If slogans are wanted, I always rather liked David Kastan's
proclamation, delivered about ten years ago at MLA, of "The New Boredom"
in literary study. Cultural studies informed by patient archival
drudgery, hard-nosed bibliographic and textual studies, but with a
theoretical edige.
Then there's postcolonial hybridity, history of the family, and the new
formalism, which seeks to rehabilitate the aesthetic as a category.
My money is on two prospects:
1. Anything written by Harry Berger;
and
2. The Turn to Religion Turns to Theory. When the turn from New
Historicism to Neo-Angican studies finally remembers that Derrida wrote
extensively on religion during the last 15 years of his life, the whole
endeavor is likely to get a lot more interesting.
David Lee Miller
Professor of English & Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
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803 777-4256 (office)
803 777-9064 (fax)
803 466-3947 (cell)
>>> [log in to unmask] 4/23/2005 2:02:47 PM >>>
I got that article and read it -- it's very interesting. Of course, I
couldn't help notice that Jackson and Marotti's touted "Turn to
Religion" sounds remarkably appropriate to our own post-9/11
zeitgeist,
with "The Passion of the Christ", God on the cover of Newsweek with
some
frequency, etc. Of course, I think Marotti and Jackson have a point
--
my own criticism addresses pious literature, because I think it's very
interesting. But another thing that strikes me is that J and M's
notion
of where we are going seems remarkably different to Harry's. And
neither stance attaches itself to a marketable banner headline -- it
seems as if we refer to what we do as New Historicism, almost by
default
(apres la lettre?).
Michael
Bryan John Lowrance wrote:
>Dear Michael,
>
>An interesting article for this is Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti,
"The
>Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies," Criticism, vol, 46, n. 1.
>(Winter 2004) pp. 167-90. It provides good bibliography and overview
of a
>lot of recent scholarship as well as providing some interesting
>theoretical analysis. If your school subscribes to Project Muse,
it's
>available on that.
>
>Best,
>
>Bryan Lowrance.
>
>
>
>>Dear All,
>>
>>I'm just finishing up a project with a student on her way to grad
>>school, and the idea is to get her oriented on graduate study
(literary
>>studies generally, and English Renaissance in particular). She asked
an
>>interesting question yesterday, which was, where are we currently?
When
>>I was at her stage in 1992, we all had a pretty clear idea of where
the
>>momentum was in literary scholarship, even though there were clearly
>>differing schools and opinions -- all scholarship seemed to be
>>positioned in one way or another with regard to the New Historicism.
So
>>I thought I'd turn the question out to the group: Is there a
collective
>>sense that we are operating in a particular phase of criticism --
either
>>as Spenserians, Sidneyans, or more generally?
>>
>>All the best,
>>
>>Michael
>>
>>
>>
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