New Historicism: Writing Literary History in the Postmodern Era Author(s): Anton Kaes Reviewed work(s): Source: Monatshefte,

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New Historicism: WritingLiteraryHistoryin the Postmodern Era

ANTON KAES*

University California, of Berkeley

The question today is no longer, "What is literature?" rather, but "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? Particularly to German ears, the term "historicism"(new or old) sounds ominous because of its association with nineteenth-century positivism which, for over a century,had been repudiatedby a phalanx of German philosophersrangingfrom 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 linguisticturn, the recent"historicalturn"seemed to reactto the growing dissatisfactionwith poststructuralism and deconstruction,whose formal strategiesappearedarid and predictable.New Historicism, in contrast, offered the richness and resonance of a multi-voiced textuality and the never-endingsense of wonder and surprisethat derives from the contingencies 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 academicenterprise,New Historicism has many institutional facets:Representations,a quarterlyjournal founded in 1983 by Stephen Greenblattand Svetlana Alpers;innumerablearticles, lectures, and conferences;a book seriesentitled "The New Historicism:Studiesin Cultural Poetics";a 1989 collection of 20 essays examiningNew Historicism from feminist, Marxist,and poststructuralist perspectives;3 and, most recently, a monographby Brook Thomas.4All these endeavors have made New Monatshefte,Vol. 84, No. 2, 1992
0026-9271/92/0002/0148 $01.50/0 c 1992by TheBoard Regents TheUniversity Wisconsin of of of System

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Historicism currentlyone of the most talked-aboutand hotly contested approaches to literary studies. It has been criticized by some as being anti-Marxistand by others as being neo-Marxist;still others have denipostmodernism.Nevergratedit as a corollaryto relativistic-"historicist" 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 interestingstudy-is indicative of the extent to which New Historicism has touched a nerve and articulatedsomething 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 relationshipbetween the past and the present and calls for a return to the "womb of history."5Bearingin mind this new, largerinterest in the interplayof history and culture,6I offer five points to suggestuses of the new historicist project for a new type of literaryhistory.

I The term "New Historicism"posits itself on two fronts againstNew Criticismand the "old historicism."Joining the words "new" and "historicism," Stephen Greenblatt coined the phrase in 1982 as a punning opposition to the term "New Criticism,"not as a conscious referenceto Germanhistoricism.7Greenblatt,editing a collection of essays on Shakespeare,had intended the term to signal the essay collection's sociological and historical orientation. That such an interest in the historicity of art Shakespearean had to be explained and legitimated in this programmatic 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 currentlybeing 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 While in Germany in the legitimateapproachto the study of literature.9 1960s the autonomy of the literary text and the art of formalist interpretation had at least been challenged (if not superseded) by literary sociology, Marxism, and reception theory, the text-based approach to literaturein 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 trivializedform) was characterized a praxisboth historicallydisjoined by and dissociatedfrom contexts of culture;even deconstructionism(at least

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in the form of most of its Americanpractitioners)could not significantly alter this. To many the much-publicizedcase of Paul de Man's troubling disavowal of his own past seemed like living proof for the fundamental All suppressionof historyin deconstructionin general.10 poststructuralist textual analyses seemed suddenly suspect, though this blanket suspicion was unwarranted. Still, the success of New Historicism must be evaluated againstthe backdropnot only of the worn-outparadigmof New Criticism and deconstruction but also of the waning influence of poststructuralism since the late 1980s. II Above all, New Historicism promised to rechargethe literary text with the abundantenergyinherentin any historicallydeterminedproduct. While New Criticism takes the very existence of a text as a given, New Historicism calls it into question. Michel Foucault, one of New Historicism's founding fathersand a frequentguest professorat Berkeley,articulated this fundamentalshift of perspectivein an interview with Raymond Bellour entitled "On the Various Ways of Writing History":
In contrastto those who are called structuralists, am less interestedin the I

I formalpossibilities a systemthan I am in language. of Personally, am

more attractedto 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 tracesof their existence, that they continueto exist and in this continuationexerta rangeof manifestor hidden effects upon history.11

Foucault'sprojectwas less concernedwith critical interpretationor exegesis than with determiningand describingthe very fact that a certain discourse had come into existence, that it representedarticulations of specific needs and intentions. Foucault's "happy positivism" delineated the material conditions of speech and writing, their contingent and historical preconditions,beforedelving into interpretation,for the mere fact of writing (or speakingor making a film) is by no means self-understood or self-evident.As Foucault,the new historicistsare concernedwith issues regardingthe 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 interplaybetween 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 reinstated 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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productimbricatedin a historical and materialistconstellation in which social and psychological factors, collective and private impulses commingled. Even the "old historicism"was concernedwith the reconstruction of historical contexts, but the relationship between literature and historyremainedat the level of flatcontrastbetweentext and background; in this scheme, the so-called backgroundfunctioned as a constant, coherent, and fixed referencepoint for textual analysis. In fact, it regulated and reducedthe excess of meaning that every text carries;the potentially subversive overdeterminationof meaning that is always present in communication (be it verbal or, especially, literary) could thus be arrested and controlled. Proceedingfrom the assumption that the historical "background" is only accessible to us textually, it follows that the backgrounditself becomes textualized and thus an object of interpretation,part of what Derrida calls "le texte g~n6ral."Greenblatt'saim is precisely to circumvent the old text/context dichotomy by situating both text and context on the same interpretivelevel, referringto texts and culturalpracticesin terms of "negotiations,""exchange,"and "circulation."We can ask, he writes, how collective beliefsand experiences wereshaped, movedfromone medium to another, in concentrated manageable aesthetic for form,offered We how the boundaries weremarked between consumption. can examine cultural understood be artformsandother,contiguous, to forms practices of expression. canattempt determine thesespecially We to how demarcated zoneswereinvested withthe powerto conferpleasure exciteinterest or or
generateanxiety. The idea is not to strip away and discard the enchanted

of but impression aesthetic autonomy to inquireinto the objectiveconditionsof this enchantment .12 .. This examination of the collective production of various cultural practices and the investigation into the interrelationbetween these diverse practicesis what Greenblattcalls the "poetics of culture.""' III In free trade with other cultural practices, literatureappearsto be a well-guarded(albeit besieged) domain whose borders are nevertheless essentially open and well-traveled.Literarymotifs and figuresoften circulate in the quotidian territoryoutside the purview of literature(literary referencescan be found in political discourse or in religion,for example), while aspects of behavior, the numerous forms of languagein everyday life (be they physical gestures or wordplay and the like), and rituals are absorbedinto the literaryrealm. What interests Greenblattis the whole

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complex of minute transactionsthat takes place between literature,culture, and society at the level of the text. As a "poetics of culture,"New Historicism investigates systems of culturaland social practicesin order to point up the dynamic currentsthat often resonateup to this day within a literarywork. An example: In his chapter on "Shakespeare and the Exorcists"in Shakespearean Negotiations,Greenblattworks from the assumption that the names, motifs, and figuresof speech in King Lear had been appropriatedfrom Samuel Harsnett'stract "A Declarationof EgregiousPopish Impostures,"an Anglican cleric's treatise that railed against exorcists in the Catholic church. That Harsnett'stract was influential has long been solidly established;the theological polemic has always been regardedas the raw material and historical backgroundto the literarytext. With its function reduced to the level of an immutable referencepoint, history seems more like an antithesis to literature,merely the source of the literarytext in isolation. Greenblatt,in contrast, is interested in the dynamic cultural field in which Shakespeare's drama and the nonliterarytext alike are embedded. What were the culturaland social practicesand strategiesthat produced and shaped these texts? Both texts, Greenblattargues,deal with a new definition of the sacredin an age when fundamentalmoral principles were being radicallyquestioned and besieged from various camps. Harsnett'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 theatricalwizardry.For Harsnett,exorcisms were like tragicomic theatricalperformancesin which the "cast" simulated symptoms of possession. With referencesto currentanthropologicaltheory, Greenblatt presents various long-forgotten representations of exorcism--exhumed from archives and presentedin abundantand perceptivedetailall having one thing in common: an awarenessof the uncertain boundaries between reality and illusion, between true madness and adroit simulation. Exactlythis awareness,accordingto Greenblatt,forms the basis of theaterand illustratesthe ambivalencethat the theatergoer Shakespeare's must have felt when, for example, the blind King Lear pretends (on a level stage) to hurl himself down from a cliff. The spectatorapparently 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'streatise, partakesof the discourseon exorcism as a theatricalfabrication.The reconstructionof this discourseopens up the literarytext: subtle allusions

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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 significance. The literary text is reinvested with its original ambivalences, duplicities, 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 treatises on hermaphrodites, contemporary anecdotes and accounts of transvestites 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 discourse 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, medical, or scientific practices each take on historically contingent functions and meanings that carry with them a wealth of descriptive detail.14 Interpretive 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 anthropology investigates the various ways and means by which a group of people represent their experiences and knowledge through customs, rituals, 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 ritualsinconsequential perhaps, but in Geertz's view these are typical occur-

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rences,anecdotaleverydayevents which function as signs that illuminate cultural motifs and behavioral codes and thus allow for a view into a With its strongself-reflexivityand under the society's self-understanding. premise that culture, in its broadest sense, is only accessible throughthe interpreted text, cultural anthropology is affiliated with semiotics and recent literarytheory. As the boundariesbetween various disciplines become increasinglyindistinct, New Historicism derives its interdisciplinary approach-both as a methodology and a compelling goal-from the anthropologyof culture as formulatedby Geertz.'s New Historicism is frequently reproached for disregardingdisciplinary parameters. Diaries and autobiographies, records of dreams, chronicles of festivals and local fairs, protocols of witches burned at the stakeand of exorcisms,primerson sexuality,descriptionsof clothing and cosmetics, eyewitnessaccountsand illustrationsof 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 1600the human body was controlled,how deviance was regulated,how power was represented, how women were portrayed,and how political unrest was thematized. These nonliterarytexts are themselves complex material and symbolic articulationsof a society's imaginative and ideological structures.

V Concernedas it is with the production and circulation of cultural practices,this expandedconcept of culture introducesa productivebasis for a new way of writing the history of literature. Not only does the principle of "thick description" challenge the linear and chronological narrative frameworkof traditional literary historiography,but a historicism based on materialgatheredfrom the anecdotaland 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 interpretivemodels that homogenize difference;it opposes, as well, the all too narrowlydrawnboundariesbetween high and low culture,between center and margins.New Historicism intersects with postmodernism in its stress on discontinuity and ruptures,eclecticism, heterogeneity,and decenteredauthority. It shares with postmodernism a "messy vitality," as Robert Venturi, the father of postmodern architectureonce put it.16 A new type of presentationhas also become evident; it allows the critical text to be approached more playfully, more sensually, enriched by an influx of associations and less respectfulof the boundariesdrawn by the vigilant border guardspatrollingthe various disciplines.

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Already in the 1930s Walter Benjamin had argued for a similar method of presentationabove all in the Passagen-Werk.In his reflections on the writing of literaryhistory-the precision and wealth of his insights are only now becoming fully evident-Benjamin called for the use of a "heightenedplasticity of style" and described the conditions for its development as follows:
The first stage will be to appropriatethe principle of montage into histo-

In structures fromthe smallest riography. otherwords,to erectlarge-scale

precision-cutelements. 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 historiographyas
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 fragmentaryPassagen-Werk.The narrativepresentationof materialaccordingto 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 culturalhistory of France. The dates are not only drawn from literature but also from biographies or politics; they are points of departurefor snapshots that link cultural and historical events. Thus, the formal and functional dimensions of literature appear less as discrete expressions and more as interconnectedparts of political, social, and culturalhistory over the centuries.No longerpresentedin a linear, one-dimensionalnarrative style, literaryhistory is here inflected with polyphonic tones; it is unsystematicand incomplete; it disregardstraditional thresholds of literaryperiods and emphasizes instead the contradictionsinherent in the In "Gleichzeitigkeitdes Ungleichzeitigen."'8 the words of Benjamin: nor Historical materialism strivesneitherfor a homogenous an uninterhas of Fromthe factthatthe superstructure rupted representation history. an effecton the basis,it followsthata homogeneous for history, instance, of the economy,can exist as littleas a homogeneous historyof literature or law.Further, factthatdifferent the epochsof the pastareaffected the by in own historian's present different degrees... meansthata senseof linear in cannotbe had.9 continuity historiography 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 presentmoment: "The materialistpresentation of history leads the past to place the present in a critical condition."20 With this statement,Benjaminintroducesa criticaldimension to literary scholarshipthat legitimatesthe interpretativeendeavor in the firstplace. 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:uncriticalhistoricalpositivism (positing a dichotomy between text and historical context) on the one hand, and arbitrary("anythinggoes") postmodernism, on the other. In summary, New Historicism has the potential for energizingthe writing of literaryhistory on at least three counts: First, New Historicism radicallyexpands the terrainnormally covered by literaryhistory. Its interdisciplinaryorientationembracestextual and symbolic representationsthat include literary and nonliterarydocuments as well as paintings, films, photographs, monuments, rituals, everyday myths, customs, and symbolic activities. While New Historicism does not fundamentallyoppose canonized texts, it does, however, recontextualizethem, thereby rechargingthem with meanings that had been forfeited by the selective process of canonization. The goal of a poetics of cultureis, then, to investigatethose culturalpracticesthat make works of literaturepossible. Second, New Historicism examines the circulation of representations both inside and outside the domain of literature,the borders of which have themselves become porous. Under the new historicist paradigm, literarystudies deal with representationswhich have a social as well as a textual dimension: How are power, poverty, crime, the penal system, and war representedand 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 New Hisbetween mass cultureand politics affectthe political process?21 toricism is concernedwith analyzingthe complex routesby which culture, society, and political life crisscrossand 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 appropriationand interpretativereading of the world. Third,New Historicismemphasizesthe contingentand conditional, the nonsystematic,contradictory,and even coincidental. It abhors largescale, totalizing claims and instead pursues "local knowledge"(Geertz); it prefersanecdote 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 presentationthat does justice to the excess of historical and linguistic meaning. Walter Benjamin: itself:How everything aboutthe methodof composition Say something thatcomesto mindhas at all coststo be incorporated the workone into is doingat the time. Be it that its intensityis thereby or disclosed, that,
from the first, the ideas bear the work within them as telos."22

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im *This essay was originallypublished as "New Historicism:Literaturgeschichte in Zeichen der Postmoderne?" Geschichteals Literatur:Formen und Grenzender Reprasentation von Vergangenheit, HartmutEggert,Ulrich Profitlich,and Klaus R. Scherpe ed. revised Metzler,1990)56-66;it was translated LeslieA. Pahl,and substantially by (Stuttgart: by the author. 'See FriedrichNietzsche's"Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fiurdas Leben," in Werke,ed. Karl Schlechta, 1 (1874; Miinchen:Ullstein, 1960);Jiurgen Habermas,"Erkenntnis und Interesse,"Technik und Wissenschaft Ideologie (Frankfurta.M.: Suhrals kamp, 1968) 167: "Der Historismus ist zum Positivismus der Geisteswissenschaften geworden." La 2SeeRemo Cesarani,"Nuove strategierappresentative: scuola di Berkeley," Belfagor 39 (1984): 665-85. 3TheNew Historicism,ed. H. AramVeeser(New York & London:Routledge,1989); see also more recentessays:ElaineC. Tennant,"Old Philology,New Historicism,and the Lesarten:New Methodologiesand Old Texts, ed. Alexander Study of GermanLiterature," Schwarz(Bern:Lang, 1990) 153-77;Judith Newton, "HistoricismsNew and Old: 'Charles Dickens' Meets Marxism,Feminism, and West Coast Foucault,"Feminist Studies 16, vol. 3 (1990):449-470. Topics(Princeton, 4BrookThomas, The New Historicismand OtherOld-Fashioned N.J.: PrincetonUP, 1991). 5"ThePresence of the Past" was the title of the 1980 Biennale in Venice, which, Cf. accordingto Paolo Portoghesi,has become a "symbol of postmodernism." Paolo Portoghesi, Postmodern.The Architecture the PostindustrialSociety (New York: Rizzoli, of as to 1983).He speaksof postmodernarchitecture "the returnof architecture the womb of history." 6Thisinterestis evidencedin the growingattentionpresentlygiven to culturalstudies in the traditionof RaymondWilliamsand the BirminghamCentrefor Contemporary CulturalStudiesaroundStuartHall. It would requireanotherpaperto investigatethe parallels and differencesbetween the new historicist project and the largerframeworkof cultural studies. See Graeme Turner, British CulturalStudies: An Introduction(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); CulturalStudies, ed. LawrenceGrossberg,Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (New York:Routledge, 1991). Greenblatt,Introductionto "The Forms of Powerand the Powerof Forms 7Stephen in the Renaissance,"Genre 15 (1982): 5. See Greenblatt'sworks, RenaissanceSelf-FashNeioning:From More to Shakespeare(Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1980), Shakespearean U gotiations:The Circulationof Social Energy in RenaissanceEngland (Berkeley: of CaliforniaP, 1988);Learningto Curse: Essays in EarlyModernCulture(New York:Routledge, 1990);MarvelousPossessions:The Wonderof the New World(Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1992). 8SeeJ.E. Spingarn,The New Criticism(New York: ColumbiaUP, 1911). 9Cf.FredricJameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton:PrincetonUP, 1971);Frank Lentricchia,Criticismand Social Change(Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1983). '0Thedisclosure of de Man's hitherto unknown series of anti-Semitic newspaper articlesfrom World War II has spawneda number of critical articlesand books. See, for Paul de Man," TheNation 30 January1988:22-24; example,Jon Wiener,"Deconstructing Hans-ThiesLehmann, "Paul de Man: Dekonstruktionen," Merkur472 (1988): 445-460; JacquesDerrida,"Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War," CriticalInquiry15 (1989): 704-873. See also Responses-On Paul de Man's WartimeJournalism,ed. WernerHamacher(Lincoln:U of NebraskaP, 1989);and David Lehman,Signs and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, of the Times: Deconstruction 1991). "Michel Foucault, Raymond Bellour, "Ober verschiedene Arten Geschichte zu der Antworten Strukturalisten, AdelbertReif(Hamburg:Hoffmanund Camed. schreiben," pc, 1973) 169. '2Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations5. RenaissanceSelf-Fashioning and "Towardsa Poetics of Culture" 5 3See Greenblatt, Learningto Curse 146-60.

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'4SeeCliffordGeertz, "Thick Description:Toward an InterpretiveTheory of Culture," The Interpretation Cultures(New York: Basic Books, 1973) 3-30. In the same of tradition, see also WritingCulture:The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,ed. James Cliffordand GeorgeE. Marcus(Berkeley: of CaliforniaP, 1986). U of '5SeeGeertz, "BlurredGenres:The Refiguration Social Thought,"Local Knowledge:FurtherEssays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York:Basic Books, 1973) 19-35. in to '6NewHistoricismmay be seen as the counterpart literaryscholarship the ironic "I historicismpracticedin postmodernarchitecture. like elements which are hybridrather amthan 'pure,'compromisingratherthan 'clean,'distortedratherthan 'straightforward,' biguousratherthan'articulated,'... inconsistentand equivocalratherthan directand clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I am for richnessof meaningratherthan 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 meaningand combinations of focus:its spaceand its elementsbecome readableand workablein severalways at once" A Architecture: Gentle Manifesto,"Complexityand (RobertVenturi,"Nonstraightforward Contradiction Architecture in [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1985] 16). '7WalterBenjamin, Das Passagen-Werk,ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 (Frankfurta.M.: Suhrkamp,1983):575. Regarding conceptof history,see H.D. Kittsteiner,"WalBenjamin's ter Benjamins Historismus,"Passagen. WalterBenjamins Urgeschichte neunzehnten des ed. Jahrhunderts, NorbertBolz and BerndWitte (Miinchen:Fink, 1984) 163-97. '8ANew Historyof FrenchLiterature, Denis Hollier (Cambridge, ed. Mass.:Harvard UP, 1989).See especiallyHollier'smethodologicalintroduction,"On WritingLiteraryHistory" xxi-xxv. 588. Passagen-Werk '9gBenjamin, 20Ibid. for 21See, example,MichaelRogin, "RonaldReagan, the Movie"and OtherEpisodes in Political Demonology(Berkeley: of CaliforniaP, 1987). U 22Walter Benjamin,"Theoreticsof Knowledge;Theory of Progress,"The Philosophical Forum 15.1-2 (Fall-Winter1983-84):1.