How cool is this?

I am so close to finishing my preliminary bibliography, but then I go and get distracted by David Shield’s introduction in Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America.  In looking for sources mentioned in his book, my eye caught on this passage.

Which brings us to the problem of this study: Can literary history be written without a chronology of classics, without fixing upon master texts, and without depending upon a rhetoric of revisionism or a vision of a new canon?  This study presumes that it can.  A number of scholars have fashioned innovative literary histories that promise to overcome the objection of social and cultural historians that accounts based on masterpieces suffer from the unrepresentativeness of their superlative expression.  Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders, an experiment in the sociology of literary forms, blazed paths in the direction of a history of popular discourses organized not so much by genre as by their figurations of society.17  This study will go on a similar direction – away from history constructed as interpretations of a series of classics toward a narrative reconstituting a dynamic of discourses imbedded in a substantial bodies of texts 18 (xxvi).

Footnotes:

17.  Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Form, trans. Susan Fischer et. Al.  (New York, 1988).  It is among Cultural Studies scholars that Moretti’s work has had some influence; traditional literary scholars have passed it by.

18. Or: this study will lead away from a Gadamerian hermeneutics of the classical toward Habermasian anatomy of discourses.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York, 1985), 176-191.

What I like about this passage is the boldness of vision, the willingness to look beyond the “classics” of early American literature and validate letters, manuscripts, commonplace books, diaries and other non-traditional literary forms as worthy of study (keep in mind Shields’s book was published in 1997).  And also, the restructuring of masterpieces vs. non-traditional literary forms into something less either/or can open up discussion if Shields has succeeded in organizing these works “by their figurations of society.”  I am excited to read through his introduction, prologue, and first two chapters, “Overture: The Promise of Civil Discourse” and “Belles Lettres and the Arenas of Metropolitan Conversation.”  But for now, it’s back to my preliminary bibliography.  

Works Cited:

Shields, David S.  Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America.  Chapel Hill: U of North Caroline P, 1997.  Print.