By Ted Underwood
Why Literary sessions Mattered explains how ancient distinction grew to become valuable to literary learn, and why it remained institutionally principal inspite of serious controversy approximately literature itself. Organizing literary heritage round distinction instead of causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of background. yet critics' lengthy reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted events and fateful turns has produced vital blind spots within the self-discipline. within the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary examine might have electronic expertise particularly to boost new equipment of reasoning approximately sluggish, non-stop change.
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Extra info for Why literary periods mattered : historical contrast and the prestige of English studies
Sample text
12 But in Radcliffe, the “mysterious and menacing” face of Gothic architecture can be difficult to separate from the romance of gracefully decaying real estate. ”13 This tension between architecture’s archaic power and its present-day aesthetic value is enacted as well in Radcliffe’s plots, which have a way of transforming estates into prisons, and prisons into estates. For novels addressed to an audience of largely middle-class readers, this structure offered an important advantage: Radcliffe’s protagonists could acquire the connection to the past that distinguished the aristocracy while regretting the abuses of aristocratic power.
On the other hand, any institution that persists for more than a hundred years necessarily produces a few blind spots. If the cultural authority of periodization is now waning, that poses a challenge for the humanities—but perhaps also an opportunity to take a fresh look at old questions. The final chapter of this volume argues that literary studies’ long reliance on a rhetoric of contrast has in fact left the discipline with blind spots that scholars are now free to address. ” The introduction of quantitative methods in literary history is controversial for a host of reasons, but I would argue that it matters above all because it opens up new ways of characterizing gradual change, and thereby makes it possible to write a literary history that is no longer bound to a differentiating taxonomy of authors, periods, and movements.
Cultural prestige had been in the early eighteenth century imperfectly distinguished from other forms of social status: the cultural value of a literary work could often be judged by the same standards of correctness and polish that governed, say, elocution or manners. 11 Moreover, to ensure that culture would remain autonomous, critics defined conformity to prevailing social standards as a positive flaw. The sources of social prestige were thus disqualified, at least in principle, from exercising a monopoly over cultural prestige.