical Change: Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen, ed. John L. Rowlett. Charlottesville: Virginia, 2017. Pp. xxv + 401. $65.00

Publication of collected theoretical essays by the late Ralph Cohen, longtime William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at the University of Virginia and editor of New Literary History from its founding in 1969 to 2009, is a welcome event both for eighteenth-century scholars and anyone concerned with the course of literary theoretical discourse over the past fifty years. Mr. Cohen is renowned within the field of eighteenth-century literature for his pioneering, seminal studies of Thomson's The Seasons and related poetry. He is celebrated more broadly as having created the first American university-based journal giving a venue to the new philosophical-theoretical discourse emerging in the 1960s from France and Germany (Genette, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Iser, and Jauss). Under his editorship, New Literary History provided a unique space where the concerns of literary theoretical discourse and those of historical literary scholarship could intersect. Equally important, it offered a forum where successive waves of newly congealing critical-theoretical orthodoxies in the academy could be rigorously challenged. This legacy of championing rigor and welcoming iconoclasm continues under the editorship of Mr. Cohen's successor as William R. Kenan Jr. Professor, Rita Felski. Like many others, I am personally in Professor Cohen's debt—both in relation to my graduate studies at Virginia and later as a onetime contributor to New Literary History.

As the title of Mr. Rowlett's edited collection indicates, Mr. Cohen was particularly interested in how signification regulated by genre traditions and variations intersected with, and influenced, historical change. These issues were explored through a series of collections edited by Mr. Cohen, from New Directions in Literary History (1974) and The Future of Literary Theory (1989) to Studies in Historical Change (1992), and they stand at the heart of the present volume, which brings together essays written between 1974 and 1998, some published here for the first time.

In reading these essays two decades after the last was composed, one may be variously struck, not least of all by the abiding critical value of Mr. Cohen's account of form's entwinement with historicity, especially in relation to how shifting hierarchies of poetic genres are implicated in and propel historical change. As is true of first-rate literary scholarship generally, age cannot wither it, nor can usage stale its charms. Still, in encountering anew the intellectual, discursive landscape of the 1970s to 1990s, one notices its circumscribed and selective elements, for contrast with what has come since makes them visible. Both the formalist and historicist theories that Mr. Cohen addressed conceived of literature as inhabiting linguistic, semiotic spaces largely or completely unmarked by pre- or nonlinguistic aspects of embodied sociality (as opposed to drives). By contrast, our present intellectual, discursive landscape reflects the foregrounding of such sociality via a series of "turns"—ethical, cognitive, affective, evolutionary, ecological, neo-Wittgensteinian—since the early 1990s. Even so, Mr. Cohen's wariness of a drift toward formalism in theory that prompts it to become unreceptive to and dismissive of historical variation and textual nuance, as well as his wariness of a drift toward dismissal of form's agency in modes of historicism that effectively dissolve particulars into contexts, anticipates contemporary reservations about the totalizing, leveling propensities of metatheory. [End Page 85] Moreover, his insistence that literary theory is itself a genre adumbrates current applications to theory of forms of genre analysis that chart the limitations of taking a hermeneutics of suspicion to be the master code for all interpretation. These reservations and applications are most forcibly elaborated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's late and Toril Moi's recent work, by Steven Best and Sharon Marcus's 2010 special issue of Representations, by the literary hermeneutics of Marielle Macé and Ives Citton, by the sociology of Bruno Latour, and by the interrogation of "critique" as a genre inseparable from an "attitude" by the successor to Mr. Cohen's endowed chair and editorship, Felski.

From "On the Interrelations...

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