Reading for the Wormholes: Micro-periods from the Future
Charnes, Linda
Early Modern Culture, No. 6 (2007)
Abstract
Whatever we literary scholars call ourselves today, most of us have been trained as good historicists: we recognize the need to try to understand the past in its own context even as we acknowledge that our ability to read the past is inflected by our current perspectives. With the recent shift in literary studies away from the dominant paradigm of the new historicism toward a re-evaluation of the importance of the present, scholars are now debating the relative value of studies weighted at either side of the temporal scale: the “then” versus the “now.” While “presentism” may seem to be the next new thing in literary studies, its agenda looks a good deal like that of the cultural materialism, largely British, of two decades ago. If anything, presentism seems a more urgently re-launched version of cultural materialism, perhaps even more important now in a globalized, post-911 world than it was twenty years go, when it spoke most pointedly against the Thatcher regime. There are certainly genuine methodological concerns at stake in the current debates; but there are also institutional and professional politics. Irrespective of where we stand on the need to “always historicize,” as university administrations reduce humanities programs, as verbal literacy rates drop and visual technologies rise, as presses publish fewer scholarly books and privilege those that reach wider audiences, we will simply have to make the texts we teach and write about relevant to the lives of our students and readers in the present. If we do not, we are at risk, especially those of us who work on the earlier periods, of having increasingly less impact on the world in which we live, at a time when our voices may be needed more than ever — a time in which the repetitions of history may be harder to discern and therefore even harder to avoid.
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