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Romanticism &
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| 1 | A discussion about presentism is
appropriate for an issue of Praxis about the relation between Romantic-period
writers and contemporary culture. Presentism can be defined as using present-day
issues to understand history, and so literary historians who teach, think,
and write referring to contemporary events are very much repeating the process—albeit
in reverse—of recent novelists and film-makers who incorporate Romantic
literature into their work. |
| 2 | We reprint here from an issue of
SubStance David Simpson's "Is Literary History the History of Everything?:
The Case for Antiquarian History"1
as an example of an argument against presentism both in the classroom and
in research. In the classroom, we are all presentists, as Simpson admits.
Surely every Romanticist has mentioned at least one current event in relation
to Romantic literature when teaching it, and certainly every research project,
as Simpson again admits, has present motivations if not explicitly articulated
connections with current events. But the worry about presentism that, in
my view, we all share, voiced here especially well by David Simpson, is
of rampant subjectivism. Here "subjectivism" isn't meant in its rigorous
sense, "having to do with subjects," but in the common-sense, popular meaning,
as in the phrase "purely subjective"—i.e., "purely personal." Projection
of oneself onto the past is bad not just ideologically but emotionally as
well, and I think many of us tacitly share the desire that the many students
we deal with, just briefly (in terms of their lives), learn at the least
from their encounter with past literatures that something truly other-than-oneself
exists, and that information about this different person or scene is indeed
worth discovering. If more students could discover that Wordsworth does
not feel about things just the same way they do, nor just the opposite,
they will have successfully learned techniques for truly encountering others
beyond the mere denial and repudiation of difference through which they
fictionalize friends, enemies, and lovers. Simpson states this view eloquently:
"the university ought to provide," he says, echoing all our hopes, "the
experience of challenge and difference" (7). |
| 3 | But relative agreement ends, perhaps, once we
finish discussing pedagogy and move on to research. Simpson's argument about
the relation between presentism and research is complex because, as postmodernists,
we have a very complicated relationship to the notion of objectivity. On
the one hand, we see ourselves as inevitably personalizing history,2
while on the other, historians avoid anachronism in order to certify that
they are understanding the past in its own terms.3
As Henry Abelove put it in an oral presentation, discussing the abuses of
queer theory in eighteenth-century studies, "When I hear the term 'homophobia'
[applied to eighteenth-century structures of feeling], all my critical tools
dissolve." Of course: without the existence of "homosexuality" as such during
the eighteenth century (Halperin 111), how can there be what we know as
"homophobia"? Fears may be felt and articulated, but they won't be
organized in the same ways as ours, and knowing the difference is crucial
to understanding the past. |
| 4 | The essays collected here, by Jerome McGann,
Phillip Barrish, Gregory Tomso, and Jon Klancher—as well as a brief
summary, included in this introduction, of Alan Liu's forthcoming book—have
been gathered together as a response to Simpson's "Is Literary History the
History of Everything?" for a particular reason. They respond to Simpson
sympathetically in the sense that they are trying to eschew what Barrish
calls "blithe" or "naive presentism"—simply applying "homophobia" to
past articulations of fear. It is precisely this naive presentism that Simpson
justly attacks as an uncritical use of the past in present political battles.
But the articles and summary collected here also attempt to account theoretically
for the lived experience of Romanticists, connecting that experience to
their research and teaching in contrast to Simpson who seems partly to wish
to negate that connection. They use "presentism" as a method. |
| 5 | In "Reading Queerly," Tomso looks at contemporary
homophobic rhetoric about AIDS in relation to very alien (to us) figurations
of illness in 19th-century American novels: he doesn't simply find homophobia
in those figurations, but rather attempts to determine how discourses on
illness enter into a genealogy of homophobic rhetoric. |
| 6 | In his article presenting the theoretical orientation
of his forthcoming book, Phillip Barrish connects the presentist method
to anachronistic stagings of Shakespeare, quoting Jonathan Miller's defense
of such a practice: since "every dramatic work ‘must necessarily undergo
change with the passage of time, . . . this change is best inflicted upon
the work deliberately rather than, as it were, by default.'" Barrish connects
Edith Wharton's "Autre Temps," an argument against sexism, to a reading
of Hopwood v. Texas, the case that recently abolished affirmative
action at the University of Texas. Again, he does not blithely or naively
say that discrimination based on gender and marital status of the 19th century
is just like racial discrimination at the end of the 20th. Instead of making
this simple analogy, Barrish posits a catechretic relationship between the
two discriminations and two historical periods, showing how each reveals
what is difficult or impossible to say about the other. |
| 7 | Klancher responds to Simpson's critique of cultural
criticism as it appears in this essay, a critique articulated fully in The
Academic Postmodern (1995). Just as students see only themselves or
an enemy in historically-distant writings, cultural-studies critics, Simpson
believes, put history into "parodic or reductive form," rendering it a mythic
or Imaginary antagonist: "orientalism, sexism, homophobia, Eurocentrism,
and so on" (6). Klancher argues against Simpson that the "second-hand or
transcribed" history of literary and cultural critics "isn't parodic," as
Simpson maintains; rather it is, Klancher says, "just misconceived": bad
cultural criticism evinces "a will only to use history and not to hear it." |
| 8 | A prime example of such "instrumental historicism,"
in Klancher's terms, are readings that rely on an important early essay
by Alan Richardson. Sometimes critcs will use "colonization of the feminine"
to read a passage written by a high Romantic poet in lieu of asking what's
going on in that passage. In their view, Richardson's various readings have
"proven" that high Romantic writers colonize the feminine, and so present-day
critics use that "fact" as a key for reading rather than asking what's going
on with the feminine imagery deployed in a specific passage written and
published at specific times. Richardson himself never used his own concept
in that way: each text he adduces as an example is shown to be colonizing;
he doesn't find colonization once and then read every text as if we could
presume its engagement in that project. We can't presume sexism; there might
even be misogynist moments conjoined with feminism in high Romantic poetry,
and, if so, we want to know what they are about. For Klancher, literary
critics must be prepared "to hear a message from the past they didn't anticipate
or wish to hear": one must resist, he says "a determination to keep history
enlisted in one's own campaign as if it never could offer anything with
which to instruct the campaign itself." |
| 9 | If one can enlist the past in order to better
understand the present, one can also enlist the present to understand the
past. McGann's Ivanhoe
Game, discussed in detail in his Radiant Textuality and in essays
and examples available on line,4
makes use of the Internet (email) in order to fully educe the "transmissional
possibilities" of a printed text, Ivanhoe. Radiant Textuality,
excerpted in this issue of Praxis, theorizes how "deformative"
reading made possible by debunking the canon and adopting deconstructive
reading practices works in conjunction with digital media. We need to ask,
McGann says in the Preface reproduced here, "[h]ow [computers] can be made
to operate in a world that functions through . . . ambiguities and incommensurables"
— how, that is, computer "tools [might] improve the ways we explore
and explain aesthetic works . . . ." The essays included in this forthcoming
book show that McGann sees hypertext as, to use Sherry Turkle's term, an
"evocative object" (17), one that allows us to see what is otherwise invisible
since they bring to light messages encoded in traditional media, no matter
what their surface content. As McGann has said, what hypertexts make clear
about any text — texts in codex form, for instance — is that they
should "not [be] primarily understood as containers or even vehicles of
meaning. Rather, they are sets of instantiated rules and algorithms for
generating and controlling themselves and for constructing further transmissional
possibilities."5 |
| 10 |
As I show in greater detail elsewhere,6
Alan Liu's method for resisting the projective reduction of history in
all its forms similarly involves bringing past and present into conversation
with each other. In his forthcoming book, The Laws of Cool, part
of which has been previously published,7
Liu examines how history is understood (and used) by present management
theorists prominent in the business of knowledge work. Often the past
becomes nothing more than "obsolete" in technological discourse.8
That history is for these business theorists either the same as the present
or outmoded is especially visible in one of the examples Liu adduces in
The Laws of Cool, a book by Alan Axelrod titled Elizabeth I
CEO: "The indifference of (and ultimately to) history here," Liu says,
". . . is sublime." |
| 11 |
But Liu resists turning these business theorists, and our present, into
a demonic Other. Instead, he demands that academics undertake a "serious
engagement with the full intellectual force of business in its new persona
as knowledge work" ("Knowledge Work" 118). In the first stage of a dialectical
movement from present to past and past to present, Liu uses archaism to
resist the reduction of the activity of business to mere profiteering,
a Manichaean other to academic life: "the single most influential contemporary
vision of the ‘one life' and imagination (as the Romantics called
it)" is provided by "a management guru," Peter Senge ("Knowledge Work,"
119). Then Liu deploys anachronism. Instead of treating the past as events,
he treats it as technique: the French Revolution was, Liu says anachronistically,
a "restructuring event." Information Society's narrative of History as
obsolescence insists that there was no technology, or only a less adequate
one, and now technological progress triumphs. Axelrod's fantasy about
Elizabeth I, that she was just a good CEO, feeds into that narrative:
history is either really the same as now or unimportant, lesser. But unlike
Axelrod, Liu doesn't see the technology used by the French revolutionaries
as the same as that used in corporate takeovers. Revisiting the
past in order to compare past and present technologies, without seeing
the past as lesser or the same, disrupts the narrative of technological
progress. The trick lies in resisting the sheer archaism of seeing the
past only for the sake of its impact on present technique ("Napoleon I,
Global Competitor"). In his book, Liu asks, "what's the difference between
past and present revolutions in management?" and "what is at stake in
knowing that difference?" His book argues that knowing history can give
present-day knowledge workers critical purchase on the pressures for conformity
within global corporate culture.9 |
| 12 |
The dialectic of anachronism and archaism visible as a deliberate methodology in Liu's work, I would suggest, necessarily appears in all historical work, most often unconsciously suffered rather than consciously deployed by the literary historian. The essays included in this section all try to make that dialectic conscious in various ways. All of them can help us think better about how to convince our contemporaries that the work of literary historians is vitally important to present-day life. |
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Romantic Circles - Home / Praxis Series / Romanticism and Contemporary Culture / Laura Mandell, "Presentism vs. Archivalism in Research and the Classroom: Introduction" |