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Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism, and Cultural Materialism

Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism, and Cultural Materialism Page 545 Reviews The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830. By Clifford Siskin. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. x + 285 pp. $39.95. “History,” in the words of Michel de Certeau, “endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice,” and therefore, as we know from the many recent accounts of the work of historicization, the writer of history should specify two places: the “present that is the place of practice” and the “past that is its object.” Fredric Jameson speaks similarly of the need to follow “the path of the object and the path of the subject, the historical origins of the things themselves and that more intangible historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand those things.”1 The literary historicisms that have obeyed the Jamesonian injunction —“Always historicize!”— have been remarkably self-conscious, even self-confessional, as in prefaces and afterwords in which the self or subjectivity otherwise held in scare quotes returns full force in the voice and vivid situation of the historical critic. The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin’s sequel to his important 1988 book, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, is one http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Duke University Press

Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism, and Cultural Materialism

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2000 by University of Washington
ISSN
0026-7929
eISSN
1527-1943
DOI
10.1215/00267929-61-3-559
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Page 545 Reviews The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830. By Clifford Siskin. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. x + 285 pp. $39.95. “History,” in the words of Michel de Certeau, “endlessly finds the present in its object and the past in its practice,” and therefore, as we know from the many recent accounts of the work of historicization, the writer of history should specify two places: the “present that is the place of practice” and the “past that is its object.” Fredric Jameson speaks similarly of the need to follow “the path of the object and the path of the subject, the historical origins of the things themselves and that more intangible historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand those things.”1 The literary historicisms that have obeyed the Jamesonian injunction —“Always historicize!”— have been remarkably self-conscious, even self-confessional, as in prefaces and afterwords in which the self or subjectivity otherwise held in scare quotes returns full force in the voice and vivid situation of the historical critic. The Work of Writing, Clifford Siskin’s sequel to his important 1988 book, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, is one

Journal

Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History – Duke University Press

Published: Sep 1, 2000

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