Blake, Foucault, and the Classical Episteme

PMLA ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Stempel
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Classical Structure ◽  
Archaeological Method

The accepted periodization of English literary history, a linear alternation of convention and revolt, has made Blake the ancestral and archetypal romantic. But an examination of the language of his texts, using Michel Foucault's archaeological method, demonstrates the classical structure of his oeuvre, which is a variant of classical discourse as defined and described by Foucault. The deep structure of Blake's discourse is logical, but the logic is not that of general grammar; it is the logic of identity, not the logic of difference. The assimilation of Blake's oeuvre into Foucault's classical episteme enriches and expands Foucault's model of the period; it also offers a model of the transformation from classical to modern that may clarify some of the difficulties of Foucault's scheme of historical change.

scholarly journals Procesos da historiografía literaria galega Para un debate crítico

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo Casas
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Methodological Innovation ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Galician Literature ◽  
The 19Th Century

Galician literary historiography shows links and ruptures that refer to the cultural history of Galicia itself and to the sequence of historical events that have delineated the social, economic and political development of the country since the 19th century. These coordinates comprise a series of processes, including the elaboration and propagation of ideologies aimed at achieving a way out of political subalternity and oriented towards the horizon of national emancipation. Those events and these processes also marked the connection of Galicia with modernity and the dynamics of historical change. As a result of the above, this book analyses critically the institutionalization processes of the history of Galician literature – with special emphasis on historiographic models such as that of Said Armesto, Carvalho Calero, Méndez Ferrín and others – and indicates the need to undertake a productive methodological innovation of the discipline in heuristic, organic and discursive terms. It further argues that this update should pay attention to substantive theoretical debates, not exclusively of specific cultural coordinates, such as Galician ones or any others that could be considered. Among these, the cooperation between history and sociology, the intellection of literary facts as historical facts, the review of the link between literary history and nation, the public uses of literary history, and the inquiry of discursive choices that promote a less self-indulgent and predictable historiography. This essentially involved a challenge, that of permanent dialogue with some of the most powerful critical reinterpretations of the Galician historiographic tradition and with alternative models constituted from feminist thought, postcolonial theories, the sociology of the literary field or the systemic theories of culture, as well as with the contributions made from a post-national understanding of the literary phenomenon.

Benjamin's Literary History of Attention: Between Reception and Production

Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-291
Author(s):  
Carolin Duttlinger
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Mass

This article argues that attention and distraction form a central concern of Benjamin's writings on literature. Individually and in conjunction, they underpin processes of textual production and reception, yet their relationship is fluid and subject to historical change. In this respect, Benjamin's exploration of the interplay of attention and distraction in writers such as Leskov, Baudelaire and Brecht also leads to more general reflections about the social, cultural and psychological shifts brought about by industrialization and modern mass culture. Benjamin's writings on literature trace developments which he also explores in relation to film. And echoes of his ‘literary history of attention’ can also be found in both his own critical approach and his self-reflexive comments on the process of writing.

Literature, Society, and Politics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Werner Mackenbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
The 1960S

The historiography of Central American literature from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, focusing on the relationships between literature, (literary) history, and the political field, especially within the context of projects centered on national construction, is essential. The approach here analyzes the different periods—or moments of change or transition—regarding the relations between politics, society, and culture from the perspective of historical change, concentrating on “microperiods” characterized by a paradigm shift with respect to the relationships between literature, history, politics and society: the nineteenth century (the post-independence moment); the late nineteenth/early twentieth century; the 1930s–1960s; the 1960s–1990s; and the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. A set of proposals aims at filling the gaps, developing the desiderata, and coping with the challenges in literary historiography in and about Central America at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Significant Change

The Introduction defines the character and scope of the book. It surveys the ways in which ‘general history’ and ‘literary history’ were related in the nineteenth century and how both were bound up with Whiggish interpretations of the national past. It identifies the significant change that was brought about by the more strenuous forms of ‘criticism’ that developed in the wake of the early work of T. S. Eliot and was carried on by such leading critics as William Empson and F. R. Leavis. It argues that a whole variety of forms of historical interpretation and historical assumption was present in the work of these critics, often carrying a strongly declinist message, and that such work filled a vacuum in wider public debate left by the withdrawal of History as an academic discipline into austere, archive-based research that eschewed larger interpretations about the direction of historical change.

The Nostalgic Imagination

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.

The Strains of Historical Change

1969 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 336-338
Author(s):  
ERIC SCHOPLER
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change

Şiirde sürgünün izdüşümü: Özkan Mert'in Ülkesinden Ayrılan Bir İşçinin Türküsü ve bir Mültecinin Mektubu şiirlerine Göstergebilimsel bir yaklaşım

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-248
Author(s):  
Medine Sivri
Keyword(s):  
Deep Structure ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Exile Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Deductive Method

Bu çalışmada, bir ‘sürgün şair’ olarak anılan Özkan Mert’in Ülkesinden Ayrılan Bir İşçinin Türküsü ve Bir Mültecinin Mektubu şiirleri göstergebilimsel bir yaklaşımla yeniden okunmaya çalışılacaktır. Özellikle farklı imgesel yapıları ve farklı bir dil kullanımını içinde barındıran ve bir ‘dünyalı şair’ olarak da anılan Özkan Mert’in şiirlerini biçimsel ve içeriksel yapılarıyla ele almak, son zamanlarda çokça tartışılan ‘sürgün edebiyatı’ ile ilgili görüşlere de katkı sunacaktır. Şiirler çözümlenirken, yüzeysel yapıdan derin yapıya doğru ilerleyen tümdengelimci yöntem izlenecek ve en son aşamada şiirler anlamsal yapılarıyla karşılaştırılmaya çalışılacaktır.ENGLISH ABSTRACTThe Projection of Exile in Poetry: A Semiotics Approach to Özkan Mert’s poems titled Ülkesinden Ayrılan Bir İşçinin Türküsü and Bir Mültecinin Mektubu In the current study, it will be tried to reread the poems titled Ülkesinden Ayrılan Bir İşçinin Türküsü and Bir Mültecinin Mektubu of Özkan Mert, who is known as an exiled poet, with a semiotics approach. Considering the poems of Özkan Mert, who is known as an “poet of the world” and contains different imaginary structures and a different language usage, with their stylistic and contextual structure will also make contribution to the “exile literature” that is argued recently. During the analysis of poems, the deductive method proceeding from the superficial structure to deep structure will be practised and finally the poems will be compared about their semantic structures.Keywords: Özkan Mert; Semiotics; Exile Literature; Superficial Structure; Deep Structure

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