Figural Historiography

Abstract

In “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” an argument for defining literature as the medium that puts its own ontological status into question, Paul de Man suggests that a change is required in historical approaches to literature as these are currently understood and practiced. Such a conception of literary history, he writes, “would imply a revision of the notion of history and, beyond that, of the notion of time on which our idea of history is based” (164). For example, given that— in this hypothesis—“truth and error” exist simultaneously in the literary text and nowhere more so than when literature conveys knowledge about itself, one would have to abandon “the pre-assumed concept of history as a generative process… of history as a temporal hierarchy that resembles a parental structure in which the past is like an ancestor begetting, in a moment of unmediated presence, a future capable of repeating in its turn the same generative process” (164). He concludes, “To become good literary historians, we must remember that what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature and that what we call literary interpretation—provided only it is good interpretation—is in fact literary history. If we extend this notion beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions” (165).