The Idea of Criticism and the Historical Mode: Problems and Paradoxes (9/31/01)
Essay collectition edited by Philip Smallwood
Proposals are requested for a forthcoming number of the Bucknell Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, to be published by Bucknell University Press/Associated Universities Press in Spring 2004. The title of this volume will be The Idea of Criticism and the Historical Mode: Problems and Paradoxes, and it will consider some of the various relationships between literary criticism and history. The volume will be designed to bring together the theory of history, and the practice of historical enquiry and composition, with thought about "criticism" subjected as it is today to the historical pressure of competing modes of articulation about literary and artistic value.
Possible topics for essays (which should be in the region of 6,000 words) might include the following:
a. underpinning theories of the history of literary criticism, its literary form and cultural meaning, as deduced from major works of critical history written at different times-Saintsbury, Wellek, the new "Cambridge" History etc;
b. the problem of the historicization of cultural artefacts such as literary criticism-comparisons with the history of literature, music, painting or "art" in the widest sense; history as a mode of translating the critical past or "making it new";
c. the aesthetic, rhetorical and narrative problems of writing a history of criticism in practice-beginnings and endings, the definition of one's logical subject, rules and conventions governing the constitution of a literary-critical "event," the legitimacy of "great critics," the "schools and movements" philosophy and narrative versus encyclopaedic history etc., critical temporality;
d. the writing of national histories of literary criticism and their relation to national literary cultures-the possibility of American versus British or "global" critical histories;
e. kinds of interpretive context that enable the past of criticism to be understood in the present-whether external such as the political, social, historical and intellectual world outside criticism, or immanent and textual such as the literary, the critical and the poetic;
f. individual literary critics across a range of historical periods whose achievement throws an especially revealing light on the relations between critical past and critical present;
g. criticism as an historical mode in its own right: the relations between literary criticism and literary history;
h. the "historical" as a specifically critical perspective;
i. relations between the history of criticism ("proper") and the history of theory;
j. the history of the history of literary criticism; early origins of the form to its recent manifestations;
k. aspects of traditional, poststructuralist or postmodernist historiography applicable to conceptualisation of the literary-critical past: CROCE, COLLINGWOOD, DILTHEY, CRANE, JAUSS, RICOEUR, HAYDEN WHITE, FOUCAULT, DERRIDA, etc.: the concept of the critical "classic."
The Bucknell Review is a scholarly interdisciplinary biannual journal (carrying an ISSN) and an autonomous hardcover book publication (carrying an ISBN). Each issue is devoted to a major theme or movement in the humanities or sciences, or to two or three closely related topics. The Journal is a member of the Conference of Learned Journals and from 2003 will reflect new, more stringent, standards and criteria.
Abstracts of around 500 words relating to this number should be sent to Professor Philip Smallwood, School of English, University of Central England, Perry Barr, Birmingham B42 2SU, UK (email philip.smallwood@uce.ac.uk or smallwoo@ucent.u-net.com) by 30 September 2001. Completed manuscripts of essays will be required by February 2003. Manuscripts, which should be double spaced, with endnotes and in Word format, should be prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed).