White Names Research Articles

Tropos Logikos: Gustav Shpet's Philosophy of History

Gustav G. Shpet (1879-1937) is one of those formidable Russian thinkers who, in the early years of the last century, orchestrated a revolutionary paradigm shift across a broad swath of the humanities and social sciences that is still reverberating today. But we lack a comprehensive view of the manifold heterogeneity of Shpet's intellectual endeavors. This article focuses on one prominent lacuna in our knowledge of Shpet: the theory of history that he advanced in the 1910s. In many respects Shpet's theory anticipated the "linguistic turn" that occurred in western historiography during the last quarter of the twentieth century and that is most often identified with Hayden White's name. But while White analyzes the historian's discourse in terms of tropology and narratology, for Shpet predication is the key logical mechanism that generates production of texts about the past. The divergence of these two approaches can be explained through the hidden Kantian underpinnings of White's thought that contrasts sharply with the explicit Hegelianism of Shpet's theorizing.

Medievalism and the Modernist Temper ed. by R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (review)

REVIEWS159 Professor Mancoff is Chair of the Art History Program at Beloit College in Wisconsin, and her book will appeal chiefly through its copious colour and blackand -white illustrations, beautifully photographed by Kenneth Cain. It is a useful supplement to Muriel Whitaker's The Legends ofArthur in Art. She seems especially enthused by the figure ofElaine, represented by an excellent range ofpictures, many from private collections, like the paintings byArthur Hughes and Edward Corbauld (80, 81). Much space is given, too, to the female illustrators Eleanor Fortiscue Brickdale and Florence Harrison (neithet Victorian), as well as to Julia Margaret Cameron. However, this aspect of the book also suffers from some shortcomings, such as the inaccurate descriptions of Riviere's painting (146). The account of one of Maclise's illustrations for Moxon's 1857 edition ofTennyson's Poems is both questionable and inflated (53), and Mancoffneglects to compare it with her previous reproduction of Beardsley's rendering ofArthur and the Lady ofthe Lake (50) which also incidentally contradicts her statement that 'there is never a trace of callow youth in (Arthurs) appearance' (56). There is no reference to the current theory that Morris's 'Guenevere' actuallydepicts Iscult, thus detractingfrom itsvalue as iconographyofArthur'squeen (93). The captions are erratic in assigning pictures' dates and dimensions, an irritating feature in a work intended to trace historical developments. This also gives disproportionate emphasis to small originals, such as Moxon's (153). As Professor Mancoffherselfstresses, alluding to Burne-Jones's 'huge canvas,' The SUep ofArthur in AvaUn (158-160) (which is captioned 9*3" ? 2i'2", but described in the text as 'eleven feet and a halfby twenty-one and a halffeet'), size really does matter. KAREN HODDER University ofYork, England R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, eds., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. vii, 496. isbn 0-8018-5087-8 (paper). $19.95. A specter is haunting the field of medieval studies: it is the specter of the 'New Medievalism.' Only a few years after the contributors of a collection entitled The New Medievalism (ed. M.S. Brownlee, K. Brownlee, and S. Nichols, Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) limited their definition ofthis conspicuous term to a revisionist movement in Romance medieval studies, this 1996 volume makes a suprising claim for broader representation. In the five years between the two publications, Nichols and Bloch have been out searching forsignsofthe 'New Medievalism' in other disciplines and— finding natural allies in other current self-fashionings such as the 'New Philology" and the 'New Historicism'—decided that a general critical advance had occurred which warranted dropping the adjective 'New' in the title and appropriating the word 'Medievalism' to stress the now universal importance oftheir scholarly enterprise. The editors' introduction and the essays in the recent collection reveal, however, that the main thrust of this movement still originates in Romance medieval studies and that the inclusion ofLee Patterson and Haydn White's names and a few forays into German and British philology cannot possibly make up for the disregard shown for existing transdisciplinary work on 'Medievalism.' While there is ample recognition i6oarthuriana for Bloch, Haidu,Jauss, Nichols, Vance, and Zumthor, there is a telling silence about Norman Cantor (Inventing the MiddU Ages, New York: W. Morrow, 1991), Leslie Workman's Studies in Medievalism and Year's Work in Medievalism (an entire journal and conferenceseries [withseveral published proceedings] which have been negotiating the subject matter since the mid-1970s), or even the French (!) historian Jacques Heers (LeMoyenAge, Une Imposture, Paris: Perrin, 1992). The silencing ofthese more philology-oriented, contemporaryscholars reveals the agonistically theoretical agenda ofthe 'NewMedievalists.' Theydismiss the'Old' Philologyasan elitistcordonsanitaire which prevented access to medieval texts, promoted the vice of decontextualization, and inhibited a dialogue between medievalists and specialists from other fields. At the same time, the 'New Medievalists' style themselves as upbeat (e.g.: 'WORD'S OUT: There's something exciting going on in medieval studies, and maybe in the Renaissance too,' p. 1) and progressive, forgetting that their own joyous dismantling of myths established by scholars of the 'modernist temper' unveils themselves as proponents ofthe myth of(post)modetnity, the era inwhich the potential elimination ofall myths has become...

Hidden Meanings: Cultural Content and Context in Harrison White's Structural Sociology

This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers of our day-Harrison White, lately of Columbia University. I have chosen this topic because thinking is an important, perhaps the most important, feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential; and because, frankly, I have misgivings about certain features of the program. It seems to me, in general, a good principle that critical questions ought to be raised about views that are on the verge of becoming accepted orthodoxy. In this paper I intend mainly to probe a line of thinking to see what sorts of dubious notions might actually be involved, but I will also suggest a few alternatives and improvements as I go along. There can be little doubt that the analysis of social structures as networks of relations among persons and positions is of decisive importance in contemporary sociology, and that Professor White plays an important role in current thinking about these matters. In the index of Collins's (1988) Theoretical Sociology-perhaps the best guide to the current state of scientifically oriented thinking in sociological theory-the word structure and words related to it take up an entire column, whereas words such as culture, social control, stratification, institutions, and social change take up half as many lines or fewer. White's name occupies 10 lines in the index. Of living sociologists, he is mentioned less often than Peter Blau (another structuralist), Jonathan Turner, and Harold Garfinkel, but he is cited more often than Robert K. Merton, Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, Arthur Stinchcombe, or Immanuel Wallerstein, among others. Apart from an uncharacteristic book (written with Cynthia White) on institutional and stylistic change in the French art world (White and White 1965), White has attempted for the last 30 years to work in a rigorously structuralist frame, which is to say that he has focused on the form of fundamental patterns of interaction that link individuals and larger social units to one another or provide the essential, underlying channels within which behavior occurs (Mullins 1973, pp. 256-57). In this sense, White has been unusually faithful to perhaps the single most distinguishing project of our discipline since the classical period: the effort to demonstrate how social structure constrains and in some instances even determines human behavior. This emphasis on underlying structures is evident in White's early mathematical studies of kinship organization (White 1963) and in his mature conceptualizations of vacancy chains as the channels of social mobility in organizations (White 1970), of blocks as positions in social networks (Boorman and White 1976; White, Boorman, and Breiger 1976), and of