Abstract
On 29 April 2005, The New York Times reported the following: “In a showdown that featured inside-the-Beltway lobbying and bare-knuckle boardroom negotiating, Donald J. Trump and President Bush effectively squared off yesterday in pursuit of the same parcel of real estate—a piece of the NBC-TV prime-time lineup. And it was the president who blinked first.”1 The day before the White House had scheduled a press conference for 8:30 p.m. and NBC had requested it be moved to 8:00, so that it would not interfere with their highly rated reality TV program The Apprentice, scheduled to begin at 9:00. Other networks, such as Fox Broadcasting and CBS, had originally planned not to run the president’s press conference at all, because they did not want to preempt their highly popular shows—The O.C. and Survivor, respectively. In the end, the White House agreed to move the press conference to 8:00 and all three networks decided to give it live coverage. Yet despite the White House’s capitulation, NBC and CBS stopped their coverage at exactly 9:00 p.m. before the president was finished with his parley with reporters, refusing to allow The Apprentice and Survivor to be preempted for even the one minute that was all that was actually left of the press conference. It was clear that President Bush himself was both aware of and nervous about when the TV networks might cut away from him, because midway through the hour he delayed questions from the print media, saying, “Let me finish with the TV people first.”2
A historical work… that recognizes how the archaic, the past, the “primitive,” the medieval continues to inhabit the present as an inheritance of traumas unresolved and still demanding resolution… might also recognize the possibility that doing history can mean a commitment not just to excavating the past but to considering how the past inheres in the present in such a way as to demand that the present, and thus the future, be thought otherwise.
—Steven F. Kruger, “Medieval/Postmodern: HIV/AIDS and the Temporality of Crisis”
… the study of culture without politics is an inane undertaking.
—Françoise Meltzer, “Future? What Future?”
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Notes
Jacques Steinberg, “How the President’s News Conference Ended Up Live on Four Networks,” The New York Times, 29 April 2005: A23.
See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), which has been described by Louis Menand as “a meditation on world history—via the influential lectures of the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève, given in Paris in the nineteen-thirties—in the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Weber”: “Breaking Away: Francis Fukuyama and the Neoconservatives,” The New Yorker, 27 March 2006: 84 [82–84]. It should be noted that Fukuyama sees this “triumph” of Western liberalism as having occurred mainly in the world of ideas, and, as such, has yet to conquer fully the material world. Indeed, Fukuyama readily admits that many parts of the world are still held in the grip of ideological, sectarian, religious, and other sorts of violent conflict, but he also maintains that, for the most part, all of the supposedly viable alternatives to economic and political liberalism that have advanced themselves at one point or another in the twentieth century (i.e., fascism, communism, absolutism, and socialism) have essentially exhausted themselves, and the tendrils of Western consumerist culture can be seen in the most unlikely places, such as China and Cuba. But it is worth reemphasizing, too, that Fukuyama has been distressed that many readers have interpreted his book as being about the triumph of a particularly American liberalism, when, in fact, he is making an argument about the progress of modernization in general. For another perspective on the supposed “end of history,” see Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); for an overview of the various historiographical discourses of “the end of history,” as well as a refutation of that discourse, see Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? trans. Patrick Camiller ( London: Verso, 1992 ).
Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–18. Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man (cited above) represents an expansion and refinement of his ideas about the end of history articulated in this essay, which received wide attention and was much debated when it first appeared.
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction,” in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 15 and 16 [1–191]. Gallagher’s and Greenblatt’s commentary, in its original context, is addressed to the problem of the challenges posed to literary criticism in the wake of the insight, partly drawn from the Geertzian anthropology of the 1970s and partly from the contemporary “pantextualism” of deconstruction, that “all culture is text” (p. 14), but the challenges Gallagher and Greenblatt outline are equally applicable to the problem of how to analyze the intersections of politics and culture when “everything is culture” and “all culture is text.”
Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America ( New York: Vintage, 1961 ), p. 37.
Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, “Introduction,” in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. xiv and xvi [xi—xxiii].
See Bruce Holsinger in his book The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), where he writes that “the critical discourse of postwar France be reconceived in part as a brilliantly defamiliarizing amalgamation of medievalisms” that “reaches across a millennium to embrace a distant epoch as a foundation for its own intellectual work while elaborating a diverse and often perplexing self-contradictory vision of the Middle Ages and their legacy to modern theoretical reflection” (p. 4). Ultimately, in Holsinger’s view, the European Middle Ages and European medieval studies have had a “deep, sustaining, and constitutive role… in the last half-century’s theorization of language, culture, and society” (p. 12).
Walter Benjamin, “Theses for a Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), p. 255 [253–64].
Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present ( London: Routledge, 2002 ), p. 3.
Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, p. 4. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 ).
James W. Earl, Thinking about Beowulf ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994 ), p. 136.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Midcolonial,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 3 [1–17].
Allen J. Frantzen, Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love from Beowulf to Angels in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 ) and Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004 );
Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity ( Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997 );
Bruce Holsinger, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007); Lochrie, Heterosyncracies; Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schulz, eds., Constructing Medieval Sexuality ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 );
Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004 );
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 );
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Form in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) and Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn ( Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004 );
and Angela Jane Weisl, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 ).
Jonathan Culler, “What Is Cultural Studies?” in The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation, ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 337 [335–47].
Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 ), p. 150.
Czeslaw Milosz, “Coming Unglued,” in Czeslaw Milosz, Road-Side Dog, trans. Robert Haas (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1998 ), p. 164.
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© 2007 Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey
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Joy, E.A., Seaman, M.J. (2007). Introduction. In: Joy, E.A., Seaman, M.J., Bell, K.K., Ramsey, M.K. (eds) Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610040_1
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