Can Foucault Save Literary History?

Abstract

Intertexts, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2002 Can Foucault Save Literary History John Neubauer A m s t e r d a m U n i v e r s i t y Histories of literature have fallen on hard times; some say they are mori¬ bund. They have been shunned by new critics and structuralists; their raison d’etre has been questioned by diverse recent thinkers, including Roland Barthes, who demanded that one should choose between history and litera¬ ture (136), Fran9ois Lyotard, who criticized the “grand narratives” in history writing, and David Perkins, who thinks that the loss of consensus on what is plausible has made the writing of literary histories impossible (16-7). Con¬ sent for euthanasia was signed by godfather Rene Wellek in an article with the telling title “The Fall of Literary History.” Did Michel Foucault play arole in this existential crisis of literary history? And if so, what kind? He wrote no literary histories, nor has he explicitly re¬ flected on them. Yet everything he wrote has abearing on historical ap¬ proaches to literature. Particularly relevant has been his general critique of organicist notions such as development, continuity, coherence, and causality Geistesgeschichte, Hegelianism, intellectual history and other histori¬ ographies, as well as his critique of the subject. In this sense, Foucault had a major role in bringing about the crisis of literary history writing. Yet, his ap¬ proach to cultural history has been akey catalyst in recent discussions of the subject, and had aformative role in the emergence of New Historicism, interdiscursive cultural histories, and cultural studies—directions that have reinvigorated historical approaches to literature in the last decades. The work of Stephen Greenblatt has, in particular, been deeply indebted to ideas by Foucault. Ihave myself greatly profited also from Foucault when studying the literary, artistic, psychoanalytic, pedagogical, judicial, and other fin-de-siecle discourses on adolescence, even if Idid not adopt Foucault’s notion of epistemic space. The heritage of Foucault is thus at the very center of the vigorous debates thatareconductedonbothsidesoftheAtlanticaboutthequestionwhether literaryhistories,andliterarystudiesingeneral,shouldabandonthenarrow critical stance that characterized formalist, structuralist, and new critical ap¬ proaches in favor of interdiscursive and interdisciplinary cultural studies. I wish to offer with the following paper aspecific contribution to this ongoing fundamental debate about the future of literary studies, by describing the ideas and problems of anew kind of literary history. Working on that project, my colleagues and Ihave built on Foucault’s critique of past historiographies and have incorporated into our design some of his ideas on cultural history. The project we are engaged in goes beyond amere history of texts, writers, and movements, to become amore comprehensive history of literary cultures. But cw/fwrehas acquired in our project ameaning that is both more restricted and broader than it has in Foucault’s work: more restricted, because we found i n 6 0 ( 6 1 Neubauer—Can Foucault Save Literary History? it necessary to limit the notion of culture to those areas in which literature is a palpable social force through its agents, texts, and specific literary institu¬ tions; broader, because we found that he conspicuously avoids discussing problems of nationalism. Ishall then try to pinpoint both areas in which he has contributed new ideas to the writing of literary histories and the lacunae that his work displays for those who seek guidance from him in apostFoucaldian period of history writing. Of the enormous library on Foucault and literature only afraction is rele¬ vant to my specific topic. Most valuable is Simon During’s Foucault and Liter¬ ature, both for its depth and its particular interest in post-Foucauldian histori¬ cal approaches to literature. But Ishall treat the issues from adifferent angle, following up questions that have been raised by two earlier plenary talks at these conferences on “Cultural History after Foucault”: Mario Valdes’s talk at the first, Amsterdam conference on ahistory of literary cultures in Latin America, and my own talk at the second,Aberdeen conference, in which I looked at the role of nationalism in the emergence of modern literary histo¬ ries.LikeValdes,IshallreconsiderFoucaultbywayofdiscussingtheprobwill be ahistory of the litlems of aliterary history in the making; my test case erary cultures in East-Central Europe...