The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [26]
The idea of a master discourse has fallen into disuse and even into disrepute, but if there is any discourse that holds the mastery in these excerpts from two groundbreaking works of cultural theory, it is literary studies.
How quickly we forget.
In the years that followed these brilliant appropriations from literary studies, the appropriators were themselves reappropriated by literary critics and established in the rhetorical position of mastery. New historicists Steven Mullaney and Stephen Greenblatt invoke Geertz’s methodology: “Employing a kind of ‘thick description’ in Clifford Geertz’s sense of the phrase,” Mullaney writes, “I examine diverse sources and events, cultural as well as literary, in an effort to situate the popular stage within the larger symbolic economy of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”56 Greenblatt cites a passage from Geertz comparing Elizabethan and Majapahit royal progresses at a key turning point in his own essay on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.57 J. Hillis Miller, a specialist in the British nineteenth-century novel, lists Hayden White as an important figure in the development of modern theories of narrative. “The inclusion of Hayden White,” he writes, “is testimony to the fact that in recent years history writing as well as fictional narratives have been addressed by narrative theorists.”58
Authority in literary critical—and literary theoretical—writings increasingly began to derive from such voices. Not only White and Geertz but the anthropologist Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the cultural historian Robert Darnton, and others were cited in argument and epigraph, and a new vocabulary became the common medium of exchange: “Culture, practice, relativism, truth, discourse, narrative, microhistory, and various other terms,” note Hunt and Bonnell, were in general use across many of the social-science disciplines. But these same terms became words to conjure with in literary studies as well, together with others that originated in social-scientific or scientific disciplines: genealogy, archaeology, agency, paradigm.
Not long after their eager engagement with the linguistic turn, historians and others drew back, returning to an emphasis on empirical data, sometimes in conjunction with theoretical arguments and sometimes to trump them. In a book pointedly called Telling the Truth About History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob noted the difficulties of aligning postmodern theory with historical practice:
If postmodern cultural anthropology is any guide, the concern with developing causal explanations and social theories would be replaced in a postmodernist history with a focus on self-reflexivity and on problems of literary construction: how does the historian as author construct his or her text, how is the illusion of authenticity produced, what creates a sense of truthfulness to the facts and a warranty of closeness to past reality (or the “truth-effect” as it is sometimes called)? The implication is that the historian does not in fact capture the past in faithful fashion but rather, like the novelist, gives the appearance of doing so.59
The authors were at pains to say that they did not reject all the ideas of postmodernist thinkers, noting that the text analogy and various cultural and linguistic approaches had helped to disengage historians from some other models, like Marxism and other economic and social determinisms, while also “puncturing the shield of science behind which reductionism often hid.” But linguistic determinism also presents a problem, they argued. And since postmodernism “throws into question the modern narrative form,” key methodologies for history writing, including historiography, narrative, and storytelling, were all subject to critique. Yet historians have to tell stories, they claimed, in order to make sense of the past, as well as to reach toward practical political solutions for the future. So these authors, themselves historians, suggested that there was a point when members