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Contemporary Literary Theory: From Deconstruction Back to History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Peter Jelavich
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Extract

Various attempts have been made to bring to the attention of a wider historical audience the debates that have taken place among intellectual historians over the past decade. Such summaries may soon be in need of some updating. Insofar as many of these discussions have been inspired by developments among our colleagues in departments of literature, it is worth noting that those scholars likewise have engaged in heated exchanges. Since those debates seem to have resulted in a triumph of “history,” we may be looking forward to new modes of argument among intellectual and cultural historians as well. This essay will attempt to present a summary of the issues within poststructuralism that induced this turn to a “new historicism” in departments of literature, and it will conclude by offering some suggestions about the ways in which this tendency might be useful to the study of the German past.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1989 , pp. 360 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

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References

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28. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 4, 2.

29. Foucault, History of Sexuality: Introduction, 96.

30. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 9.

31. Ibid., 5.

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34. Ibid., 133, 138.

35. Ibid., 89.

36. Ibid., 86.

37. Foucault, Archaeology, 127.

38. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 7.

39. For leftist engagements in this debate, see Weimann, Structure and Society in Literary Theory; Lentricchia, After the New Criticism; and Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981).Google Scholar

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42. For example, see Tully, James, ed., Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, 1988).Google Scholar

43. Geertz, “Thick Description,” 20.

44. Recently, Charles Maier has made a similar point in The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, 1988), 168–72Google Scholar. See also Megill, Allan, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley, 1985), 345.Google Scholar

45. A renewed assault was launched in 1987 by Victor Farias, whose book is now available in English: Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia, 1989)Google Scholar. See also the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism,” in Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 407–88.Google Scholar

46. Sabean, David, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modem Germany (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar

47. Goldman, Harvey, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self (Berkeley, 1988).Google Scholar

48. Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1947).Google Scholar

49. See White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987)Google Scholar; and most recently, Kellner, Hans, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, Wis., 1989).Google Scholar