New Historicism: Writing Literary History in the Postmodern EraAuthor(s): Anton KaesReviewed work(s):Source: Monatshefte, Vol. 84, No. 2, New Historicism (Summer, 1992), pp. 148-158Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30161347 .Accessed: 17/05/2012 12:50

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New Historicism: Writing Literary History in the Postmodern Era

ANTON KAES*

University of California, Berkeley

The question today is no longer, "What is literature?" but rather, "What is not?"

-Denis Hollier

What is new about New Historicism? Perhaps the term warrants suspicion; is it not just another new label applied to old goods? Partic- ularly to German ears, the term "historicism" (new or old) sounds om- inous because of its association with nineteenth-century positivism which, for over a century, had been repudiated by a phalanx of German philosophers ranging from Nietzsche to Habermas.' What started out as a local phenomenon-in 1984 it was referred to as "la scuola di Berkeley"2-has in the meantime captured the imagination of literary scholars across the country. Often mechanically set in opposition to the linguistic turn, the recent "historical turn" seemed to react to the growing dissatisfaction with poststructuralism and deconstruction, whose formal strategies appeared arid and predictable. New Historicism, in contrast, offered the richness and resonance of a multi-voiced textuality and the never-ending sense of wonder and surprise that derives from the contin- gencies of history. Over the last decade New Historicism has become a blanket term for all critical work that emphasizes the historicity of the text and the textuality of history.

As an academic enterprise, New Historicism has many institutional facets: Representations, a quarterly journal founded in 1983 by Stephen Greenblatt and Svetlana Alpers; innumerable articles, lectures, and con- ferences; a book series entitled "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics"; a 1989 collection of 20 essays examining New Historicism from feminist, Marxist, and poststructuralist perspectives;3 and, most recently, a monograph by Brook Thomas.4 All these endeavors have made New

Monatshefte, Vol. 84, No. 2, 1992 148 0026-9271/92/0002/0148 $01.50/0 c 1992 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System

Literary History in the Postmodern Era 149

Historicism currently one of the most talked-about and hotly contested approaches to literary studies. It has been criticized by some as being anti-Marxist and by others as being neo-Marxist; still others have deni- grated it as a corollary to relativistic-"historicist" postmodernism. Never- theless, or perhaps precisely because of its ideological open-endedness, New Historicism firmly established itself in academia during the 1980s.

Such rapid acceptance-the reasons for which would in themselves make an interesting study-is indicative of the extent to which New His- toricism has touched a nerve and articulated something deeper that has to do with the legitimation crisis facing the study of literature today. Perhaps, too, it is part of the postmodern impetus that reevaluates the relationship between the past and the present and calls for a return to the "womb of history."5 Bearing in mind this new, larger interest in the interplay of history and culture,6 I offer five points to suggest uses of the new historicist project for a new type of literary history.

I

The term "New Historicism" posits itself on two fronts against New Criticism and the "old historicism." Joining the words "new" and "his- toricism," Stephen Greenblatt coined the phrase in 1982 as a punning opposition to the term "New Criticism," not as a conscious reference to German historicism.7 Greenblatt, editing a collection of essays on Shake- speare, had intended the term to signal the essay collection's sociological and historical orientation. That such an interest in the historicity of Shakespearean art had to be explained and legitimated in this program- matic way reveals the extent to which New Criticism dominated literary studies in the United States at the time-as it has since the beginning of this century.8

Neither the literary sociology of a Kenneth Burke of the 1930s (whose works are currently being rediscovered) nor the isolated attempts by American Marxists in the 1960s were able to break New Criticism's hold on schools and universities, so powerful was its claim as the sole legitimate approach to the study of literature.9 While in Germany in the 1960s the autonomy of the literary text and the art of formalist inter- pretation had at least been challenged (if not superseded) by literary sociology, Marxism, and reception theory, the text-based approach to literature in the United States kept alive the continuity between New Criticism's "close reading" and the deconstructionist text analyses of Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, or Paul de Man. New Criticism (in its trivialized form) was characterized by a praxis both historically disjoined and dissociated from contexts of culture; even deconstructionism (at least

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in the form of most of its American practitioners) could not significantly alter this. To many the much-publicized case of Paul de Man's troubling disavowal of his own past seemed like living proof for the fundamental suppression of history in deconstruction in general.10 All poststructuralist textual analyses seemed suddenly suspect, though this blanket suspicion was unwarranted. Still, the success of New Historicism must be evaluated against the backdrop not only of the worn-out paradigm of New Criticism but also of the waning influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction since the late 1980s.

II

Above all, New Historicism promised to recharge the literary text with the abundant energy inherent in any historically determined product. While New Criticism takes the very existence of a text as a given, New Historicism calls it into question. Michel Foucault, one of New Histo- ricism's founding fathers and a frequent guest professor at Berkeley, ar- ticulated this fundamental shift of perspective in an interview with Ray- mond Bellour entitled "On the Various Ways of Writing History":

In contrast to those who are called structuralists, I am less interested in the formal possibilities of a system than I am in language. Personally, I am more attracted to the very existence of discourse, to the fact that utterances have been made, that such events originally existed within a particular context, that they have left in their wake traces of their existence, that they continue to exist and in this continuation exert a range of manifest or hidden effects upon history.11

Foucault's project was less concerned with critical interpretation or exegesis than with determining and describing the very fact that a certain discourse had come into existence, that it represented articulations of specific needs and intentions. Foucault's "happy positivism" delineated the material conditions of speech and writing, their contingent and his- torical preconditions, before delving into interpretation, for the mere fact of writing (or speaking or making a film) is by no means self-understood or self-evident. As Foucault, the new historicists are concerned with issues regarding the mechanisms of power, authority, and repression in the production of writing itself. Such mechanisms play a role even before any communication can come about between author, work, and reader.

What could uncover the interplay between text and history that had become obscured through convention and the gradual isolation of the text from the context in which it was embedded? New Historicism rein- stated the cultural field to which the text had originally referred. Gone was the specter of the unique, godlike author; in its place appeared a

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product imbricated in a historical and materialist constellation in which social and psychological factors, collective and private impulses com- mingled. Even the "old historicism" was concerned with the reconstruc- tion of historical contexts, but the relationship between literature and history remained at the level of flat contrast between text and background; in this scheme, the so-called background functioned as a constant, co- herent, and fixed reference point for textual analysis. In fact, it regulated and reduced the excess of meaning that every text carries; the potentially subversive overdetermination of meaning that is always present in com- munication (be it verbal or, especially, literary) could thus be arrested and controlled.

Proceeding from the assumption that the historical "background" is only accessible to us textually, it follows that the background itself becomes textualized and thus an object of interpretation, part of what Derrida calls "le texte g~n6ral." Greenblatt's aim is precisely to circum- vent the old text/context dichotomy by situating both text and context on the same interpretive level, referring to texts and cultural practices in terms of "negotiations," "exchange," and "circulation." We can ask, he writes,

how collective beliefs and experiences were shaped, moved from one me- dium to another, concentrated in manageable aesthetic form, offered for consumption. We can examine how the boundaries were marked between cultural practices understood to be art forms and other, contiguous, forms of expression. We can attempt to determine how these specially demarcated zones were invested with the power to confer pleasure or excite interest or generate anxiety. The idea is not to strip away and discard the enchanted impression of aesthetic autonomy but to inquire into the objective con- ditions of this enchantment .. .12

This examination of the collective production of various cultural prac- tices and the investigation into the interrelation between these diverse practices is what Greenblatt calls the "poetics of culture.""'

III

In free trade with other cultural practices, literature appears to be a well-guarded (albeit besieged) domain whose borders are nevertheless essentially open and well-traveled. Literary motifs and figures often cir- culate in the quotidian territory outside the purview of literature (literary references can be found in political discourse or in religion, for example), while aspects of behavior, the numerous forms of language in everyday life (be they physical gestures or wordplay and the like), and rituals are absorbed into the literary realm. What interests Greenblatt is the whole

152 Kaes

complex of minute transactions that takes place between literature, cul- ture, and society at the level of the text. As a "poetics of culture," New Historicism investigates systems of cultural and social practices in order to point up the dynamic currents that often resonate up to this day within a literary work.

An example: In his chapter on "Shakespeare and the Exorcists" in Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt works from the assumption that the names, motifs, and figures of speech in King Lear had been appro- priated from Samuel Harsnett's tract "A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures," an Anglican cleric's treatise that railed against exorcists in the Catholic church. That Harsnett's tract was influential has long been solidly established; the theological polemic has always been regarded as the raw material and historical background to the literary text. With its function reduced to the level of an immutable reference point, history seems more like an antithesis to literature, merely the source of the lit- erary text in isolation.

Greenblatt, in contrast, is interested in the dynamic cultural field in which Shakespeare's drama and the nonliterary text alike are embed- ded. What were the cultural and social practices and strategies that pro- duced and shaped these texts? Both texts, Greenblatt argues, deal with a new definition of the sacred in an age when fundamental moral principles were being radically questioned and besieged from various camps. Hars- nett's treatise against exorcism was a weapon in this battle. Greenblatt's detailed analysis of the pamphlet's main points demonstrates that not only superstition and demonic possession but also exorcism itself was depicted as theatrical wizardry. For Harsnett, exorcisms were like tragi- comic theatrical performances in which the "cast" simulated symptoms of possession. With references to current anthropological theory, Green- blatt presents various long-forgotten representations of exorcism--ex- humed from archives and presented in abundant and perceptive detail- all having one thing in common: an awareness of the uncertain bound- aries between reality and illusion, between true madness and adroit sim- ulation.

Exactly this awareness, according to Greenblatt, forms the basis of Shakespeare's theater and illustrates the ambivalence that the theatergoer must have felt when, for example, the blind King Lear pretends (on a level stage) to hurl himself down from a cliff. The spectator apparently enjoyed being drawn into the illusion of this simulation and regarded this process with a combination of skepticism and fascination. Indeed, almost all of Shakespeare's plays contain allusions to exorcism as a form of swindle as well as theater. King Lear, just as much as Harsnett's trea- tise, partakes of the discourse on exorcism as a theatrical fabrication. The reconstruction of this discourse opens up the literary text: subtle allusions

Literary History in the Postmodern Era 153

to performance and pretense resonate all the more vibrantly, the symbolic dimensions of customs and practices are revealed in narrative motifs, and theatrical pantomime is charged with new and multifaceted signifi- cance. The literary text is reinvested with its original ambivalences, du- plicities, and dynamic contradictions.

A similar process of analysis is applied to the remaining essays in Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations. A comedy such as Twelfth Night, in which, as was common in the Elizabethan theater, male actors played women who pretended to be men, is part of a debate originating about 1600 on sexual hermaphrodites, a debate which is reconstructed with the help of surviving documents of the time such as scientific trea- tises on hermaphrodites, contemporary anecdotes and accounts of trans- vestites and transsexualism. Here, too, at stake are not issues ofinfluence, but rather questions of circulation. At stake is the transformation into the theatrical realm of text fragments and their attendant motifs from such diverse areas as medicine, eroticism, and daily life. In their own way, Shakespeare's comedies also contribute to the discourse of sexuality operative around 1600. For his part, Greenblatt, in constructing a dis- course on sexuality that incorporates medical, theological, legal as well as fictional texts, recasts the currents which determined not only the theater culture of the time but also everyday life, culture, and identity.

IV

For its characteristic analysis of the links between political, cultural, and everyday life, New Historicism is indebted to a concept of culture as formulated and promoted by the interpretive school of anthropology. Clifford Geertz, in his oft-quoted book, The Interpretation of Cultures, defined culture as a symbolic system within which social phenomena, behavioral modes, institutions, cultural activities or various legal, med- ical, or scientific practices each take on historically contingent functions and meanings that carry with them a wealth of descriptive detail.14 In- terpretive anthropology in the Geertzian tradition focused on cultural constructions that are enlisted by members of a given society to make sense of their experiences; as an interpretive system, this form of an- thropology investigates the various ways and means by which a group of people represent their experiences and knowledge through customs, rit- uals, and institutions, as well as through literature and art.

Geertz is interested in how human beings interpret their world in meaningful ways. Using a detailed and complex descriptive technique, called "thick description," he analyzes seemingly insignificant rituals- inconsequential perhaps, but in Geertz's view these are typical occur-

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rences, anecdotal everyday events which function as signs that illuminate cultural motifs and behavioral codes and thus allow for a view into a society's self-understanding. With its strong self-reflexivity and under the premise that culture, in its broadest sense, is only accessible through the interpreted text, cultural anthropology is affiliated with semiotics and recent literary theory. As the boundaries between various disciplines be- come increasingly indistinct, New Historicism derives its interdiscipli- nary approach-both as a methodology and a compelling goal-from the anthropology of culture as formulated by Geertz.'s

New Historicism is frequently reproached for disregarding disci- plinary parameters. Diaries and autobiographies, records of dreams, chronicles of festivals and local fairs, protocols of witches burned at the stake and of exorcisms, primers on sexuality, descriptions of clothing and cosmetics, eyewitness accounts and illustrations of disease, insanity, birth and death, and so on: all these documents taken from the "slime of history" may be obscure but they are not irrelevant for the study of Shakespeare. They reveal, for example, how around 1600 the human body was controlled, how deviance was regulated, how power was represented, how women were portrayed, and how political unrest was thematized. These nonliterary texts are themselves complex material and symbolic articulations of a society's imaginative and ideological structures.

V

Concerned as it is with the production and circulation of cultural practices, this expanded concept of culture introduces a productive basis for a new way of writing the history of literature. Not only does the principle of "thick description" challenge the linear and chronological narrative framework of traditional literary historiography, but a histo- ricism based on material gathered from the anecdotal and the vernacular is more richly endowed in the details of history than are monolithic historical constructs. New Historicism takes a skeptical stance vis-a-vis interpretive models that homogenize difference; it opposes, as well, the all too narrowly drawn boundaries between high and low culture, between center and margins. New Historicism intersects with postmodernism in its stress on discontinuity and ruptures, eclecticism, heterogeneity, and decentered authority. It shares with postmodernism a "messy vitality," as Robert Venturi, the father of postmodern architecture once put it.16 A new type of presentation has also become evident; it allows the critical text to be approached more playfully, more sensually, enriched by an influx of associations and less respectful of the boundaries drawn by the vigilant border guards patrolling the various disciplines.

Literary History in the Postmodern Era 155

Already in the 1930s Walter Benjamin had argued for a similar method of presentation above all in the Passagen- Werk. In his reflections on the writing of literary history-the precision and wealth of his insights are only now becoming fully evident-Benjamin called for the use of a "heightened plasticity of style" and described the conditions for its de- velopment as follows:

The first stage will be to appropriate the principle of montage into histo- riography. In other words, to erect large-scale structures from the smallest precision-cut elements. Indeed, the task is to discover the prism of totality in the analysis of minute elements, thus breaking with historical vulgar naturalism and capturing the constructive nature of historiography as such."

A recent literary history of over 1,000 pages, A New History of French Literature, published in 1989, has radically put to the test what Benjamin could only intimate in his incomplete and fragmentary Pas- sagen-Werk. The narrative presentation of material according to author, title, and genre is replaced by a series of hundreds of sharply defined essays, each of which illuminates a certain significant date in the long cultural history of France. The dates are not only drawn from literature but also from biographies or politics; they are points of departure for snapshots that link cultural and historical events. Thus, the formal and functional dimensions of literature appear less as discrete expressions and more as interconnected parts of political, social, and cultural history over the centuries. No longer presented in a linear, one-dimensional nar- rative style, literary history is here inflected with polyphonic tones; it is unsystematic and incomplete; it disregards traditional thresholds of lit- erary periods and emphasizes instead the contradictions inherent in the "Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen."'8 In the words of Benjamin:

Historical materialism strives neither for a homogenous nor an uninter- rupted representation of history. From the fact that the superstructure has an effect on the basis, it follows that a homogeneous history, for instance, of the economy, can exist as little as a homogeneous history of literature or law. Further, the fact that different epochs of the past are affected by the historian's own present in different degrees... means that a sense of linear continuity in historiography cannot be had.9

It is well known that Benjamin argued, instead, for thinking in terms of constellations, for the bold leap into the past that illuminates not only the historical, but also the present moment: "The materialist presentation of history leads the past to place the present in a critical condition."20 With this statement, Benjamin introduces a critical dimension to literary scholarship that legitimates the interpretative endeavor in the first place. In point of fact, Benjamin's theory of historical materialism could be

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utilized to immunize New Historicism against two inherent dangers: un- critical historical positivism (positing a dichotomy between text and his- torical context) on the one hand, and arbitrary ("anything goes") post- modernism, on the other.

In summary, New Historicism has the potential for energizing the writing of literary history on at least three counts:

First, New Historicism radically expands the terrain normally cov- ered by literary history. Its interdisciplinary orientation embraces textual and symbolic representations that include literary and nonliterary doc- uments as well as paintings, films, photographs, monuments, rituals, everyday myths, customs, and symbolic activities. While New Histori- cism does not fundamentally oppose canonized texts, it does, however, recontextualize them, thereby recharging them with meanings that had been forfeited by the selective process of canonization. The goal of a poetics of culture is, then, to investigate those cultural practices that make works of literature possible.

Second, New Historicism examines the circulation of representa- tions both inside and outside the domain of literature, the borders of which have themselves become porous. Under the new historicist par- adigm, literary studies deal with representations which have a social as well as a textual dimension: How are power, poverty, crime, the penal system, and war represented and discursively constituted at a certain place, at a certain time? How are sexuality, gender, identity, leisure and work, sickness, epidemics, and death depicted? How does the intertwining between mass culture and politics affect the political process?21 New His- toricism is concerned with analyzing the complex routes by which culture, society, and political life crisscross and intersect. In this light, literature seems less like an expression of social norms (as in traditional social history) and more like a medium for an intricate appropriation and in- terpretative reading of the world.

Third, New Historicism emphasizes the contingent and conditional, the nonsystematic, contradictory, and even coincidental. It abhors large- scale, totalizing claims and instead pursues "local knowledge" (Geertz); it prefers anecdote and montage over linear narratives: not one (hi)story, but stories. The search for a fixed center of meaning also gives way to a more encompassing, associative way of presentation that does justice to the excess of historical and linguistic meaning. Walter Benjamin:

Say something about the method of composition itself: How everything that comes to mind has at all costs to be incorporated into the work one is doing at the time. Be it that its intensity is thereby disclosed, or that, from the first, the ideas bear the work within them as telos."22

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*This essay was originally published as "New Historicism: Literaturgeschichte im Zeichen der Postmoderne?" in Geschichte als Literatur: Formen und Grenzen der Repra- sentation von Vergangenheit, ed. Hartmut Eggert, Ulrich Profitlich, and Klaus R. Scherpe (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990) 56-66; it was translated by Leslie A. Pahl, and substantially revised by the author.

'See Friedrich Nietzsche's "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fiur das Leben," in Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, 1 (1874; Miinchen: Ullstein, 1960); Jiurgen Habermas, "Er- kenntnis und Interesse," Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr- kamp, 1968) 167: "Der Historismus ist zum Positivismus der Geisteswissenschaften ge- worden."

2See Remo Cesarani, "Nuove strategie rappresentative: La scuola di Berkeley," Bel- fagor 39 (1984): 665-85.

3The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York & London: Routledge, 1989); see also more recent essays: Elaine C. Tennant, "Old Philology, New Historicism, and the Study of German Literature," Lesarten: New Methodologies and Old Texts, ed. Alexander Schwarz (Bern: Lang, 1990) 153-77; Judith Newton, "Historicisms New and Old: 'Charles Dickens' Meets Marxism, Feminism, and West Coast Foucault," Feminist Studies 16, vol. 3 (1990): 449-470.

4Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1991).

5"The Presence of the Past" was the title of the 1980 Biennale in Venice, which, according to Paolo Portoghesi, has become a "symbol of postmodernism." Cf. Paolo Por- toghesi, Postmodern. The Architecture of the Postindustrial Society (New York: Rizzoli, 1983). He speaks of postmodern architecture as "the return of architecture to the womb of history."

6This interest is evidenced in the growing attention presently given to cultural studies in the tradition of Raymond Williams and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cul- tural Studies around Stuart Hall. It would require another paper to investigate the parallels and differences between the new historicist project and the larger framework of cultural studies. See Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1991).

7Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction to "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance," Genre 15 (1982): 5. See Greenblatt's works, Renaissance Self-Fash- ioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980), Shakespearean Ne- gotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: U of Cal- ifornia P, 1988); Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990); Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992).

8See J.E. Spingarn, The New Criticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1911). 9Cf. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971); Frank

Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983). '0The disclosure of de Man's hitherto unknown series of anti-Semitic newspaper

articles from World War II has spawned a number of critical articles and books. See, for example, Jon Wiener, "Deconstructing Paul de Man," The Nation 30 January 1988: 22-24; Hans-Thies Lehmann, "Paul de Man: Dekonstruktionen," Merkur 472 (1988): 445-460; Jacques Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 704-873. See also Responses-On Paul de Man's Wartime Jour- nalism, ed. Werner Hamacher (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989); and David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991).

"Michel Foucault, Raymond Bellour, "Ober verschiedene Arten Geschichte zu schreiben," Antworten der Strukturalisten, ed. Adelbert Reif(Hamburg: Hoffman und Cam- pc, 1973) 169.

'2Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 5. 3See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning 5 and "Towards a Poetics of Culture"

Learning to Curse 146-60.

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'4See Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Cul- ture," The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 3-30. In the same tradition, see also Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986).

'5See Geertz, "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought," Local Knowl- edge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1973) 19-35.

'6New Historicism may be seen as the counterpart in literary scholarship to the ironic historicism practiced in postmodern architecture. "I like elements which are hybrid rather than 'pure,' compromising rather than 'clean,' distorted rather than 'straightforward,' am- biguous rather than 'articulated,'... inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning ... I prefer 'both-and' to 'either-or,' black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white .... A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once" (Robert Venturi, "Nonstraightforward Architecture: A Gentle Manifesto," Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1985] 16).

'7Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1983): 575. Regarding Benjamin's concept of history, see H.D. Kittsteiner, "Wal- ter Benjamins Historismus," Passagen. Walter Benjamins Urgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed. Norbert Bolz and Bernd Witte (Miinchen: Fink, 1984) 163-97.

'8A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989). See especially Hollier's methodological introduction, "On Writing Literary His- tory" xxi-xxv.

'9gBenjamin, Passagen-Werk 588. 20Ibid. 21See, for example, Michael Rogin, "Ronald Reagan, the Movie" and Other Episodes

in Political Demonology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987). 22Walter Benjamin, "Theoretics of Knowledge; Theory of Progress," The Philosoph-

ical Forum 15.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1983-84): 1.