The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0130 Monday, 12 February 2007
From: Hugh Grady <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Sunday, 11 Feb 2007 20:25:33 -0500
Subject: SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Roundtable: "Whey Presentism Now?" Week Three
This week we have a short correction from Cary DiPietro and two longer
contributions from Joseph Egert and Hardy Cook. Egert excerpts passages
from previous critical comments on Presentism from the SHAKSPER
archives, and Cook reproduces part of a message from Larry Weiss, which
suggested that the relatively modest number of responses offered in the
first two weeks of responses is a sign that the issues raised here are
of interest only to a few academics. Cook replies by sketching a history
of changing critical paradigms in the last 80-100 years of academic
Shakespeare criticism and suggests that the age of new historicism is
indeed coming to an end and that Presentism deserves investigation as a
possible new direction for the field. I will comment briefly on the two
longer posts at the conclusion.
******************
From: Cary DiPietro <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 20:57:25 -0500
Subject: 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Ammunition for those who will argue that presentism shuns historical
accuracy: in my earlier post, I incorrectly attributed Greenblatt's
oft-quoted desire to speak with the dead to _Renaissance
Self-Fashioning_, rather than the later _Shakespearean Negotiations_.
******************
From: Joseph Egert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:07:08 +0000
Subject: 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Hugh Grady with typical generosity invites
>the many critics of the entire enterprise
>of presentism among us....to weigh in with reasoned
>statements that try to identify the problems and issues with this
>approach.
Rather than repeat my own reservations from the current "A Question"
thread (SHK 18.0067 & 18.0095), I've extracted below some earlier
objections from years past on SHAKSPER. All ellipses are mine.
David Lindley:
"I don't think I was ever trying to argue...for 'the integrity of
"fact"' in a simple kind of way. I was rather worrying that the very
valuable recognition of the constructedness of history has itself
congealed into an over-simple formulation which lifts the responsibility
of scholarship from the shoulders of the critic....I'd actually want to
go further, and say that abandonment of any notion of the possibility of
'factual' evidence resisting and challenging interpretation has fearsome
consequences for our political and social life....Auschwitz - fact or
construction?" (SHK 6.0080)
"To argue that we can never escape our present as we look back at and
reconstruct the past is, it seems to me, a truism. But, pace Terry
Hawkes, I do not believe that we cannot therefore escape from that
present in any way... I argue to students...that their simple-minded
'presentism'...misses the essential point that the past can challenge us
in the present."(SHK 9.1173)
"whilst of course I would acknowledge the truth that we make the past in
part out of the investments we have in our present (to paraphrase Tom
Healy), I do not, as 'presentists' would have me, believe that therefore
the careful documentation of the past cannot challenge the constructions
we do in fact make."(SHK 12.0342)
Sean Lawrence:
"the Other exists prior to the self, rather than the self discovering
the Other. The other precedes the self, in a non-coincidence which is
the an-archical foundation of temporality...The approach of alterity (it
approaches us, not the other way around) precedes thematization,
precedes knowledge itself, and precedes the existence of the ego who can
theorize about whether and how it is possible to approach the past."(SHK
9.1277)
"My point was not that the past is an Other which we have to re-create
after an encounter. On the contrary, it is -absolutely- whether we
recreate it or not. In fact, its absolute claims -its Otherness, qua
Otherness- are removed if it becomes the object of our re-presentation.
To integrate the past into our categories kills it. It ceases to be
Other i[n] the radical sense; in fact, it ceases to be past and becomes
present....And my point is that we encounter the past before
ideology."(SHK 9.1298)
"A great deal of recent theory in our field, heavily influenced as it is
by the social sciences, seems to be trying to extend the enlightenment
project, 'demystifying' or 'deconstructing' (perhaps in abuse of both
terms) everything which cannot be understood in the most banal (albeit
sometimes scholastically complicated) terms of power or money. It
reduces, in other words, what is Other to the Same....More seriously,
presentists seem at times to extend what is only an empirical
observation into an imperative, that we ought not allow ourselves to be
surprised, to welcome the Other as a stranger."(SHK 14.1544)
RDH Wells:
"I had assumed...that, like me, you [Terry Hawkes] find the Orwellian
implications of radical Presentism deeply depressing. (The job of
Orwell's Ministry of Truth is to rewrite the past in such a way as to
bring it into line with present policies; for Winston Smith this
systematic presentist reconstruction of the past is a crime against
humanity far worse than 'mere torture'.)"(SHK 10.0005)
Bruce Young:
"The discomfort some have with theory may come from its focusing so much
on the way things are seen rather than on the things seen....C.S. Lewis
commented on the shift from the things seen (or experienced) to the
process of seeing (experiencing) and also on the encouragement this
shift gives to the reductive impulse, the impulse to explain things
away." (SHK 14.1519)
Had enough? For more, follow the link below to Graham Good's 1996 "The
Hegemony of Theory".
http://www.greggsimpson.com/Hegemony.htm
Enjoy!
Joe Egert
***************
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:06:56 -0500
Subject: 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0092 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Presentism
This past week I contributed the following to one of the digests in the
"A Question" thread:
Response to the Roundtable discussion has not taken off as I expected or
perhaps hoped that it would. Maybe I got it wrong. Maybe discussions in
the medium of e-mail depend upon relatively immediate exchanges and are
not appropriate to the delayed gratification of weekly digests.
Anyway, since this thread involves Presentism, might some of the
participants here, as one has already this week, consider submitting
future remarks to the Roundtable discussion?
<http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2007/0114.html>
In response, I received several private correspondences. One member
wrote to say that he felt I had indeed gotten it wrong and that I should
keep all of the procedures for the Roundtable discussion the same,
except that I should distribute Roundtable digests daily with weekly
comments from the Guest Moderator.
Larry Weiss also wrote to me and I quote, with his permission, the first
section of that message here:
"I am enjoying the discussion and I am not in the least put off by the
weekly approach. True, it sacrifices immediacy for thoughtfulness.
That is not a bad thing, as I am sure you agree."
I replied that "Indeed, thoughtfulness rather than immediacy was what I
was trying to encourage."
Larry continued,
"It might be the subject that has restrained debate. Theory is not the
burning issue it was ten years ago, and to someone who is not thoroughly
immersed in it (as I confess I am not) the jargon can be off-putting.
The debate seems really among a handful of academics at the top of the
ivory tower who debate with each other about semantic subtleties which
have more to do with describing what they do than what Renaissance
authors did. It is caviar to the general."
As I was writing my reply to the above, it occurred to me that what I
was writing might be appropriate to contribute to Presentism Roundtable.
Here it is in a slightly edited form:
You may be correct here; however, frankly this is a subject that I find
fascinating. In part, it may be because Terry Hawkes began exploring
some of his own ideas here. But in a greater sense, I am interested in
how what is now called the "Old Historicism" [along with "Philology"]
was the foundation of scholarly study when English became an academic
discipline; how "New Criticism" challenged it and came to dominate
English Departments for thirty to forty years; how so-called "New
Historicism" grew out of post-structuralist thinking but was
subsequently attacked by feminists and others; how "New Historicism"
spread from Early Modern Studies to much of literary studies and then
continued to spread into other disciplines perhaps first to History
itself; how "New Historicism" became "Historicism" and "Cultural
Materialism" became "Materialism"; how "New Historicism" after becoming
so dominant in literary studies either disappeared or simply became the
new orthodoxy or gradually waned in importance, subtly morphing into
something else without clearly announcing what it was becoming; and THEN
how "Presentism" challenges "Historicism" and "Materialism" and yet
seems to me to be, nevertheless, rooted in the same post-structuralist
assumptions that gave birth to "New Historicism." This is all very
exciting to me and I don't particularly feel I am "among a handful of
academics at the top of the ivory tower who debate with each other about
semantic subtleties which have more to do with describing what they do
than what Renaissance authors did."
My remarks about the establishing of English as an academic discipline
are primarily based on my reading of Gerald Graff's _Professing
Literature: An Institutional History_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987)
and Terry Eagleton's _Literary Theory: An Introduction_ (2nd ed.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996). My remarks about the morphing of
"New Historicism" are in part my response to being unable to describe or
to categorize the methodology that Stephen Greenblatt used in his _Will
in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare_ (New York and London:
Norton, 2004.). Some light was shed by my reading Catherine Belsey's
essay "Historicizing new historicism" in the Grady/Hawkes collection
_Presentist Shakespeares_ (Accents on Shakespeare. London: Routledge,
2007), yet I keep thinking to myself "What happened to 'New Historicism'"?
I include the above ramblings in the hopes that they might stimulate
discussion, comments, or reactions.
Hardy M. Cook
***************
Comments by Hugh Grady
Several of the excerpts reproduced by Egert (and I'm begging off from
following up on the link he provided) strike me as based on simply
assuming the worst about Presentism. There is in fact no way to insulate
any critical method from misuse or insure that it will not be employed
by the shallow, the ignorant, or the malevolent. I teach plenty of
students who drift into the kind of simple-minded presentism mentioned
by David Lindley, and I try to challenge them to take a more
historically aware direction without losing their presentist insights. I
devoted most of my initial post on this subject precisely to make the
case that presentism needs historicism-the two are of course
dialectically linked. I invite readers to look over the essays in
Presentist Shakespeares before concluding that Presentism has "congealed
into an over-simple formulation which lifts the responsibility of
scholarship from the shoulders of the critic." Let me come out and say
it: I value and try to practice good scholarship, and so do others doing
Presentist criticism.
Then there is our old friend "the facts." I'm going to invoke Terence
Hawkes' mantra on this: Facts exist but they don't speak for
themselves. Facts only take on meaning in language, and words are not
one-to-one maps of reality-they are concepts which represent but do not
mirror reality. The dish I'm making for dinner tonight is baking in an
oven set at 425 degrees Fahrenheit, and this is a fact. But its
expression depends on our constructing scales and instruments to measure
heat and a panoply of scientific and cultural institutions that give it
meaning. Our grandmothers would have expressed the "fact" quite
differently, in a language of "fast" or "slow" ovens, to take one simple
example. I would go further and say, with a host of post-Romantic lovers
of poetry and drama, that we don't read literature for "the facts." At
best they can help us try to understand the originating contexts of the
documents we read. They don't give it its meaning.
Sean Lawrence's Levinas-based comments are sophisticated and
interesting, but I don't have time to do more than gesture at a reply
here. I suggest anyone interested might take a look at Ewan Fernie's
anthology Spiritual Shakespeares, in particular his Derridean inflection
of Levinas's central categories of "I" and "Other" for presentist ends
(pp. 13-18). Elsewhere Fernie has emphasized the salient point that to
encounter Shakespeare's plays as works of art is, necessarily, to
encounter them as they exist in the "now." I would simply add that I
don't doubt that the past has existed and that all critics of
Shakespeare depend on that knowledge. But precisely because the past is
Other, it can never be captured in its precise specificity-whatever that
would mean. We can of course attempt to conceptualize it and perform the
useful task of trying to imagine what complex cultural documents like
Shakespeare's plays would have meant to their original audiences. But we
will only have a series of approximations in the end, and any reading of
the historical critics of the past will show that their "past" is not
our "past." The premise of contemporary Presentist critics is that we
are beginning to repeat ourselves in this endeavor, or to be pursuing
more and more arcane and ultimately trivial reconstructions in a
chimerical search for details that will finally deliver us the
disappeared truth. Instead, we might focus on what all of these
commentators concede, that the pasts we construct are permeated with our
situation in the present, are always allegories of the present in one
form or another. We can use that as a starting point for a new critical
departure.
I think Hardy Cook very usefully summarizes the history of academic
Shakespeare criticism here and rightly points out that we should expect
that the process of change will continue to develop. As I have written
elsewhere, signs of the exhaustion of the new historical paradigm are
multiplying, and we have entered a period something like that of the
1970s, when New Criticism and the old historicism had clearly waned, and
when a number of different critical methodologies proposed themselves as
alternatives. I agree with Hardy that important parts of Presentism take
their inspiration from the more Presentist cultural materialism and new
historicism of the 1980s-but I don't see a problem with this so long as
the analyses produced push in new directions, as I think they do. And I
agree that these are fundamental questions for the field and have wide
implications, not only for the actively publishing but for all
contemporary lovers of Shakespeare. Perhaps this week listserv members
might want to pursue these issues-or introduce new ones.
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