Why Literary Periods Mattered by Underwood Ted

Author:Underwood, Ted [Underwood, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

4

The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization, and a Forgotten Challenge to It (1886–1949)

The English literary curriculum changed remarkably slowly in the twentieth century. One can page through catalogs from 1900 and find courses that bear exactly the same titles today: “English Romanticism,” “Elizabethan Drama.” To be sure, departments of English now teach more American and postcolonial literature than they did in the early twentieth century. But the organizing grid of period and nationality itself has remained (at least until quite recently) undisturbed by the addition of new content. Even more surprisingly, it has been undisturbed by a series of epochal struggles over the very definition of the discipline. Philology gave way to literary history, which gave way to New Criticism, and to poststructuralism—but none of those transitions seriously challenged the curricular primacy of the period survey course.

My goal in this chapter is to explain the curious stability of that institution. In a fractious discipline that repeatedly redefined the purpose of literary instruction, and especially the relationship between literature and history, how could the organizing function of “literary periods” have gone unchallenged?

If it actually had gone unchallenged, this would be a difficult question to answer. But the primacy of the period has always been challenged by alternative curricular models. In fact, the history of literary studies has been if anything more turbulent and surprising than standard histories suggest: course catalogs from the early twentieth century make absolutely startling reading, full of ambitious courses on the history of journalism, and strange disciplinary projects like “General Literatology” that are now entirely forgotten. The periodized curriculum has been curiously stable, not because no one thought to challenge it—but because institutional challenges have never displaced periodization in a significant, enduring way. In the first half of the twentieth century, comparative philology, comparative literature, and the history of ideas each threatened to shift the focus of debate from discrete “periods” and “movements” to processes of development. In the middle of the twentieth century, it seemed for a while that theories of genre (guided by archetypal or structuralist premises) might become more important than chronology. Each of these movements made significant inroads in the curriculum, and then retreated, leaving the organizing grid of period and nationality unshaken.

This pattern suggests that periodization has fulfilled some important but poorly articulated social function. Periodization has been no one’s conscious ideal: when periods become a subject of explicit debate, their limitations are always acknowledged. Alternative curricular plans have frequently been proposed. But somehow, the alternatives never take root in a way that makes them seem educationally indispensable. And somehow it always does remain indispensable to offer courses on “romanticism” or “modernism.” The opacity of this phenomenon suggests that it rests on a social foundation not fully articulated as conscious belief.

This chapter will examine one alternative curricular model, and ask why it failed, in order to cast light on the social forces that have made periodization such a resilient institution. In the process, I hope to illuminate some interesting and poorly-understood passages of disciplinary history.

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