1. Historical Scholarship
Catherine Gallagher

2. Historical Scholarship
• Historicism
• Aim: to historicise that is, to understand
any phenomenon as a part of history
• A historical turn in literature departments
1980-90-present
– Frederic Jameson: „Always historicise‟.
• A broadening of the range of topics
handled by literature depts.

3. • What does it mean for literary scholarship?
– Challenging the text/context distinction
– Posing historical questions about literary
works
– Answering historical questions with literary
evidence and critical analytic tools

4. • Also influenced the underlying
assumptions of literary criticism
• We no longer study literature as a product
of historical periods (English Renaissance
Lit etc)
• Historicism also looks at
– Construction of authorship
– Canons
– Reading practices
– Nationhood
– Idea of the literary

5. – Historicising history itself and analysing its
literary character
– Understanding the place of literature in
human culture. Literature is a recent
phenomenon. Why did it emerge?

6. • Historicisms of the 80s
– Frederic Jameson „Always historicise‟
– Literary history is not an epiphenomenon
– History is a field for the chronological
investigation of cultural differences which are
reflected in and created by literary texts
– Many historicisms, little consensus

7. – The idea of what is history has not been
settled yet.
– Historicism has had to deal with its own
success
– The movement has done a fair bit of
introspection in order to settle its foundations.

8. • Jameson – the path of the object and the
path of the subject – the historical origins of
the things themselves and the intangible
historicity of the concepts and categories by
which we attempt to understand those things.
• Historicism tried to follow a balanced
approach.

9. What drives historicism?
• Technology
• Curiosity
• Inclusivity
– The need to include previously excluded
groups as a part of history
• Methodological self consciousness

10. Historicising The Author
• The author was central to literary study upto
the 1970s ie, till the advent of postmodernism
• Till then, the author was
– The historical link between a work and its
environment of production
– R S Crane (1935): A literary history is a narrative
of the changing habits, beliefs, attitudes … of
individual persons…it is not a history of
literature but of literary men.
• Author-centered, contextualising historical
criticism

11. • 1970|1980 – New Historicisms
– Discursive Criticism – Foucault & Annales
school
– Ideology Criticism – Marxist Structuralists –
Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey
– Cultural Poetics/Cultural Studies – Raymond
Williams & Annales school
• Deemphasized the author
• No difference b/w literature and its
historical context.

12. New Historicisms
• Discursive Criticism – connected texts (and
other representations) across generic
boundaries. As parts of „unauthored‟
discourses.
• Texts are vehicles of discourse, carrying the
“effects of social power” deep into “the
secluded recesses of consciousness”.
• It is discourse that creates consciousness.
Individual consciousness (the author) is not
the ultimate historical cause or source of a
literary work.

13. • These movements sought to destabilize the
idea of the subject.
• Getting rid of the author was only part of this
project.
• The author is a modern figure, a product of
our society…it discovered the prestige of the
individual…it should be this positivism,the
epitome and culmination of capitalist
ideology, which has attached the greatest
importance to the “person” of the author.
-Roland Barthes

14. • Deconstructionists – the subject is made
and unmade as a textual phenomenon.
• Lacanians – the subject is an effect of
language.
• Althusserians – the modern subject was
called into being by the ideological
apparatuses of the state.
• They all agreed that the author is a
construction.

15. Terry Eagleton
– Texts are composed of a variety of ideologies
(ie, texts are overdetermined)
– The authorial ideology (AuI) is only one of
these. There are a lot of other ideologies too
(GMP, LMP, AI, GI)

16. Jerome McGann:Romanticism vs.
Historicism
• Author figure in English Romanticism
– During the romantic period, writers began
claiming primacy for themselves and their
consciousnesses.
– Influence of Kant and Fichte‟s subjectivity.
– They tried to place the author at the centre of the
literary process. They tried to erase history and
replaced it with a record of pure consciousness.
– Literary historians (McGann) during the 70s and
80s attempted to reclaim the historicity of these
works.

17. Retrieving historicity from Romantic
Writers
• The form of a literary work retains its
historicity even if the author tries to impose
his/her consciousness upon it.
• The work/poem is a record of the struggle
between the author and historical aspects of
the time.
• Close reading can reveal the elisions and
intentional antihistorical actions engaged in
by the authors.
• Romantic authorship was overdetermined by
a number of ideologies. Althusserian
influence.

18. History and Textuality. Paul de Man
& Lacan
• According to de Man
– The author is an ideological formation.
– What disrupts ideology is called textuality or
literariness.
• New Historicists equated textuality with history.
• History is the process by which ideologies are
formed.
• It fractures the “centred, totalizing and rational
subject”.
• History is often unspecifiable like the Jacques
Lacan‟s idea of the real.

19. Stephen Greenblatt
• Greenblatt‟s Renaissance Self-Fashioning.–
questioning the subject/author.
– the subject which emerged during the
renaissance was not autonomous or stable.
– It was an improvisational self. It could tolerate
nonidentity.
– Iago: “I am not what I am.”
• Greenblatt was influenced by Foucault‟s idea
that the subjectivity was a historically flexible
conduit of power.

20. Foucauldian New Historicism
• Foucauldians refused to privilege nonidentity
as a subversive alternative to subjectivity.
• Althusser: Elisions, fissures, gaps, ruptures
and slippages in the text indicate instances
when subjectivity breaks down.
• Foucault: But these may serve another
hidden power/agenda.
• The author was an endlessly labile
(mutable, changeable) self that could be
fashioned for a variety of discursive
purposes.

21. • In „What is an Author?‟, he argued that the
„Death of the Author‟ is never absolute.
• The author is always reconstituted in the form
of an „author function‟.
• The author function is how the name of the
individual writers operate in various
discourses – legal, institutional etc.
• Modern literary authorship arises from the
juridical need to hold individuals responsible
for certain kinds of publications.

22. • Foucauldian critics looked at how writers
constitute themselves into authors – under
certain legal systems, inside certain
ideologies, within the rules of certain
institutions and with the help of certain
productive forces.
• The „author‟ is not the starting point of
literature.
• The author is a product. The writer is only
one of the ingredients that make an
author.

23. Legality and Censorship
• Foucault identified the state‟s need to hold
individuals responsible for their writing.
• New impetus to studies of suppression
and censorship. Examples of studies –
page 177 paragraph 1
• Censorship not only suppresses
authorship, it requires it.
• It authorizes and deauthorizes.

24. Copyright and the Author
• Writers derive certain benefits out of
censorship. The idea of copyright is one.
(Woodmansee, Rose)
• Britain had the earliest copyright law –
1710.
• The writer becomes the author-proprietor.
• Carla Hesse – „The Rise of Intellectual
Property‟

25. The Author as a part of the
Economy
• The author is both economic agent and
commodity.
• This authorial function started with the
beginning of the „print culture‟ in the early
modern period.
– Increasing availability of printed commodities
– opening up of the public sphere
– the ability to make one‟s living by writing.
• Habermas, Pocock, Brewer. Pg 178 Para 0

26. The threat of Commodification to
Authorship
• Economic and Legal factors may have
prompted textual production & authorship.
• But the model of an autonomous and
perfectly self-expressive author developed as
a reaction to these conditions.
• The aspect of authorship which was most
threatened by commodification was
masculinity.

27. Gender and Authorship
• Historically the default gender of the
author was assumed to be male.
• Feminist projects to recover the history of
women writers.
• How and why did women become authors
at specific points in history?
• Authorship at these points in time took on
a feminine aspect and conversely also
helped constitute the very idea of
femininity.

28. Minority Authorship
• How and why did certain authors create
textual effects of minority consciousness?
• How did these affect the idea of
authorship?
• David Lloyd, Abdul
JanMohamed, Regenia Gagnier

29. Revisiting Historicised
Authorship
• Economic, Legal, Psychological, Gender,
Minority, Commodification etc have effects
on authorship.
• Barthes‟ idea of the author as a sovereign
subject is incomplete.
• Historicization has uncovered the
complexities of authorship.
• Is the process of historicization complete?

30. • Do we need to continue to historicize after
we have removed the „sinister hegemony‟
of the subject?
– We are only beginning to have a detailed
picture of historical authorship.
– Historicizing authorship is becoming an
important part of literary biography.
– A rich variety of theoretical and critical
methods are available.

31. Historicizing the Text
• Author, text, reader, literature etc are fundamental
categories that are deeply interconnected.
• Barthes – “The text is plural.”
• Barthes attempted to distinguish between text and
work
– Text: an open-ended network or weave of signifiers or
a methodological field
– Work: a closed system that seems to convey a
definite intention.
• These (text and work) were radically new
concepts.

32. • Defining a text is difficult
• Not all things written by an author are
texts.
• There can be texts without authors
ie, anonymous texts.
• During the 1980s this plurality of the text
was being explored by textual historians
– They focused on the materiality of written
artifacts; their versions, modes of
production, preservation, and dissemination.

33. • These early textual historians noted the
role of editors
• They postulated that „editing‟ was invented
as a deeply historical discipline in the 18th
& 19th C.
– Editing (re)constructs texts out of the
indeterminacy and plurality which surrounds
them.

34. 18th and 19th C practice of Editing -
McGann
• RECOVERY of the entire
cultural and historical
context of the original
• EXPLORATION of the
entire critical history
• RECONSTITUTION of the
words in terms of these
two historical matrices.

35. Problems with this concept of
Editing
• It narrowed the field of possible historical
questions about texts.
– It hides the variety of texts available as well as
the history of the text‟s
production, dissemniation and reception
• Because historicization of texts tend to
dissolve them, authorial intention has been
a necessary way of protecting the concept
of the text from the plurality produced by
historical criticism.

36. 1990s – New Philology
• Celebration of heterogeneity of texts
• Fundamental variability in the transmission
of texts
• Textual variability helps understand
conditions of production and dissemination
• Texts are not finished products but
ongoing processes.

37. New areas of consideration in
textual scholarship
• History of the book censorship
• History of • Licensing
printing/manuscript • Libraries
transmission • Markets
• Histories of theater • Paper making
• oral performance • Taxation
• Illustration • Copyright
• Photography • University curricula
• religious customs • Film, television, intern
• formal and informal et etc

38. • Textual historical criticism has merged with
media studies
• Textual historians read between texts to
understand the operation of various
discourses in society.
• Challenges:
– Loss of historical perspectives (time and
space)
– „Permanent presentness‟ of texts

39. Historicizing the Reader
• Hand Robert Jauss, “The historicity of
literature rests on…the experience of the
literary work by its readers”
• “The historical context in which a literary work
appears is not a factical, independent series
of events that exist apart from an observer”
• The text happens wherever it is read.
• Wolfgang Iser: The virtual text of the reading
process is multiple in time and space.

40. Two Possibilities for Reading
• The text does not have a • A new field in the history
history; nor does the of reading is possible.
reader. • We can study the
differences between how
• Barthes, „the reader is a reader in the 13th
without century read a work and
history, biography, psycho how it is read now.
logy: he is simply that
someone who holds • Jauss: „their horizons of
together in a single field expectations‟ would be
all the traces by which the dissimilar
written text is constituted‟. • Para 0, pg 182 – 2
different readings of
Perceval

41. Reception histories
• 1970s – texts are simply their readings
• Canons are made by readers
• Human subjectivity differs widely
• Various Theories emerged
– German Reception Theory
– American reader-response theory
– French cultural history

42. 1990s – History of Reading
• From “Who, what, when and where did
people read?” To “Why and how did they
read?”
• Robert Darnton – “First steps toward a
History of Reading”
• Transitions in reading practice – from
orality to writing, from manuscript to
print, from hand press to industrial printing.

43. The impact of Printing
• Printing displaced older reading habits.
• In the medieval period, printing created not
only a new type of reader but a new type
of person.
• Meaning of a text depends on its reading.
• Reading depends upon its material and
cultural conditions.

44. A negative vision and a positive
one
• Richard • Readers actively
Hoggart, Foucault, Pierr moulded texts for their
e Bourdieu: own purposes
– Popular literacy is a form • Readers are not
of political manipulation passive consumers
– It implants a recessive
subjectivity and self • Modern reading subject
discipline is socially self
– This is required for the conscious and resistant
modern state to maintain to oppression and
habitus exploitation.
– Habitus: a culturally
specific way of
thinking, behaving and
understanding which is
regarded as natural by
those inhabiting it.

45. Disintegration of the reader
• The author subject and the reader subject
depended on a certain mode of textual
production: the medium of the book.
• Changes in the nature of this medium are
changing the nature of the reader and the
author.
• Readers who can access texts
simultaneously and instantaneously.
• A great revolution in reading.

46. Historicizing Literature
• Terry Eagleton: There is no essence of
literature
• Literature is a functional term.
• A definition of literature must take into
account a lot of overlapping phenomenon
– The public sphere
– National identity
– Capitalism
– The print market etc

47. Canon Wars of the 80s
• Literary canons are artificially constructed
• Jane Tompkins: the fluctuating reputations
of certain authors illustrate how the idea of
literary value is continually refashioned.
• Canons expanded with access to
previously unavailable material through
microfilm archives etc.
• Inclusion of many women and minority
writers.

48. Historicizing Nation, Race &
Empire
• Discovery of intimate connections between
literature and development of modern
nations
• The nation was beginning to be
understood as a very unstable category.
• Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha
• A student of Japanese Literature should
take neither Japan or Literature for
granted.

49. • The question of Empire
– Britain itself is a conglomeration of nations
– How did it control a vast global empire?
– Is English Literature a national literature, an
imperial literature or global literature?
• The making of the American Nation and
its literature
– The history of colonisation of America
• Racial Identities and literature
– The nation as a constantly changing system
of racial differences.

50. Concluding Remarks: Historicizing
History
• Tracing the development of history as
– a discipline,
– a category of consciousness,
– A method of defining periods
– A narrative practice
• Hayden White, F. R. Ankersmit, Dominick
La Capra
• History (with a capital „H‟) >> history

51. • Limits to self questioning
• One cannot examine history without using
the principles of the discipline
• Self-questioning -> the path of the subject
• Opening up new areas -> the path of the
object
• Effecting a synthesis between the two.