This is the fourth of a series of weekly posts on the book Critical Terms for Literary Study.
In his survey of the term “literary history” Lee Patterson poses this question: what exactly is the relationship between literature and history?
His survey shows that in the 19th Century, history was held to be “objective” and literature “subjective.” History provided the “cause” that produced particular pieces of literature as “effects.”
Literary scholars were not happy with this arrangement. Literature was not subject to history. In fact, wasn’t this “cause/effect” stuff too mechanistic? And history was “objective”? Says who?
But the attempt to make literary study more objective (christened the “new criticism”) soon fell into disrepute. “New Historicism,” the critical golden school of the 80s and 90s simply rendered literature and history as overlapping subjective studies. And the critic? Bound by history too. There was no escape.
This leads to Patterson’s concluding paragraph, where he writes:
Literary historians know, perhaps too well, that there is no methodological elixir (least of all “theory”) that will enable them to tell the truth about either literature or history. But they must also not ignore the scrupulousness and inclusiveness that attend a commitment to the theoretically problematic yet ethically indispensable desire to get it right.
That last sentence is a doozy. “Theoretically problematic” vs. “ethically indispensable.” Problematic to who? Ethically necessary why?
And so “literary history” is another critical term that desperately needs, but does not get, examination through a biblical and covenantal perspective.
The Christian scholar does not define history the same as the secular scholar: the working out of God’s providential plan in time, with its typological patterns administered through God’s covenants. Seen in light of God’s covenant, the “ethics” of getting history right take on a different hue. They are God’s laws revealed in history and fulfilled in Christ.
James Jordan makes clear in his book Through New Eyes that covenantal history reveals glorified and transformed models of the world as we draw closer to the coming of God’s kingdom. Periodization, a hallmark of literary and world history alike, is not a problem. Whose periods, however? The Bible provides a symbolic way of understanding human history, moving from Adam through Christ.
Both literature and history are subject to divine providence. We cannot hope to suture these two subjects to each other, hoping that two subjective disciplines will make an objective one. History is an idol. So too is the deified human imagination on which literature places its laurels.
We begin with a commitment to God’s sovereign control of human history, his revelation in his word, his son’s redemptive work through the incarnation, and the sanctified clarity brought by the holy spirit.
There may something analogous to the institutional equality of family, church, and state in the humanistic disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history. No single discipline is sovereign. They constitute a trivium: history is grammar, philosophy is logic, and literature is rhetoric. They are all under God and each offer truth that clarifies God’s covenantal work.
Experiments in Criticism 