History

oSubjective

oTextual

oPolitical

oSystemic:

French History

Civil War

oIt has its own conventions:

Narrates

Selects

Arranges

Generalizes

Totalizes

Speculates

Attributes

Orients itself to an end or destiny

Subordinates the diachronic to the synchronic

Literary History

oTo focus on literature of the past

oTo select texts and authors which can be discussed

oTo arrange authors and texts into groups based on diverse criteria

oTo construct a narrative of literature

oTo bring points in the past to bear on other points in the past or in the present

oTo evaluate texts and authors through the construction of a coherent narrative

oTo account for the development and character of literary texts by relating them to their historical context

English Lit. – VS. CTP p. 104

Spanish Lit.

French Lit.

History and Literary History as Systems of Classification

oTo indicate or generate similarities

oTo suppress or deny differences

oTo generate periods, generations, eras, ages…

oTo understand the flow (dicachronic) in terms of the snapshot (synchronic)

After The Death of the Author > New Historicism

oEvery expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices

oEvery act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes

oLiteraty and non-literary texts circulate inseparably

oNO discourse –imaginative or achival- gives access to unchanging truths or expresses inalterable human nature

oA critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe

Borges' Animals

In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into:

  1. those that belong to the Emperor,
  2. embalmed ones,
  3. those that are trained,
  4. suckling pigs,
  5. mermaids,
  6. fabulous ones,
  7. stray dogs,
  8. those included in the present classification,
  9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
  10. innumerable ones,
  11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
  12. others,
  13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
  14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

This classification has been used by many writers. It "shattered all the familiar landmarks of his thought" for Michel Foucault. Anthropologists and ethnographers, German teachers, postmodern feminists, Australian museum curators, and artists quote it. The list of people influenced by the list has the same heterogeneous character as the list itself.