Historicism Blues

“Always historicize!” Fredric Jameson calls this opening salvo from 1981’s The Political Unconscious the book’s “transhistorical imperative” and its “moral” (9). Is this, indeed, the most sacred of all critical commandments? The “thou shalt not kill” of literary studies (above all, perhaps, of American literary studies)? (Nietzsche might have called it, rather, the “thou shalt kill”: in his words, “[a] historical phenomenon . . . resolved into a phenomenon of knowledge, is, for him who has perceived it, dead” [67].) In an essay in one of the recent twentieth-anniversary issues of ALH, the author, Joel Pfister, characterizes graduate programs in English today as “historicizertraining factories.” “Most Americanists have to historicize if they want to land jobs,” he states (583). This seems fair; ALH has scrutinized the categories American and literary relentlessly since its inception, but the third category—history—has been taken more in Jameson’s sense, as an “imperative,” than as an object for equivalent examination and potential critique. Perhaps, indeed, as a “moral” as well. “Professors assign an ethos to historicism,” Pfister writes (583). Ethos: a guiding belief, an ideal, an intangible quality giving us our ethical stance. For an earlier generation of critics, the totemic status of American or literary might have given rise to that inner spirit animating our labors; now, history does so. In the same issue, Mary Esteve similarly detects an “evangelical impuls[e]” in our practice; hence, she calls Jameson-style ideology critique “the form of moral criticism that since the 1980s has dominated American literary studies” (531). Recent years, however, have also seen a certain backing away from ideology critique as Jameson defined it, even if this has been less the case in American literary studies than elsewhere in the discipline. Most notably, the journal Representations, itself an offspring of the same contextualizing turn, announced in the fall of 2009 that