Clifford Siskin

Biographic Data

ID413753
NAMEClifford Siskin
GIVEN NAMESClifford
FAMILY NAMESiskin
SIGNATURESISKIN C
AFFILIATIONSNew York University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS14
TOTAL CITATIONS0
WORKS AS AUTHOR14
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1982
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX0

  • The Advancement of Knowledge Now, or the History of Knowledge and the Elephant in the Room

    Open AccessClifford SiskinARTICLEHistory and Theory2025

    What role should history play in the advancement of knowledge? Because it was so "hard," so "unbelievably difficult ... to get people to believe" in his Great Renewal, Francis Bacon thought a history of knowledge could provide evidence of advancement-a reason to "believe" and participate in his experiment. By indexing advancement, historians of knowledge could foster it. If Bacon were with us today, he would be happy to hear that the history of k…

  • Enlightenment, Information, and the Copernican Delay

    Open AccessClifford SiskinARTICLEHistory and Theory2020

    This essay pursues the history of knowledge in the form of what Francis Bacon called a "literary history"-a "story of learning" that tracks "the antiquities and originals of knowledges." It focuses on the changing interrelations of information and knowledge from the seventeenth century to the present day in order to identify a fundamental continuity in a knowledge project that links the Enlightenment to our own era of quantum computation. At the …

  • System

    Clifford SiskinBOOKSystem2016

    This book illuminates the role that “system” has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. System can describe what we see, as with Galileo’s sighting of Jupiter’s moons, operate a computer, or be made on a page or screen like a sonnet or a letter. Starting in the seventeenth century, more and more people wrote and published works that they named and titled “system”—turning system into one of the forms, along with competitors such …

  • Writing upon System-Instituting Culture

    Clifford Siskin, Geoffrey C Bowker et al.BOOKSystem2016

    This chapter explores the emergence of "culture" as a concept in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, arguing that it arose from the need to adjudicate claims about societal systems within a public space beyond overt politics. Siskin links the development of "culture" to the rise of liberalism's politics of blame, suggesting that determining what aspects of "The System" functioned effectively and what required reform became the domain of cultu…

  • This is Enlightenment

    Clifford Siskin, W Lloyd Warner et al.CHAPTERThis Is Enlightenment2010

    This volume emerged from a 2007 international conference held at New York University entitled, “Mediating Enlightenment Past and Present,” which sought answers to many questions about Enlightenment. However, the conference as a whole also yielded a collective answer to the big question: ̳what is Enlightenment?‘, namely that Enlightenment is an event in the history of mediation. This chapter attempts to recover that history, for our place in it is…

  • Mediated Enlightenment

    Clifford SiskinCHAPTERThis Is Enlightenment2010

    This chapter argues that we should look to the late seventeenth-century upsurge in the number and ambition of the new genre of the system: “System was the formal means to Enlightenment's end: comprehensive knowledge of a world that could be known—of parts that formed a whole.” Newton demonstrated the “system of the world” that is nature through the use of induction, simplicity, and mathematical proof. Adam Smith then capitalized on Newton's succe…

  • This Is Enlightenment

    Clifford Siskin, William Beatty Warner et al.BOOKThis Is Enlightenment2010

  • Re-mediating Ralph

    Clifford SiskinARTICLENew Literary History2009

    Re-mediating Ralph Clifford Siskin (bio) The phone rings. I pick it up and say "hello." The voice at the other end of the line does not repeat the greeting or give a name. Instead, I hear "history and genre," and I smile. For students of Ralph Cohen in the early 1970s, this was a more telling way of identifying each other than the names we brought to UVa. Yes, it was a way of making light of Ralph's sublime performances in the classroom—his voice…

  • More is different

    Open AccessClifford SiskinCHAPTERThe Cambridge History of English…2005

    Because something is happening here But you don’t know what it is Do you, Mr Jones? Bob Dylan Something happened Between 1700 and 1800 the body of writing we now call ‘Literature’ changed. Whatever the exact placement of the bookends or the particular labels, all of our literary histories of the eighteenth century tell tales of difference. Even proponents of the ‘long’ eighteenth century extend the time frame not because they presume continuity b…

  • The Work of Writing

    Clifford SiskinBOOKThe work of writing1999

    As today's new technologies challenge the reign of writing, Clifford Siskin puts our current concerns about such change into historical context. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, he argues, the "new" technology was writing itself. How did its proliferation - in print and through silent reading - coalesce into the dominant forms of literary modernity, and with what consequences? What changed, strikingly and fundamentally…

  • Epilogue

    Clifford SiskinCHAPTERCultural Institutions of the Novel1996

  • Gender, Sublimity, Culture

    Clifford SiskinARTICLEEighteenth-Century Studies1994

    Here, My Lord, wrote Thomas Blackwell in 1735 of the life and writings of Homer, there seems to be occasion for a little philosophy.' What Blackwell wrote, however, bears little relationship to what we would now call philosophical discourse. Having first turned briefly to theology to assert that Homer's poems are of human composition, he proceeded to write history (of antiquity), geography (of Asia the Less), climatography (of the temperate regio…

  • The Historicity of Romantic Discourse

    Margaret Russett, Clifford SiskinARTICLEModern Language Notes1989

    This provocative critique of Romantic discourse will profoundly affect how readers perceive not only the Romantic writers, but also their most celebrated modern critics - such as de Man, Hartman, and McGann - who are, the author argues, themselves unwitting captives of the ideas and writings they criticize. With the Romantic redefinition of the self as a mind that grows, writing became an expressive index to that growth: the product, as we still …

  • Personification and Community

    Clifford SiskinARTICLEEighteenth-Century Studies1982

    M ID AND LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE has always been a nuisance for literary historians, particularly Romantic literary historians. When, for example, we attempt neat periodizations hinging on the French Revolution or Lyrical Ballads, we tend to treat Gray's rustic moralist and visionary bard or Collins's divinely creative Poetical Character or Akenside's pleasurable Imagination as labor pains heralding the arrival of a new age for which B…