Literary History at Wisconsin

Abstract

rrITERARY HISTORY, to the best of my knowledge, has never been the sole guiding principle of studies in the Wisconsin English Department. Even so, no one familiar with the teaching and scholarship of Helen C. White, Ruth Wallerstein, Ricardo Quintana, Merritt Hughes, Henry Pochmann, and Harry Hayden Clark can fail to recognize the legacy of historical context for study bequeathed to the present department. If was never the single mode of approach, certainly it was, and remains to a great extent, the central, perhaps dominating, focus of the department's teaching of English and American literature. Since the term literary history is sufficiently ambiguous, as the recent symposium in NLH will attest, it is preferable to speak here of literature studied in its historical context. This then, rather than the diachronic study of systemic change in form, or historical modification of audience response, or any other possible interpretation of literary is what still remains the principal focus of English programs at Wisconsin. Nevertheless, to state that literature studied in its historical context is the dominant focus of the department's English programs is not to claim a unity of approach adopted, formally or otherwise, by faculty members in their individual courses. Two sections of the same course, for example, may, and often do, differ widely in terms of format, structure, and pedagogical objective, though between the two instructors there is characteristically good agreement on the general scope of the course and its function within the larger framework of a particular degree program. Thus, although it is fair to say that history, and the further dimension of found in biography, characterize the main thrust of Wisconsin's English programs, it would be wrong to conclude that the close reading of texts, for instance, is a forgotten art, or that theories of criticism-formal or informal-are not brought to bear on the literature studied. In short, a monolithic approach to literature has probably never been characteristic of the department, and certainly is not now, but within the diversity of