Introduction 1
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NOTES Introduction 1. Lest anyone think this was a masculinist comment, and that Donaldson thought only people who wore ties should be medievalists, let me assure them that it was directed specifically at me. While he was Director of Graduate Studies for the Yale English Department, the students were almost exactly half men and women, and many if not most of Donaldson's most distinguished students are women. Furthermore, Donaldson always argued for tenuring women in what was then an all male English Department, and the first tenured woman was his fellow medieval ist Marie Borroff. I myself was never really his student: my dissertation-on a com parative literature theme--was directed by Thomas Greene. 2. Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: Ronald Press, 1958). As Donaldson said in one of his essays, "Such activities as source study, investigation of historical context, philology, editing, and patristic exegesis are salu brious vacations from the awful business of facing a poem directly" (E. T. Donaldson, "Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature: The Opposition," in Dorothy Bethurum, ed., Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1958-59 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1960]; reprinted in Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer [London: Athlone Press, 1970]), p. 153. 3. Donaldson, "Patristic Exegesis in the Criticism of Medieval Literature," p. 134. 4. Trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 20. 5. D. W. Robertson, "'And For My Land Thus Hastow Mordred Me?': Land Tenure, the Cloth Industry, and the Wife of Bath," Chaucer Review 14 (1980): 403-420; "Chaucer and the 'Commune Profit': The Manor," Mediaevalia 6 (1980): 239-59; "Chaucer and the Economic and Social Consequences of the Plague," in Francis X. Newman, ed., Sodal Unrest in the Middle Ages (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), pp. 49-74. 6. W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday, 1958); RomanJakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (New York: Wiley, 1960), pp. 350-77. 7. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modemity," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Critidsm, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 165. 8. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). 178 NOTES 9. Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p.298. 10. Interpretive Sodal Sdence: A Second Look (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 23-24. 11. The term "cultural poetics" seems to have been originally coined by Stephen Greenblatt in the Introduction to Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); see Louis A. Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," in H. Aram Vesser, ed., The New Historidsm (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15-36. Montrose's essay was written in response to Hillis Miller's MLA Presidential Address of 1986 lamenting the fact that literary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal tum away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding tum toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base. ("The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base," PMLA 102 [1987]: 283) Montrose coined the New Historicist mantra" the historicity of text and the tex tuality of history." (p. 20) 12. Quoted by Rene Wellek, "The Fall of Literary History," in Actes du V1" Congres de l'Assodation Intemationale de Litterature Comparee, ed. Michel Cadot et al. (Stuttgart: Kunst und Wissen, Erich Bieber, 1975), p. 29. 13. For recent laments about the submersion of the literary into the historical, see J. A. Burrow, "Should We Leave Medieval Literature to the Medievalists?" Essays in Critidsm 53 (2003): 278-83 and Derek Pearsall, "Medieval Literature and Historical Enquiry," Modem Longuage Review 99 (2004): xxxi-xli. Candor requires that I note that I am one of the critics taken to task for, as Pearsall puts it, sacrificing Chaucer's "literary qualities" (his italics) for sociopolitical goals. IfI actually meant what I am represented as meaning in my account of the Miller's Tale in Chaucer and the Subject if History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), I would agree with Prof. Pearsall. 14. Seneca, Epistolae Morales, ed. and trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: William Heinemann, 1962),3.253. Lipsius's remark and its Senecan context are discussed in Anthony Grafton's splendid Defenders if the Text: The Tradition if Scholarship in an Age if Sdence, 1450-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 39-40. 15. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, History if Classical Scholarship, trans. Alan Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1. A contemporary example of this kind of sentimental fuzziness is Stephen Greenblatt's oft-repeated comment that he wishes "to speak to the dead and to make the dead speak" ("Benefit of Clergy, Benefit of Literature," Stanford Humanities Review 6 [1995]; see also Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 1). 16. For Skeat's comment, see Gerald Graff, Prifessing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 75. 17. On Miiller, see J. W. Burrow, "The Uses of Philology in Victorian England," in Robert Robson, ed., Ideas and Institutions if Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour if George Kitson Clark (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), pp. 180-204, and Hans Aarslef, The Study if Language in England: 1780-1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983; on Auerbach, Paul Bove, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy if Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). NOTES 179 18. Leo Spitzer, "Linguistics and Literary History," in Representative Essays, eds. Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 3-7. 19. Christopher Norris, What's Wrong With Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends if Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 17. For an extended analysis of de Man's work in these terms, see Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique ifAesthetic Ideology (London: Roudedge, 1988), especially pp. 28-64. 20. Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 56. 21. Paul de Man, Allegories ifReading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 57. 22. De Man, Resistance to Theory, p. 23. A very similar description of the course has been given by Richard Poirier in "Hum 6, or Reading before Theory," Raritan Review 9 (1990): 14-31, although Poirier seems unhappy with de Man's account (19-20). 23. For Jakobson's definition, see Calvert Watkins, "What is Philology?," in Jan Ziolkowski, ed., On Philology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), p. 25. For a similar argument, also drawing on de Man's essay, see Barbara Johnson, "Philology: What is at Stake?," in On Philology, pp. 26-30, and Jonathan Culler's "Anti-Foundational Philology" in the same volume (pp. 49-52). 24. De Man, Resistance to Theory, 10--11. 25. For Brower's definition, see Poirier, "Hum 6," 22. 26. De Man's identification is objected to by Poirier in "Hum 6," 19-20. Interestingly, textual criticism enshrines this deferral of interpretation in a now discredited dictum: recensio sine interpretatio. 27. For discussions of Scaliger and Bendey, see Grafton, Difenders of the Text, pp. 104-44, 12-21. 28. Hershel Parker, Flawed Texts and Verbal Icons: Literary Authority in American Fiction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984); John Burrow, "Poems Without Endings," Studies in the Age if Chaucer 13 (1991): 17-37. 29. I have offered a detailed theoretical account of the process of historical interpreta tion in chapters two and three of Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding if Medieval Literature (Madison, 1987). 30. Eleanor Searle, "Possible History," Speculum 61 (1986): 779. 31. Jean-Franvois Lyotard, The Postmodem Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 37. 32. Anton C. Zijderveld, "The Challenges of Modernity," in Making Sense if Modem Times: Peter L. Berger and the Vision if Interpretive Soaology, ed. James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 62. A full analysis of modernist "disenchantment" is provided by the work of Max Weber. 33. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," in Blindness and Insight, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 (1st ed., 1970», pp. 147-8. 34. Cited by de Man, p. 146. 35. Lyotard, The Postmodem Condition, p. 76. 36. People's Daily Online, May 5,2005, available at http://english.peopledaily.com. 37. These figures come from the statistics website of the tourist boards of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, available at http://www.staruk.org.uk/ /default.asp. 180 NOTES 38. See http://icom.museum/. 39. Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador Books, 1985), p. 248. 40. See Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations," in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 66-84. 41. Communist Manifesto (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1970), p. 5. 42. David Harvey, The Condition ifPostmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 147. 43. Harvey, Condition if Postmodernity, p. 156. 44. This point is powerfully made in relation to the huge (and grossly consumer unfriendly) mutual fund industry by David F. Swenson, Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment (New York: Free Press, 2005), pp.242-72. 45. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, pp. 66, 43, 76-7, and 82.