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It is often forgotten that the humanities—which are made up of history, philosophy, literary studies, philology, rhetoric, art history, musicology, and linguistics—are characterized not so much by their objects of study, which can change over time, as by their focus on reading, the reading of verbal texts, primarily, but also reading in the sense of decoding and recoding images, sounds, and movements. The disciplines that compose the humanities teach different kinds of reading practices. The products of these disciplines for the most part belong to the class of prose and poetic discourses. This is why they may often look similar or even the same, especially when they are cast in the same mode: narrative, argumentative, descriptive, or expressive as the case may be.

of Ralph Cohen as "master of genres." No one has been more assiduous in the cultivation of genre consciousness; no one has been more liberal in the entertainment of different conceptions of genre. Of course, as a literary scholar, Ralph Cohen has been especially interested in the concept and history of the genres of literary expression. But he has always treated literary genres as a special case of the more general social and cultural activity of identifying, classifying, and relating the classes and species of things both natural and unnatural. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, conformity to the "law of genre" which is supposed to have held that "thou shalt not mix the kinds" was considered a matter of moral, as well as ontological and aesthetic, necessity. The domain of literary genres was only the most cultivated and sophisticated place where the law was applied, tested, and, when necessary, revised. The law of genre was also supposed to preside over the joining of forms with contents. In literary writing, it was forbidden to join a noble form (such as tragedy) with a base content (such as villainy) . But in literature, as in life, Charles Darwin destroyed all that.

In a well-known essay on history and fiction, Michel de Certeau maintained that ‘fiction is the repressed other of historical discourse.’ Why? Because historical discourse wages everything on the t...

The definitions of theory given by our editors in their call for contributions to this issue of parallax would hardly justify the kind of hostility to theory currently abroad in the cultural sciences. Nor even the kind of questions put to theory by our editors. For in their definition, theory is a viewing, a travelling to see, a spectating, a going to consult an oracle, a judging of one thing by another, a contemplation, a consideration, a – well, a looking at something.

In this commentary I will consider a topical thread that runs through most of the essays comprising this issue of New Literary History and the one before it. The topic is the relation between history and theory in literary studies. In his contribution to this symposium, Michael Prince cites Ralph Cohen's suggestion that both the notion of (literary) genre and genres themselves appear to be "resistant to theory." Prince goes on to suggest that genre's resistance to theoretical consideration tells us more about theory than it does about genre itself. For if, as everyone seems to agree, genre is an essential element or aspect of literarity, then genre's resistance to theory implies that theory itself is inimical to literature and should not, therefore, be brought to bear upon the literary artwork. Indeed, Prince holds that it may be genre's resistance to theory that generates the endless task of literary interpretation, which has the role in criticism of mediating not only between literature and life but also between literature and theory as well. If we hold to interpretation and abandon theory we might be able, Prince tells us, to produce a low-level "theory of genre" "without falling into paradox or self-contradiction." And in his essay on "mauvais genres," he provides a brilliant historical account of how eighteenth-century English thinkers, in their attempt to construct a "theory of genre," met with a kind of resistance by genre that left them in a wasteland of theory and a quagmire of logical contradiction, left them, that is, with little more to do than turn over the question of genre to the newly emerged field of aesthetics, where the paradoxes it generated could be assimi lated to the idea of the sublime. Thus, Michael Prince's alternative to a theoretical approach to the question of genre is a history (in this case, of the failure of one attempt to construct an adequate theory) of genre. This is consistent with Ralph Cohen's historical approach to the study of genre. Cohen's idea that genre is resistant to theory is not itself a theoretical finding; it is a historical or more precisely a historicist one. It is based on the fact that no one has ever produced a compelling theory of genre in spite of the

I open the second volume of the highly acclaimed book of Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (2008), expecting to find something like the statement which opens the second volume of Richard J. Evans’s similarly acclaimed The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (2006). Evans’s book begins: ‘This is the story of the Third Reich, [...] from the moment when it completed its seizure of power in the summer of 1933 to [...] the beginning of September 1939’ (p. xv.). But I do not find this kind of opening in Friedlander’s book; I do not even find any statement about this being a ‘history’ of Nazi Germany and the Jews. Instead, I find — just after the title and the dedication — on a single page by itself, the following words presented in the following format: The struggle to save myself is hopeless .... But that’s not important. Because I am able to bring my account to its end and trust that it will see the light of day when the time is right ... And people will know what happened ... And they will ask, is this the truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth .... Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth .

The issues raised in this collection of essays touch upon almost all of the aspects of contemporary discussions of language, discourse, and textuality: referentiality and theme, voice and expression, cognitive and ideological codes, audience reception and affect, poetics or style, figurative and literalist meaning, narration and description. Moreover, these issues are considered within the context of the continuing debate between Formalists and Historicists over the relevance of knowledge of social–cultural contexts to the understanding of the forms and contents of artistic, and specifically musical artifacts. Thus, Thomas Grey and Lawrence Kramer deal with the function of metaphor in the musical production of meaning. Anthony Newcomb considers the question of plot in the production of narrative effects in instrumental music. Edward T. Cone discusses the nature of voice in sung speech. John Neubauer, Peter Rabinowitz, and Charles Hamm deal with the “audience's share” in the production of musical meaning. The topic of musical thematics is addressed by David Lewin (with respect to power), Paul Alpers (with respect to “strength to world”), and Ellen Rosand (with respect to madness). And the problem of ideology in musical representation is analyzed by Claudia Stanger and Ruth Solie. Marshall Brown provides a cultural–historical context for our consideration of these issues insofar as they relate to contemporary musicological research. First, he notes a specifically formal problem confronting the attempt to answer the question posed by Newcomb: namely, how might music mean? He points out that, in the musical work, structure is explicit and meaning difficult to discern, while in the literary work meaning is easily discernible but structure is elusive.

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To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

(1987). “The nineteenth‐century” as chronotope. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 119-129.

ROBERT ROSENSTONE'S ESSAY RAISES AT LEAST TWO QUESTIONS that should be of eminent concern to professional historians. The first is that of the relative adequacy of what we might call "historiophoty" (the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truth and accuracy presumed to govern the professional practice of historiography (the representation of history in verbal images and written discourse). Here the issue is whether it is possible to "translate" a given written account of history into a visual-auditory equivalent without significant loss of content. The second question has to do with what Rosenstone calls the "challenge" presented by historiophoty to historiography. It is obvious that cinema (and video) are better suited than written discourse to the actual representation of certain kinds of historical phenomena-landscape, scene, atmosphere, complex events such as wars, battles, crowds, and emotions. But, Rosenstone asks, can historiophoty adequately convey the complex, qualified, and critical dimensions of historical thinking about events, which, according to Ian Jarvie, at least, is what makes any given representation of the past a distinctly "historical" account? In many ways, the second question is more radical than the first in its implications for the way we might conceptualize the tasks of professional historiography in our age. The historical evidence produced by our epoch is often as much visual as it is oral and written in nature. Also, the communicative conventions of the human sciences are increasingly as much pictorial as verbal in their predominant modes of representation. Modern historians ought to be aware that the analysis of visual images requires a manner of "reading" quite different from that developed for the study of written documents. They should also recognize that the representation of historical events, agents, and processes in visual images presupposes the mastery of a lexicon, grammar, and syntax-in other words, a language and a discursive mode-quite different from that conventionally used for their representation in verbal discourse alone. All too often, historians treat photographic, cinematic, and video data as if they could be read in the same way as a written document. We are inclined to treat the imagistic evidence as if it were at best a complement of verbal evidence, rather than as a supplement, which is to say, a discourse in its own right and one capable of telling us things about its referents that are both different from what can be told in verbal discourse and also of a kind that can only be told by means of visual images.

Any attempt to characterize the present state of literary criticism must first deal with the fact that contemporary literary criticism does not constitute a coherent field of theory and practice.1 The contours of criticism are unclear, its geography unspecified and its topography therefore uncertain. As a form of intellectual practice, no field is more imperialistic. Modern literary critics recognize no disciplinary barriers, either as to subject matter or to methods. In literary criticism, anything goes. This science of rules has no rules. It cannot even be said that it has a preferred object of study. It might be thought a priori that literary criticism is distinguishable from other kinds of intellectual activity by virtue of its interest in the specifically literary artifact. But this is true only in a general sense. Modern literary critics resemble their historical prototypes by virtue of their interest in "literature" and their concentration on the "literary" artifact as the point of departure for the composition of their discourse. But this interest and this

If Critical Theory Since 1965 had been published by Norton, it would probably have been called The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Critical Theory, for there is no question that writing about the study of literature has become virtually a recognizable genre of text production. Having freed itself from the idea that criticism enjoys a parasitic relationship to primary literary texts, such writing enjoys the prerogatives vying for equal importance with conventionally identified literary genres, of viewing itself as making the recognition of literature possible by defining the parameters of the literary phenomenon, and of sustaining a tension between literary text production and other forms of cultural production that legitimates the ideological role of both literature and criticism in societies.

rT Z o RAISE THE QUESTION of the relation between literature and social action is to ask about the ways in which all aspects of the literary world-production, product, exchange, and consumption-relate to that larger structure which, since the eighteenth century in the West, has come to be called "society." We are not, I submit, clear about the precise nature of this "society." Indeed, the social sciences were constituted in their specifically modern form in order to deal with the problem of identifying what might count as a uniquely "social" act. Political action, economic action, religious action, and so on, are all manifestly different kinds of social actions; but wherein their shared sociality consists is unclear. Differences over the nature of this pervasive sociality account for the different notions of what a proper social science should be. Obviously, a social action is any action involving exchange between two or more human beings under conditions of some sort of mutuality of interest, intention, or need. But beyond this basic agreement on the exchange nature of the social act, very little else can be said without lapsing into ideological argument. It follows that any effort to determine the status of literary work as a kind of "social action," as an effect of social causes, or as a reflection of social structures, conditions, etc., will be tinged by ideological special pleading-ideological in the degree to which one must presuppose a specific answer to the question "What is the nature of society?" before proceeding to establish the ways in which "literature" is related to a given social formation. It might be noted as well that if the concept of the "social" underlies all debate among different kinds of social theorists, the concept of "literature" is not less contested among theorists of literature. Here, too, in order to enable investigation, it is necessary simply to assume that one knows what literature consists of, wherein it differs from language in general on the one side, and discourse specifically on the other, in order to inquire into a given literary work's relationship to the various social milieus in which it arose and in which it finds its

Contemporary thought about the nature of interpretation, especially in the human and social sciences, tends to stress the ways it differs from simple description, on the one hand, and from explanation on the other. This is not to suggest that interpretation, description and explanation are in any way mutually exclusive operations; indeed, we could well characterize description and explanation as different kinds of interpretation or, conversely, regard interpretation itself as a kind of explanation which features description over formal argument or demonstration as its modus operandi. But if we do wish to stress the differences between interpretation on the one side and both description and explanation on the other, we would have to insist on the propaedeutic and heuristic aspects, the pre-classificatory and preexplanatory functions of interpretation. We might wish to say that interpretation is what we do when we are uncertain how properly to describe some object or situation in which we have an interest and unsure about which of several available analytical methods should be used to explain it. As thus envisaged, interpretation is a product of thought in the preliminary stage of grasping an object by consciousness, thought in the effort of deciding, not only how to describe and explain such an object, but whether it can be adequately described or explained at all. Because interpretation typically entertains different ways of describing and explaining some object or situation deemed worthy of the

"Tropics of Discourse" develops White's ideas on interpretation in history, on the relationship between history and the novel, and on history and historicism. Vico, Croce, Derrida, and Foucault are among the figures he assesses in this work, which also offers original interpretations of a number of literary themes, including the Wild Man and the Noble Savage. White's commentary ranges from a reappraisal of Enlightenment history to a reflective summary of the current state of literary criticism.

HE question "What is literary history?" is ambiguous. It can be taken as an occasion for reassessing one's conception of literature or one's conception of history, or both. But it does not ask (a' la Kant), "How is literary history possible?" For we know that it is both possible and not a science. Hence we have no need of a transcendental deduction of its categories. Phrased as it is, it is bound to bring preconceptions to the surface in the critic asked to reflect on it. Anytime we are asked what a thing is, we find ourselves having to constitute it as well as describe it. The danger is that we are inclined to constitute it in the image of ourselves. The contributions to this issue of NLH fall into two general categories: those which assume that literary history is a problem and those which assume that the problem is literary history. The term "literary history" contains, not one, but two "essentially contested concepts." As scholars we have a stake in the way the terms "literature" and "history" are conceived. These terms not only constitute fields, they provide it with a structure reflecting the way we should like things to be as well as the way we think things are. Most of the essays in this issue are normative as well as analytical, stipulative as well as descriptive. It is difficult, therefore, to conceive any way that they might be aggregated or integrated. But there are two polar conceptualizations of the problem of literary history that might be viewed as extreme cases: Bateson's and Hartman's. For Bateson literary history offers problems of a purely legal nature. History is one thing, literature another; the problem, then, is to make sure that the one not be allowed to penetrate into the sphere of authority and influence of the other. Hartman, by contrast, sees the union of literary consciousness with its history as a means of restoring the artist's faith in form itself and of recalling the artist to his vocation as mediator between human consciousness and its objects. For him, the problem is metaphysical, or at least metacritical and metahistorical. He envisages a poeticization of history itself. Between these polar conceptualizations of the problem of literary

For better than a century many historians have found it useful to employ a Fabian tactic against critics in related fields of intellectual endeavor. The tactic works like this: when criticized by social scientists for the softness of his method, the crudity of his organizing metaphors, or the ambiguity of his sociological and psychological presuppositions, the historian responds that history has never claimed the status of a pure science, that it depends as much upon intuitive as upon analytical methods, and that historical judgments should not therefore be evaluated by critical standards properly applied only in the mathematical and experimental disciplines. All of which suggests that history is a kind of art. But when reproached by literary artists for his failure to probe the more arcane strata of human consciousness and his unwillingness to utilize contemporary modes of literary representation, the historian falls back upon the view that history is after all a semi-science, that historical data do not lend themselves to "free" artistic manipulation, and that the form of his narratives is not a matter of choice, but is required by the nature of historical materials themselves. This tactic has a long record of success in disarming critics of history; and it has allowed historians to claim occupancy of an epistemologically neutral middle ground that supposedly exists between art and science. Thus, historians sometimes argue that it is only in history that art and science meet in harmonious synthesis. According to this view, the historian not only mediates between past and present; he also has the special task of joining together two modes of comprehending the world that would normally be unalterably separated. But there is mounting evidence that this Fabian tactic has outlived its usefulness, and that the position which it had formerly secured for the historian among the various intellectual disciplines has been placed in serious jeopardy. Among contemporary historians one senses a growing suspicion that the tactic functions primarily to block serious consideration of the more significant advances in literature, social science, and philosophy in the twentieth century. And the opinion seems to be growing among non-historians that, far from