Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

  • Home
  • Steve Mentz
  • Humanities Commons
  • Public Writing
  • The sea! the sea!
  • The Bookfish
  • St. Johns

Messy Transitions

December 2, 2012 by Steve Mentz 2 Comments

What to do with a problem like periodization? How can we historicist literary types do justice to both the messy abundance of the past and our professional habit of transforming it into period-centered narratives?

I’ve been enjoying some lively periodic-chatter over the past three days, starting with Jeffrey Cohen’s short essay on the problems with “early modern”, to which I made a few comments & was joined by the always inspiringly polyglot Jonathan Hsy. Then came a Facebook flutter over a smart hatchet job in the LA Times Book Review of Greenblatt’s The Swerve, which ends with a utopian wish for a non-telological “history without transitions.” I don’t like cartoon versions of post- Middle Ages historical change any more than anyone else,  — they don’t serve early modernists any better than they do medievalists — but I do like transitions, and don’t think we can do without them. We just need better, messier ones than the ones we’ve inherited.

The conversation continued yesterday with Rick Godden’s  response to both the above links, with coda in favor of Hinch’s transitionless history. “I can think of worse things,” says Rick. Today Jeffrey’s taken to the twitterverse, insisting that Greenblatt give back his awards from The Swerve. (It really is a revolutionary medium…)

Without in any way defending heroic conceptions of early modernity that insist on leaping high by stomping on medieval plurality, I don’t want history without transitions. I like plurality, multiplicity, radical difference, but I also want narratives of change, transformation, discontinuity. I think both those things are historically true, in terms of recoverable facts and records of human experience. But how to have both at once?

Two quick ideas about different ways to do periodization:

1. Historical transitions are myths at least as much as history. The felt shape of historical change, as recorded in many different cultural forms, responds to but also itself re-shapes historical experience. The idea of a “break” into early modernity doesn’t fit recorded facts, but it does express a lasting fantasy about patterns formed by accumulated historical events. Greenblatt didn’t invent that myth any more than Petrarch did. I don’t think either of their versions of the break does full justice to the historical record — I prefer shipwreck as a representation of early modern cultural change — but myths are always grist for our interpretive mill.

2. Always periodize — at least twice! With apologies to Jameson, we need periods and transitions, but also need to remember that we should not believe in them too much, that they always do some violence to the full (unknowable) plurality of historical experience. So what about a double (or more) system of periodization, which might be as simple as recognizing that all 21c critical work responds to 21c claims (“presentism”) as well as the demands of historical sources, or as sophisticated as remembering that historical periods never end in any conclusive way, that cultural habits of responding to historical stimuli layer themselves atop and alongside each other, intersecting and accumulating and recombining. With legible but messy transitions.

 

 

Filed Under: Blue Humanities

Trackbacks

  1. Desiring Pasts « EXM says:
    January 28, 2013 at 11:21 am

    […] Strand 1: Meghan closes by asking a series of questions that foreground “the growing conversation about links between Chaucer and Shakespeare” (Birns 364). Those questions about reading across periods and against the period divide are precisely at the heart of criticism directed at Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve and at MLA for awarding the book its major prize. Twitter and Facebook erupted with incredulity and scorn about the award essentially on the same day Meghan posted. Discussion of the award and connected issues of periodization continued apace in posts by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen at In the Middle; Elaine Treharne, Rick Godden here and here, and also Steve Mentz. […]

    Reply
  2. Is the World Undergoing a Deep Populist Transition? | VesFinderVesFinder says:
    July 25, 2019 at 3:29 pm

    […] present. This is because nothing ends in a conclusive way, and nothing starts on a clean slate. As Steve Mentz poignantly noted, “cultural habits … layer themselves atop and alongside each other, intersecting and […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Desiring Pasts « EXM Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
Read Bio

Twitter Feed

Steve Mentz Follow

Shakespearean. Ecocritic. Swimmer. New book Ocean #objectsobjects Professor at St. John's in NYC. #bluehumanities #pluralizetheanthropocene

stevermentz
Retweet on Twitter Steve Mentz Retweeted
beachbooksblog Anna Iltnere @beachbooksblog ·
29 Jun

Book N°505: Steve Mentz: Ocean

From ancient stories of shipwrecked sailors to the containerized future of 21st-century commerce, this pocket-sized book splashes the histories we thought we knew into salty and unfamiliar places.

@stevermentz @BloomsburyBooks

Reply on Twitter 1542196614764404736 Retweet on Twitter 1542196614764404736 2 Like on Twitter 1542196614764404736 15 Twitter 1542196614764404736
Retweet on Twitter Steve Mentz Retweeted
quatr_us Dr Karen Carr @quatr_us ·
28 Jun

It's today! Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming is officially published today in the United States.

You can order your copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Shifting-Currents-World-History-Swimming/dp/1789145783

Reply on Twitter 1541792561475375106 Retweet on Twitter 1541792561475375106 5 Like on Twitter 1541792561475375106 22 Twitter 1541792561475375106
Load More

Pages

  • #shax2022 s31: Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbbean
  • OCEAN Publicity
  • #SAA 2020: Watery Thinking
  • Creating Nature: May 2019 at the Folger
  • Audio and Video Recordings
  • Oceanic New York
  • Public Writing
  • Published Work
  • #pluralizetheanthropocene

Recent Posts

  • Fat Ham at the Public
  • A Comedy of Macbeth?
  • License to Kill: Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga in Macbeth on Broadway
  • Remember Me? Specters of #shax2022
  • Fictions, Genres, and Planetary Waters in Auburn

Copyright © 2022 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in