History and Epistemology: The Example of The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

ANY AMERICAN CRITICS have begun to view history as a way out of the impasses of epistemology. They point out that theoretical reflection has not been able to devise clear, indisputable procedures for producing correct interpretations. Conflict still rages about such basic issues as whether literary works have an autonomous existence or depend radically in their very meaning and structure on how we construe them. These undecidable questions can be bypassed if not resolved, it is thought, by turning to history. The argument for replacing epistemological reflection with historical analysis takes several forms. If, for example, a theoretical issue like that of the relation between a writer's intention and the meaning of his work cannot be conclusively settled, then we can at least explain how this dilemma arose by analyzing the development of the concept of the author.' Perhaps studying the history of a problem will show us how to avoid traps others have fallen into. Or, if the inability of epistemology to legislate hermeneutic correctness means that different communities can regard different kinds of argumentation as persuasive, then perhaps we should study the various rhetorical practices in which interpreters have engaged instead of attempting to define absolutely what a right reading must look like. This maneuver would turn epistemology into a historical issue by asking how ways of seeing are institutionalized in discursive practices.2 Or perhaps we should abandon theoretical reflection altogether and devote ourselves to practical research in the conviction that some problems can be solved concretely, case by case, even if they resist a global, philosophical attack.3 For all of these arguments, historical study seems to offer a means of avoiding irreconcilable epistemological disputes. This hope, however, is mistaken. does not provide a neutral ground outside the theory of knowledge. History itself is a hermeneutic construct, and all the quarrels about validity in interpretation return in the question of how to constitute it. Instead of escaping the epistemological issues which have vexed contemporary literary theory, the move to history is destined to repeat them. Epistemology is necessarily implicated in history in a number of ways. Disinterest-