Historicism and Literary History: Mapping the Modern Period

Abstract

including the term literature itself-modern and period are at the same time indispensable and highly problematical. Put together in a single phrase-the modern period-they are paradoxical. Period implies an end, yet in some senses we still feel that we are living in the modern period. will the Modern Period end? Ihab Hassan has asked. Has ever a period waited so long? When will modernism cease and what comes thereafter?' One answer is that the modern period has already ended and that we are now living in the postmodern period. Hassan himself, in the essay from which I quote, makes a useful contribution to the definition of postmodernism, but regards it as a change or development in modernism rather than a decisive break with it. In any case, the question, what comes hereafter, remains. end of periodization? The slow arrival of simultaneity? are among Hassan's apocalyptic suggestions. The Parisian savants of our day would, I think, applaud this prospect. Levi-Strauss, for instance, has offered the utopian vision of a world in which automation would free man to enjoy all the advantages of a timeless primitive existence and none of its disadvantages: Henceforth history would make itself by itself. Society, placed outside and above history, would be able to exhibit once again that regular and, as it were, crystalline structure which the best preserved of primitive societies teach us is not antagonistic to the human condition.2 If such a society read literary texts at all, it would surely approach them in the spirit of the nouvelle critique, as semantic playgrounds rather than as historical expressions or representations. In such a society, it is safe to assume, there would be no university courses in literature, no scholarly journals, and no MLA Conventions, all of which institutions are heavily dependent on periodization for the conceptual organization of their subject matter. The question of periodization is therefore part of a larger question about history as a mode of knowledge and its application to literature: is literary history possible, or desirable? I would say that it is certainly unavoidable, in the sense that even those writers and critics who seek to escape from