CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 7 (2005) Issue 1 Article 3 Modernism and the Issue of Periodization Leonard Orr Washington State University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Orr, Leonard. "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization." 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UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu > CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 < http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb > Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture , the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: < [email protected] > CLCWeb Volume 7 Issue 1 (March 2005) Article 3 Leonard Orr, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss1/3> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.1 (2005) <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss1/ > Abstract: In his paper, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization," Leonard Orr describes how literary theorists, historians, and anthology editors have put forward many conflicting models for literary periodization, while simultaneously expressing their doubts about the categories they have created. They are caught between intellectual despair and pragmatic necessity, scholarly journals and presses and academic departments imagine they are working at the cutting edge of thinking about their subjects but period concepts remain in place, even while every article focused on the subject expresses strong objections to the terms. Orr traces in his paper these problems and issues through the twentieth century, including the post-modern and post-structuralist responses to the question. Theorists have attempted to narrow the issue by dealing solely with form, techniques and stylistic practices, mere temporal boundaries. In addition to these "splitters," there are "lumpers," who would deny the many different boundary lines that have been made and deny the existence of "postmodernism" or "early modernism" and think of the master-narrative category of "modernism" for the twentieth century. While this essay is focused on modernism, it notes the way parallel questions exist for all of the other periods which are the basis for departments, journals, anthologies, and curricula. Leonard Orr, "Modernism and the Issue of Periodization" page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 7.1 (2005): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss1/3> Leonard ORR Modernism and the Issue of Periodization There are at least four different models of literary history: there are process models such as rise and fall cycles and tri-partite divisions (birth-maturation-death, birth-death-rebirth); there are Romantic, optimistic organic models of national literatures that seek a dominant mode of literature based on particular qualities, such as Realism and Naturalism; there are models that attempt to avoid period concepts by using the arbitrary timelines of centuries and decades that have nothing to do with the qualities of literature; and there are models that follow the historical period divisions based on factual events or political leaders, such as wars to mark the beginning or end points of literary periods, or the regime in the Elizabethan, Restoration, or Victorian periods. A period is longer in duration, covering more years under one name, the further back in time. Periods are frequently subdivided following one or more of the general models. The same possibility of models exist in a wide variety of scholarly disciplines that work both diachronically and synchronically, where the division of information for practical purposes seems to call for period concepts: history, archaeology, art history, music history. Frequently, even within the same monograph or classroom anthology or department curriculum, more than one model, sometimes all four of the different models, are used without a sense of contradiction or dismay, used, in fact, to provide structure and coherence authoritatively to the discipline, despite its illogically arrayed taxonomies and leaky boundaries. Again and again, the question of periodization is raised and grappled with by the major theoreticians of the disciplines, they seem to have clarified the definitions and list of periods and sub-periods and the function of period-concepts (see, e.g., Bender and Wellbery; Bentley; Besserman; Boas; Brunkhorst; Patterson; Wellek; Wellek and Warren; see also Sucur <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss4/2/ >). It certainly seems a matter both clear and settled from the names of the divisions of the MLA: Modern Language Association of America, the titles of innumerable scholarly journals, course catalogues, and anthologies. Yet, as Mark Parker noted in 1991 in an article on Romantic periodization from Lovejoy and Wellek to the present, "words like paralysis, scandal, embarrassment, crisis, and detour are regularly employed in critical discussions of periodization. This range of terms suggests a kind of hysteria" (227). Fredric Jameson is often cited for his statement of the "crisis" in periodization: "the larger issue is that of the representation History itself. There is in other words a synchronic version of the problem: that of the status of an individual 'period' in which everything becomes so seamlessly interrelated that we confront either a total system or an idealistic 'concept' of a period: and a diachronic one, in which history is seen in some 'linear' way as the succession of such periods, stages, or moments" and after considering many different models, prefers an Althusserian rejection of totalizing "master-narratives" (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 28). But at the same time, as Lawrence Besserman has pointed out, Jameson finds periodization pedagogically necessary and has a special class of works that are positive deployments of period concepts -- such as Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism , as a work "that delineates the contours of a traditional paradigm of cultural periodization in ways that 'reinscribe' genre and periodization on the agenda in a welcome and productive fashion" (Jameson qtd. in Besserman 5; see also Besserman's discussion of Jameson's "conceptual confusion" concerning periodization). Asbjørn Aarseth is one of many who note problems with periodization but feel it is "inevitable as part of any account of a process in temporal unfolding. It is of course possible to imagine a complete and chronologically ordered account of literary