609 Week 4 - Blog 1

Where to begin…? Where to begin…?

Catherine Gallagher’s essay Historical Scholarship sweeps across the eras of written and oral history to introduce students and scholars to literature through a new historicist lens—one in which the author is placed into equal parts along with his/her piece, the era it is written, and the culture which spawned the author's intent. Aristotle’s topoi of Whole/Parts then seems a likely focus as Gallagher breaks literature down into parts—author, text, reader, literature, and finally, nation, race, and empire. Her intent succeeds as it is explicates for new scholars the finer points of keeping true to an author's original concepts as texts are republished over years and eras. The "Author" segment spent time on the new historicist approach to texts--this frustrated me a bit. From my perspective, new historicists sometimes don't take into account the sweat, toil, and heart necessary to bring a piece of literature (book, not article) to the world. Further on, the text segments concentration on textual indeterminancy highlighted again the difficulty in staying true to texts over long periods of time (millenia).

Where Gallagher does shine is in the "Reader" section. She writes, “Like the history of authorship, the history of reading has a twist at the end, when the reader, like the author, after centuries, of getting consolidated, suddenly comes apart into fragments or altogether disperses into a digital vapor” (184). Indeed, technology has affected us in numerous and significant ways, and at the moment, we’re still trying to piece the parts of technology together so we might bring it to our students in the most helpful and concise way. On a sidenote, it's interesting that as teachers we're turning to our students to teach US how technology works. The last segments on "Literature and Nation, Race, and Empire" round the piece out and bring the parts back to a whole. From a students perspective, she offers a highly in-depth view of history, literature, and new historicism.