Literary History: The Point of It All

Abstract

HE question What is history? is ambiguous. It can be taken as an occasion for reassessing one's conception of or one's conception of history, or both. But it does not ask (a' la Kant), How is possible? For we know that it is both possible and not a science. Hence we have no need of a transcendental deduction of its categories. Phrased as it is, it is bound to bring preconceptions to the surface in the critic asked to reflect on it. Anytime we are asked what a thing is, we find ourselves having to constitute it as well as describe it. The danger is that we are inclined to constitute it in the image of ourselves. The contributions to this issue of NLH fall into two general categories: those which assume that is a problem and those which assume that the problem is history. The term literary contains, not one, but two essentially contested concepts. As scholars we have a stake in the way the terms literature and history are conceived. These terms not only constitute fields, they provide it with a structure reflecting the way we should like things to be as well as the way we think things are. Most of the essays in this issue are normative as well as analytical, stipulative as well as descriptive. It is difficult, therefore, to conceive any way that they might be aggregated or integrated. But there are two polar conceptualizations of the problem of that might be viewed as extreme cases: Bateson's and Hartman's. For Bateson offers problems of a purely legal nature. History is one thing, another; the problem, then, is to make sure that the one not be allowed to penetrate into the sphere of authority and influence of the other. Hartman, by contrast, sees the union of consciousness with its as a means of restoring the artist's faith in form itself and of recalling the artist to his vocation as mediator between human consciousness and its objects. For him, the problem is metaphysical, or at least metacritical and metahistorical. He envisages a poeticization of itself. Between these polar conceptualizations of the problem of