The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading

Abstract

A few years ago I, along with a few colleagues from my department, went to dinner with a candidate for a junior position in eighteenth-century British literature. In the course of the conversation, the job candidate de clared that it was impossible to get published without archival work. This was something I had never heard, and it stuck in my craw. Whether or not her assessment of things was accurate and despite the likelihood that it varies a lot by field, I recognized that this remark does in fact represent something about the direction of literary studies today. While not literally true, the remark bespeaks what, for those whose disci plinary formation is taking place in the United States in the early twenty first century, is an established norm. This norm diverges widely from those that governed my own professional formation three decades ago, and I want to say?at the risk of sounding like the aging curmudgeon I am becom ing?that I believe this direction literary studies has taken is misguided. It was about twenty years ago that English studies witnessed the rise of new historicism: this burgeoning movement was not only the site of brilliant critical performances but also a much needed corrective to the ahistoricism then predominant. The time was ripe for such a course cor rection: ahistoricism had been persuasively linked to sexism, racism, and elitism; attacks on the canon had called into question the notion of time less works; literary studies had been ahistorical for too long.