The Limits of Literary Historicism

The Historicization of Literary Studies

The Historicization of Literary Studies Jane Gallop A few years ago I, along with a few colleagues from my department, went to dinner with a candidate for a junior position in eighteenth-century British literature. In the course of the conversation, the job candidate declared that it was impossible to get published without archival work. This was something I had never heard, and it stuck in my craw. Whether or not her estimation of things was accurate, despite the likelihood that it varies a lot by field, I recognized that this remark does in fact represent something about the direction of literary studies today. While not literally true, the remark bespeaks what, for those whose disciplinary formation is taking place in the United States in the early twenty-first century, is an established norm. This norm diverges widely from those which governed my own professional formation three decades ago, and—at the risk of sounding like the aging curmudgeon I am becoming—I want to say that I believe this direction that literary studies has taken is misguided. It was about twenty years ago that English Studies witnessed the rise of New Historicism: this burgeoning movement was not only the site of brilliant critical performances but also a much needed corrective to the ahistoricism then predominant. The time was ripe for such a course correction: ahistoricism had been persuasively linked to sexism, racism, and elitism; attacks on the canon had called into question the notion of “timeless” works; literary studies had been ahistorical for too long. In the early 1980s, historicism was in such low favor in literary studies that, in order to get a hearing, it was necessary to call this work New Historicism . For more than three decades, English had been dominated by New Criticism—and its offspring. Since my notion of the “offspring” of New Criticism may not yet be generally accepted in our histories of criticism, before I proceed, let me explain a bit what I mean:1 Jane Gallop 4 In the years just preceding the arrival of New Historicism, the American literary academy seemed wholly preoccupied with a battle over what was then most often called “theory.” While those against theory fought hard to defend the heritage of New Criticism, it turns out that many of those on the other side were practicing, often under the name of deconstruction, a form of close reading of literary texts not in fact so radically different from New Criticism. In an essay written at the peak of the theory debate, Paul de Man makes this point by suggesting that deconstructionist reading practice basically conformed to the New Critical instructions given by Reuben Brower to his students in the 1950s (when de Man was his Teaching Assistant at Harvard ).2 While those railing against theory saw it precisely as a departure from the text, an increasing number of radical critics agreed with de Man here and complained that deconstructionist literary criticism as practiced in US English departments was, in fact, all too much like the old New Criticism—elitist, canonical, and ahistorical. Looking back at that old theory battle now, from the other side of the paradigm shift inaugurated by New Historicism, the difference between the two sides seems much smaller than it did at the time. Looking back now at that period, I would want to lay the emphasis not for or against theory, but rather on the close reading practice appearing on both sides of the divide. Deconstructionism did not challenge the centrality of close reading to English, but on the contrary infused it with new zeal. Just when New Criticism was looking old, deconstructionism came along to make close reading chic and smart and potent again. While we might quibble about the relation between New Critical and deconstructionist reading, the fact is that for more than three decades, including most recently in the theory era, literary studies in this country was dominated by the scholarly and especially the pedagogical practice of “close reading.” These days, I worry about the fate of “close reading.” While it may be an all-too-familiar skill to English professors of my generation, I’m not confident that it is still being widely taught. And if practiced here and there, it is seldom theorized, much less defended. It has been, I think, tarred with the elitist brush applied in our rejection of the New Critics’ canon, and I fear it is being thrown out with the dirty bathwater of timeless...