The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [27]
A few key observations might be made about the foregoing: first, that it ties “the linguistic turn” (quickly broadened, to accommodate anthropology, into “the cultural turn”) to postmodern theory, thus eliding the linguistic, the literary, the cultural-anthropological, and the philosophical. Second, that it ultimately sets aside postmodernism as antifoundationalist and thus is likely to pose questions rather than seek solutions. (“In place of plot and character, history and individuality, perhaps even meaning itself, the most thoroughgoing postmodernists would offer an ‘interminable pattern without meaning,’ a form of writing closer to modern music and certain postmodern novels.”)61 Third, that it generalizes a crisis—supplementary to the fabled “crisis in the humanities”—which led, or would lead, or was then currently leading, participants “in almost every field of knowledge or learning” to turn away from the postmodern view, and thus from the temporary hegemony of humanistic and literary critical studies.
The return of the empirical after the heady attractions of the ungrounded “theoretical” had its effects upon literary scholars as well as upon historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.62 Inevitably, perhaps, chroniclers began to contemplate “the historic turn.” The editor of the volume The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences noted that there had been a proliferation of historical emphases across the disciplines: “the ‘new historicism’ in literary and legal theory, a revived interest in ‘history in philosophy,’ a historically oriented ‘new institutionalism’ and other historical approaches in political science and economics, ‘ethno-history’ in anthropology.”63
As the century drew to a close, the question of literary study’s place in the intellectual and academic hierarchy was an unsettled matter. Suddenly, the word material was everywhere (to be contrasted, presumably, with its antonym formal, but also with the complicatedly intellectual and highly verbal playing fields of theory). Material culture and the material book were phrases to conjure with, as book series on “art and material culture,” “design and material culture,” “American material culture and folklore,” “gender and material culture” proliferated. The Body as Material Culture, Children on Material Culture, Chimpanzee Material Culture, and Cognition and Material Culture crowded the bookshops—and these titles are only the briefest of selections from the B’s and C’s. Literary critics, once to be styled by preference literary theorists, were now increasingly scholars of material culture.
Furthermore, the rise of cultural studies and other interdisciplinary approaches to social and cultural practice caught the eye, and the disapproving glance, of many former, retired, or disgruntled academics, some transformed into journalists or government officials, who unilaterally declared a culture war. Wielding the three most effective weapons for such a battle, intolerant anti-intellectualism, jingoistic super-patriotism, and nostalgia for a past that never was, these self-appointed guardians ridiculed what they did not demonize and demonized what they did not ridicule. Deconstruction, a reading practice developed directly out of the New Criticism, was parodied as a plot of the left. When deconstructive critic Paul de Man was discovered to have had a complicated past involving possible collaboration with the Germans during World War II, deconstruction also became a fascist plot. Race-class-and-gender, or race-class-gender-and-sexuality, were deemed unworthy “political” objects of humanistic attention, and attention to colonialism (even for a discipline like English