Abstract
What path leads to a career teaching and studying medieval literature? Mine was devious. In 1963, I was awarded a one-year Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, which required me to attend graduate school at a university other than where I had been an undergraduate, which was Yale—and Yale at its New Critical prime. At the time I wanted, like all good New Critics, to be a modernist, so I chose what I thought was the appropriate university. Regardless of field, all Ph.D. candidates were required to take a year of Anglo-Saxon. After a term of language study, the class turned to the literature, including Beowulf. I found the poetry fascinating, but the professor—a learned scholar and kind man—was a philologist to his finger tips, a true “word man.” Every time an idea would crawl out on the table, he would brush it away with a certain impatience. Rather than being dismayed, I responded to this behavior with low cunning. If, I thought, someone so uninterested in literature could become a full professor at a distinguished university, then obviously medieval literature was the field to cultivate. Armed with this shamelessly careerist plan, I returned to Yale to complete my degree. I immediately asked Talbot Donaldson if it were possible at this relatively late stage—in those days graduate school took four years or else—to switch fields and become a medievalist. Donaldson looked at me with the genial disdain for which he was famous, and asked: “Can you tie your tie?”1 But I remonstrated: what about all those things I was supposed to know?
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Notes
D. W. Robertson, “‘And For My Land Thus Hastow Mordred Me?’: Land Tenure, the Cloth Industry, and the Wife of Bath,” Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 403–420
Francis X. Newman, ed., Social Unrest in the Middle Ages (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 49–74.
W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday, 1958)
Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp. 350–77.
Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 165.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).
The term “cultural poetics” seems to have been originally coined by Stephen Greenblatt in the Introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); see Louis A. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in H. Aram Vesser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15–36.
Quoted by René Wellek, “The Fall of Literary History,” in Actes du VIe Congrès de l’ Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, ed. Michel Cadot et al. (Stuttgart: Kunst und Wissen, Erich Bieber, 1975), p. 29.
For recent laments about the submersion of the literary into the historical, see J. A. Burrow, “Should We Leave Medieval Literature to the Medievalists?” Essays in Criticism 53 (2003): 278–83
Derek Pearsall, “Medieval Literature and Historical Enquiry,” Modern Language Review 99 (2004): xxxi–xli.
Seneca, Epistolae Morales, ed. and trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: William Heinemann, 1962), 3.253.
Anthony Grafton’s splendid Defenders of the Text: The Tradition of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 39–40.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, History of Classical Scholarship, trans. Alan Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1.
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 1).
For Skeat’s comment, see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 75.
On Müller, see J. W. Burrow, “The Uses of Philology in Victorian England,” in Robert Robson, ed., Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp. 180–204
Hans Aarslef, The Study of Language in England: 1780–;1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983
Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
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Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong With Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 17.
Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Reconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (London: Routledge, 1988), especially pp. 28–64.
Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 56.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 57.
De Man, Resistance to Theory, p. 23. A very similar description of the course has been given by Richard Poirier in “Hum 6, or Reading before Theory,” Raritan Review 9 (1990): 14–31
For Jakobson’s definition, see Calvert Watkins, “What is Philology?,” in Jan Ziolkowski, ed., On Philology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), p. 25.
Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984)
John Burrow, “Poems Without Endings,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 17–37.
Eleanor Searle, “Possible History,” Speculum 61 (1986): 779.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 37.
Anton C. Zijderveld, “The Challenges of Modernity,” in Making Sense of Modern Times: Peter L. Berger and the Vision of Interpretive Sociology, ed. James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 62.
Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 (1st ed., 1970)), pp. 147–8.
Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador Books, 1985), p. 248.
See Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 66–84.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 147.
This point is powerfully made in relation to the huge (and grossly consumerunfriendly) mutual fund industry by David F. Swenson, Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment (New York: Free Press, 2005), pp. 242–72.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984), 53–92.
For a detailed version of such an account, see Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).
Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens, eds., Approaching Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986)
E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices (London: Verso, 1988)
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Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 12.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 28–64.
See Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 102–109
Richard Firth Green, The Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 310.
J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words, 2d edn., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (London: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1962]), p. 144.
Amy Hollywood, “Book Review,” Signs 29 (2003), 257.
Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 142.
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© 2006 Lee Patterson
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Patterson, L. (2006). Introduction: Historicism and Postmodernity. In: Temporal Circumstances. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08451-4_1
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