Free The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber Page B

appearance of doing so. 59
    The authors were at pains to say that they did not reject all the ideas of postmodernist thinkers, noting that the text analogy and various cultural and linguistic approaches had helped to disengage historians from some other models, like Marxism and other economic and social determinisms, while also “puncturing the shield of science behind which reductionism often hid.” But linguistic determinism also presents a problem, they argued. And since postmodernism “throws into question the modern narrative form,” key methodologies for history writing, including historiography, narrative, and storytelling, were all subject to critique. Yet historians have to tell stories, they claimed, in order to make sense of the past, as well as to reach toward practical political solutions for the future. So these authors, themselves historians, suggested that there was a point when members of the historical profession, however initially energized by the likes of Derrida and Foucault, had to part company with them, to rejoin the referent and leave the play of the signifier, or to leave the text and rejoin the world. In fact, they wrote in 1994, “a similar kind of crisis that foreshadows a turning away from the postmodern view can be seen in almost every field of knowledge or learning today.” 60
    A few key observations might be made about the foregoing: first, that it ties “the linguistic turn” (quickly broadened, to accommodate anthropology, into “the cultural turn”) to postmodern theory, thus eliding the linguistic, the literary, the cultural-anthropological, and the philosophical. Second, that it ultimately sets aside postmodernism as antifoundationalist and thus is likely to pose questions rather than seek solutions. (“In place of plot and character, history and individuality, perhaps even meaning itself, the most thoroughgoing postmodernists would offer an ‘interminable pattern without meaning,’ a form of writing closer to modern music and certain postmodern novels.”) 61 Third, that it generalizes a crisis—supplementary to the fabled “crisis in the humanities”—whichled, or would lead, or was then currently leading, participants “in almost every field of knowledge or learning” to turn away from the postmodern view, and thus from the temporary hegemony of humanistic and literary critical studies.
    The return of the empirical after the heady attractions of the ungrounded “theoretical” had its effects upon literary scholars as well as upon historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. 62 Inevitably, perhaps, chroniclers began to contemplate “the historic turn.” The editor of the volume
The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences
noted that there had been a proliferation of historical emphases across the disciplines: “the ‘new historicism’ in literary and legal theory, a revived interest in ‘history in philosophy,’ a historically oriented ‘new institutionalism’ and other historical approaches in political science and economics, ‘ethno-history’ in anthropology.” 63
    As the century drew to a close, the question of literary study’s place in the intellectual and academic hierarchy was an unsettled matter. Suddenly, the word
material
was everywhere (to be contrasted, presumably, with its antonym
formal
, but also with the complicatedly intellectual and highly verbal playing fields of theory).
Material culture
and
the material book
were phrases to conjure with, as book series on “art and material culture,” “design and material culture,” “American material culture and folklore,” “gender and material culture” proliferated.
The Body as Material Culture, Children on Material Culture, Chimpanzee Material Culture
, and
Cognition and Material Culture
crowded the bookshops—and these titles are only the briefest of selections from the B’s and C’s. Literary critics, once to be styled by preference literary theorists, were now increasingly scholars