Garber - A Manifesto for Literary Studies

The title of this volume risks being regarded as vieux jeu on the one hand, and aggrandizing on the other. Why does something as staid as literary studies need a manifesto? And why mobilize that quintessentially political form of the last century, the ardent advocacy of the manifesto, in support of a discipline well established within the academy?

The fortunes of literary studies have gone up and down during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same volatility as the stock market. And like the stock market, the market in literary studies can be charted with confidence only with the benefit of hindsight.

English studies held the comfortable middle ground of the humanities in U.S. and Anglophile/Anglophone universities through the middle part of the twentieth century. The combined heritage of belletrism and the little magazines imparted a certain gloss of creativity and artiness to the practice of reading and writing about poems, novels, plays, and what was then often described as intellectual proseworks like Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, for example, or Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Practices like textual explication, often cognate with, or imported from, the study of religious texts, were partnered with literary history, thematic criticism, and the study of images, tropes, and what was called literary influencethe indebtedness and echoes of one literary work to anotherwhether such influence was deemed serene or anxious. Intertextuality, a term borrowed from French, offered an adjustment to the question of influence by seeing it as a two-way street, and also by emphasizing the agency of the text over that of the controlling author. Texts could converse with one another whether or not the author was consciously speakingor listening. The conscious/unconscious borderline was a natural topic for scholars steeped in the heritage of romanticism, whether or not they acknowledged the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud's writings on the development of twentieth-century art and culture.

An infusion of exciting and provocative theoretical writing, again largely continental in origin, coming to the United States from France, Germany, and the U.K., made literary studiesor, more properly then, literary theorythe star, and also in some views the bad child, of humanistic work in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectual practices such as semiotics, phenomenology, and structuralism changed the way critics and scholars read literature, and literature itself changed with the onset of lively debates about the literary canon, cultural inclusiveness, and popular culture. Whether described under the heading of poststructuralism, deconstruction, or postmodernity, the work of European writers like Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu,Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault shifted attention to issues of text and agency.

A phrase like the linguistic turn (later transformed into the cultural turn) signaled a high-water mark for the prestige of this particular mode of literariness in the late twentieth century. As Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell note in their introduction to Beyond the Cultural Turn (1999), the publication of two key works in 1973Hayden White's Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essaysestablished the importance of techniques derived from literary studies for the disciplines of history and cultural anthropology.

White introduced his study with a strong claim about the relationship of history to language that established the first as dependent upon the second: In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse. Histories, he maintained, contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively historical explanation should be. His table of contents was explicitly indebted to Frye's structuralist account of genre, with chapters such as Michelet: Historical Realism as Romance, Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy, Tocqueville: Historical Realism as Tragedy, and Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire.

The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, wrote Geertz in his celebrated essay on the Balinese cockfight:

Such an extension of the notion of a text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal, is, though metaphorical, not of course, all that novel.