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Like the Canon, periodization is something of a necessary evil and therefore a ready and easy target for critique. Although poststructuralism and postmodernism are supposed to have at last unmasked canons and periods for the totalizing schema that they are, periodization remains entrenched as a practical fact of the literary discipline. So while we seem unable to do away with periodization outright, can it be reconceptualized so as to remain meaningful, useful, and yet also overcome the naiveties of the past? Such a question constitutes the "challenge" that this collection of essays confronts.
Lawrence Besserman has gathered the results of a two-year workshop he conducted at the Hebrew University's Center for Literary Studies. Maintaining that the questions we pose about historical periods are in fact central to what defines them, Besserman writes that this volume will have achieved one of its primary goals if it helps to clarify the "ambiguous propositions" that inhere in the questions asked by or about what are traditionally but problematically called the Medieval, Renaissance, Modern, and Postmodern periods in European cultural history (xi). The book does reiterate some key issues in periodization debates and on this front is reasonably successful. (Although a caveat is warranted here: while Besserman invokes "European cultural history," the book's scope is almost exclusively limited to the English literary tradition.) The other of the book's primary goals is presumably then to clarify these key issues in terms of the "old paradigms and new perspectives" indicated in the book's subtitle-although Besserman nowhere says as much. The list of contributors contains some of the most well-respected names in the fields of Medieval, Early Modern and Modern studies, yet the book as a whole is inconsistent. (It could be argued, for example, that Larry Benson's compelling essay "The Beginning of Chaucer's English Style" has little place in the volume because it hardly broaches the issue of periodization at all.) The approach most frequently taken here is to show how a given figure or phenomenon exceeds the parameters of periodization. Lee Patterson, for example, positions Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman as a decidedly "modern" persona; for Denis Donoghue there is no single system of values that can embrace the various poetries we call Modernist; Heiko A. Oberman reads Johannes Reuchlin's brand of humanism, at once progressive and yet ambivalent towards the question of Jewish rights, as defying any convenient Renaissance classification; and for Geoffrey Hartman, Collins' "Ode on the Poetical Character" stands for a visionary poetics that stretches from Milton to Wallace Stevens.
These above-mentioned essays (and others, by Aldo Scaglione, Sanford Budick, and H.M. Daleski), while they certainly cover a broad range of materials and approaches, nevertheless are reducible to what I take to be a widely-accepted given, namely that periods fail to contain all the phenomenon we want them to. In essence, these are the "old paradigms" of Besserman's subtitle-Foucault and Jameson are the often-invoked authorities-and the book comes up short on "new perspectives." Robert Griffin and Jerome McGann are the notable exceptions. Griffin's "A Critique of Romantic Periodization" offers an exemplary reading of literary history's competing narratives. For Griffin, "literary history is driven by value judgements" (137); when and how we narrativize Romanticism, then, rests upon who we say made the decisive break with Pope: Collins and Cowper or Wordsworth and Coleridge. "[B]y exposing the foundations of romantic literary history," Griffin writes, "I hope to reinforce the kind of work that sees the application of period terminology not as a neutral tool in marking out chronological sequences but rather as a form of discourse that imposes an implicit set of values upon its objects" (142). McGann, whose work in interrogating periodizing narratives continues to be significant, suggests that "we have to fashion a dialectical philology that is not bound by the conceptual forms it studies and generates. The paradox of such a philology is that its freedom would be secured only when it accepts the historical limits of its own forms of thought" (165). And the essay goes on to practice such a dialectic: at the moment where his argument slips all-too easily from Romanticism into the Victorian, McGann begins a point-counterpoint dialogue between two of his familiar alter-egos, Jay Rome and Anne Mack.
Among the most disappointing essays are two that deal with Modernism. J. Hillis Miller poses the question of what an understanding of Modernism really adds to our reading of a "modernist" poem. He then proceeds with a fairly conventional close reading of Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West," and concludes that, in fact, periodization adds very little to the reading-leaving one to wonder whether the exercise was really worth the trouble. By contrast, Helen Vendler exerts too much effort. She begins by throwing in the towel altogether, eschewing any notion of Modernism to periodize American poetry, opting instead for a string of highly tentative microperiods like "The Age of Emancipation from England" (Pound, Stevens, Moore, Crane), "The Age of Auden" (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Merrill, Bishop), "The Age of the Beats" (San Francisco, New York, Black Mountain), etc. Vendler's microperiods more or less repeat already-established notions of poetic "schools," and they cling to linear chronologies and traditional notions of "ages" and "eras." (For an excellent recent effort at microperiods, see Thomas Harrison's 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance [Stanford UP 1996].) Furthermore, her inability to see Language poetry as anything other than "tedious reading" that has "mostly abandoned narrative sense and ordinary syntax" (241) forces her into reading all post-Auden American poetry through a facile binary opposition between "Freudian poems" (the Beats and Confessionals) and "Poems of the De-Centered Self" (achieved, as it were, more effectively by John Ashbery and Jorie Graham than the likes of a Charles Bernstein).
Besserman writes that each of these essays "manages to refine or reinvigorate a period definition, overriding hierarchies of the traditional canon," and "introduce[s] novel micro- or macro-periodizations that open our eyes to schema that are occluded by old paradigms" (xii). The essays also show how truly difficult it is to refine, reinvigorate, and innovate without reinscribing the new in the old.
Thomas M. Orange
University of Western Ontario