Free The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber

continental in origin, coming to the United States from France, Germany, and the UK, made “literary studies”—or, more properly then, “literary theory”—the star, and in some views the bad child, of humanistic work in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectual practices like semiotics, phenomenology, and structuralism changed the way critics and scholars read literature, and literature itself changed with the onset of lively debates about the literary canon, cultural inclusiveness, and popular culture. Whether described under the heading of poststructuralism, deconstruction, or postmodernity, the work of European writers likeRoland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault shifted attention to issues of text and agency.
    A phrase like
the linguistic turn
(later transformed into
the cultural turn
) signaled a high-water mark for the prestige of this particular mode of literariness in the late twentieth century. As Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell note in their introduction to
Beyond the Cultural Turn
(1999), the publication of two key works in 1973—Hayden White’s
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
and Clifford Geertz’s
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
—established the importance of techniques derived from literary studies for the disciplines of history and cultural anthropology. White’s book used terms like
trope
and
emplotment
to argue for a deep structure of thought that organized historical research at the linguistic level, working with categories derived from the literary scholars Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye. Geertz’s idea of a “thick description” of cultures presented symbols, artifacts, social arrangements, and rituals as texts that could be read as a consistent story or interpretation—a word itself grounded in literary study. The powerful influence of Geertz has naturalized the phrase
interpretation of cultures
so that it no longer offers any hint of the jostling of disciplines.
    White introduced his study with a strong claim about the relationship of history to language that established the first as dependent upon the second: “In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” Histories, he maintained, “contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.” 53 His table of contents was explicitly indebted to Frye’s structuralist account of genre, with chapters on topics like “Michelet: Historical Realism as Romance,” “Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy,” “Toqueville: Historical Realism as Tragedy,” and “Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire.”
    “The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts,” wrote Geertz in his celebrated essay on the Balinese cockfight.
    Such an extension of the notion of a text beyond written material, and even beyond verbal, is, though metaphorical, not of course, all that novel. The
interpretation naturae
tradition of the middle ages, which, culminating in Spinoza, attempted to read nature as Scripture, the Nietzschean effort to treat value systems as glosses on the will to power (or the Marxian one to treat them as glosses on property relations), and the Freudian replacement of the enigmatic text of the manifest dream with the plain one of the latent, all offer precedents, if not equally recommendable ones. But the idea remains theoretically undeveloped; and the more profound corollary, so far as anthropology is concerned, that cultural forms can be treated as texts, as imaginative works built out of social materials, has yet to be systematically exploited. 54
    “A deep structural content which is
generally poetic, and specifically linguistic
”; “An
extension of the notion of the