The Importance of Literary History in a Cultural Context

The Importance of Literary History in a Cultural Context Randolph D. Pope Graduate students need literary history in a cultural context. My point is not that literary history is not taught or considered at all now in graduate courses—that would be an exaggeration. But our current tendency is to teach courses on topics more than periods. Looking at the fall 2011 and spring 2012 offerings of around thirty highly respected graduate programs, I found tempting and imaginative titles: Sex and the City; Love and Lust; Burning the Stage; Sex and Gender; Discourses of Desire; Travel Literature (from Homer on); The Spanish Civil War; The Mexican Revolution; Body Matters and Market Forces in Latin American Literature and Culture; The Avant-garde, Murder, Madness, and the Texts of Transgression; Love, Science, Religion, Wisdom, Power, and Authority; Cannibalism and Colonialism; Rock and the Novel; etc. I have taught one of these courses twice, so I celebrate their inventiveness and know their value. However, most programs offer very few courses in wider issues of literary history, which, for the reasons explained below, are necessary for a graduate student's preparation to become a knowledgeable scholar and an open-minded, generous colleague. I believe that graduate students need to know very well their literary history, not as a sequence of dates, names of authors and works, enumerations of distinguishing characteristics, and major historical events, which can easily be retrieved from an iPhone, but in the following ways and for the following reasons: 1. They should become familiar with different periods in the past by reading a considerable number of works written during those times, not just a few authors and not just literature. They should be able to visualize how and where people lived, in detail, and be able to understand how social space and time were different from ours. This is not only crucial to interpret works in depth, but also for understanding our own present place of reading, our outlandishness in relation to the past we are trying to explain. 2. Since, in our practice, we are surrounded by colleagues who concentrate on other areas or periods, each department is a living literary history, often disjointed and disconnected. The better we are prepared to look with curiosity, interest, and even admiration at other times and periods, the better colleagues we may become. 3. There have been and still are a great variety of ways to conceive of art and literature. A serious study of literary history helps to avoid insularity and introduces the healthy amount of doubt and hesitation that allows us to grow as scholars. All of us who finished our graduate school training decades ago know that the certitudes of then have mostly melted away or have been replaced by others now, which surely will also prove equally frail and transient. 4. A dominant reading of literary history is teleological, with us at a higher level of accomplishment and understanding than those in the past. A close study of any period, though, usually awakens a respect for the intelligence of the past, including the amazing erudition, intelligence, and insight of other times. A true familiarity with a different period and region should allow for the study of its accomplishments as well as shortcomings. 5. Literary history makes evident diachronically the great and extremely complex connections between periods in time. For example: "How and why does Realism follow Romanticism?" is far from an easy question. Synchronically, we are confronted in the reality of any culture with an interaction with different countries, languages, and [End Page xvi] cities. (For example, reading Galdós without ever having read Balzac, Garcilaso without Petrarch, and so on, is a form of blindness.) Again, being alert to connections can make us better scholars and colleagues. 6. Finally, literary history is a reminder that the present does not suffice, and that we risk leaving behind—possibly overlooking or ignoring—much that is extraordinary and life-giving. Each generation contributes not only by creating a future, but by redrawing the past and rewriting it as literary history anew. [End Page xvii] Randolph D. Pope University of Virginia, USA Copyright © 2012 American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese

Art · Context (archaeology) · Cultural history · Exaggeration · History of literature · Literary criticism · Literary science · Literature · Lust · Power (physics) · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Latin American Literature Analysis · Latin American Literature Studies · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Psychology