Caroline Levine, "Literary History" (Against)

a part of history, not apart from it...

Against “Literary History”

Institutional academic training shapes us into scholars who tend to treat the past as if it were organized into the kinds of categories, scales, and units that are convenient - or at least possible - for us to think our ways into, here and now. This tendency helps us to feel, perhaps, that have some sort of intellectual control over what we’re observing. Genres, periods, bodies of literature. It can be easy to treat historical entities that are convenient or conventional to think, teach, and train with as if they existed as meaningful entities, in and of themselves and in the shape that we’ve determined for them, in the timespace that we’re studying.

Take the idea of "literary history," for example. In this seed, Caroline Levine reflects on the ways that treating such a category as a way to organize ourselves and our thinking might obscure or limit the possibilities of thinking with literature as a part of history.

There are good reasons to suggest this reorientation. Levine reflects on the selectivity of literary history, the challenges of making claims about influence among writers associated with a given historical period, and the contingencies of taste that shape the literary histories that we tell.

She raises questions that are good to think with, regardless of the particular institutionally constructed timespace one might be studying. Why think of writers as belonging to particular periods? Why not include the kinds of things that novelists would have been reading in a particular time or place - including texts that wouldn't otherwise fall into the category - as "literature"? How do particular forms of inquiry work in specific ways across categories like genre? What happens if we think of The Arabian Nights as Victorian literature?

Biography

Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Her books include The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press 2023), Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press 2015), The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (University of Virginia 2003), and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (Wiley-Blackwell 2007).