Playing the Cerebral Savage: Notes on Writing German History before the Linguistic Turn

I want to begin by suggesting that to speak of a linguistic turn in the writing of modern German history is premature. It may be true that intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic has taken “the” linguistic turn, in the sense that, more than ever before, much current research involves “a focused concern on the ways meaning is constituted in and through language.” The formal properties, degree of sophistication, and utility for historians of these studies vary greatly. They encompass by now almost classical poststructuralist perspectives, methodologically more conservative discussions of cultural representation, and the influential works of Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock. Yet history writing on twentieth-century Germany, considered broadly, stands very much before rather than after a linguistic turn, if there will be a turn at all. Scholars of modern German cultural, social, or political history who engage current debates on language and rhetoric in truly innovative ways are the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, considerations of a linguistic turn in modern German history take place at a time when some historians criticize poststructuralist thought more forcefully than ever before.4 This makes for an interesting confluence of tensions, especially when one considers that disciplines such as literary criticism and anthropology have turned anew to the study of history.

Download Full-text

Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198733706.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

James Whitehead

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

Cultural History ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Historical Sociology ◽

Cultural Representations ◽

History Of ◽

Television Film ◽

Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Download Full-text

Introduction: In Defence of Paraphrase

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474460606.003.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 1-38

Author(s):

Patrick Fessenbecker

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Reading Practice ◽

The World ◽

History Of ◽

Art For Art's Sake ◽

Aesthetic Structure

How did “reading for the message,” a mark of shame among literary critics, yet in many ways an ordinary reading practice, become so marginalized? The origins of this methodological commitment ultimately are intertwined with the birth of literary studies itself . The influential aestheticist notion of “art for art’s sake” has several implications crucial for understanding the intellectual history of literary criticism in the twentieth century: most important was the belief that to “extract” an idea from a text was to dismiss its aesthetic structure. This impulse culminated in the New Critical contention that to paraphrase a text was a “heresy.” Yet this dominant tradition has always co-existed with practical interpretation that was much less formalist in emphasis. A return to the world of American literary criticism in 1947, when Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn was published, shows this clearly: many now-forgotten critics were already practicing a form of criticism that emphasized literary content, and often overly rejecting Brooks’s insistence that reading for the content or meaning of a poem betrayed its aesthetic nature.

Download Full-text

Roman History

Greece and Rome ◽

10.1017/s0017383518000049 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 65 (1) ◽

pp. 119-124

Author(s):

Lucy Grig

Keyword(s):

Political History ◽

Roman History ◽

History Writing ◽

Linguistic Turn ◽

Linguistic Approach ◽

Res Publica

This crop of books is Republic-heavy, with a strong showing for political history. No fewer than three demonstrate a notable trend in current Roman history writing: the focus on a particular term as a means to examine a key ideological concept. John Richardson's 2009 study of the words imperium and provincia was clearly a landmark (and is explicitly cited as a model by one of this year's crop). In 2013 Myles Lavan examined Roman conceptions of imperialism through looking at a slightly broader range of terms, focusing on the formation of different paradigms of power. Two years later Clifford Ando explored the same subject with a more distinctively cognitive and linguistic approach. In the crop of books for review here, we have one focusing on the word foedus (most broadly: ‘alliance’), one on pax (‘peace’), and one on the term res publica. Roman history, it seems, is finally fully and perhaps belatedly embracing the ‘linguistic turn’.

Download Full-text

The Nostalgic Imagination

10.1093/oso/9780198800170.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Stefan Collini

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

Cultural History ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Literary History ◽

Historical Change ◽

Central Feature ◽

English History ◽

History Of ◽

Raymond Williams

This unusual book explores the historical assumptions at work in the style of literary criticism that came to dominate English studies in the twentieth century. Stefan Collini shows how the work of critics renowned for their close attention to ‘the words on the page’ was in practice bound up with claims about the nature and direction of historical change, the interpretation of the national past, and the scholarship of earlier historians. Among the major figures examined in detail are T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and Raymond Williams, while there are also original discussions of such figures as Basil Willey, L. C. Knights, Q. D. Leavis, and Richard Hoggart. In the period between Eliot’s The Sacred Wood and Williams’s The Long Revolution, the writings of such critics came to occupy the cultural space left by academic history’s retreat into specialized, archive-bound monographs. Their work challenged the assumptions of the Whig interpretation of English history and entailed a revision of the traditional relations between ‘literary history’ and ‘general history’. Combining close textual analysis with wide-ranging intellectual history, this book both revises the standard story of the history of literary criticism and illuminates a central feature of the cultural history of twentieth-century Britain.

Download Full-text

Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology

Paragraph ◽

10.3366/para.2020.0318 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 (1) ◽

pp. 10-44

Author(s):

Christopher Johnson

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Material Culture ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Natural Environment ◽

Human Sciences ◽

Arctic Circle ◽

Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽

Language Technology ◽

Formative Experience ◽

Post War

The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

Download Full-text

War in Social Thought

10.23943/princeton/9780691150840.001.0001 ◽

2012 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Hans Joas ◽

Wolfgang Knöbl

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Intellectual History ◽

Large Scale ◽

Theoretical Work ◽

German Idealism ◽

Social Thought ◽

Social Progress ◽

Modern World ◽

Critical History ◽

Original Argument

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.

Download Full-text