Focused as some of us are on medieval and early modern literature, the question of context comes up a great deal. Is our work sufficiently contextualized? Where and how do modern theories of language and meaning (our inevitable toolkit) fit into our work? Are we expected to bracket off ourselves (and our readers) from our work? Is it our goal to speak of, for example, fifteenth-century poetry in terms that only a fifteenth-century reader would understand (e.g., "According to Aquinas. . .")? Are we to train ourselves, like Borges's Pierre Menard, to write, through the absurd force of context, the Quijote that Cervantes could never write although our text shares a word-for-word correspondence with his seventeenth-century original?
These are extreme positions, and we mostly don't expect to write about medieval and early modern works in the same way that medieval and early modern writers did. Our readers, after all, have different expectations and needs. Modern theories and philosophies do have a place in our work, although we often have a very hard time defining for ourselves and our students (not to mention those anonymous readers who assess our work for publication) where the line that divides antiquarian fetishism and anachronism might be. Certainly citing "the Philosopher" as an indisputable authority on poetics is no longer acceptable ("Dixit Algazel in sua Logica. . ."), but then referring to Abd al-Malik ibn Quzman as some kind of Zizekian provocateur (waaaay avant la lettre) is similarly a no-no. Somewhere in between these two extremes (depending on our project, readership, and willingness to go out on a limb) is where most of us do our work.
But then perhaps the problem is our notion of context itself. Is context a static thing, after all? Most of us speak of it as a "moving target," but is it a "thing" at all? A vessel into which text, culture, history, etc. are poured? And does context have any a priori existence at all or does it emerge precisely through all the talk and interaction (much of it mediated by writing and other technologies) for which we imagine it serves as a kind of container or platform (perhaps something like genre)? For literary scholars, is context perhaps better understood as an achievement, something that readers (and readers as writers) collaboratively strive to entail through the mediation of written texts? What happens if we take up Charles Briggs and Richard Bauman's call to put aside our largely uncritical talk of "context" and focus instead on "contextualization," or the processes by which participants (e.g., writers, readers, glossators, publishers, sellers, the Portuguese Inquisition, etc.) entail the ground against which their talk and interaction takes on (even if just for a moment) meaning and force?
What might such a literary research project look like? It would likely foreground the work of readers (and writers as readers). It also might have the look and feel of social history or network theory and analysis, but with a renewed focus on close textual analysis and textually-embedded forms of pragmatic signification (e.g., deixis). The results are somewhat unpredictable, but it seems right in any case that we'd benefit from a more precise and simultaneously dynamic sense of what it is we mean by "context."
In more practical terms, it's not that we seek to "understand" or "situate" (as a totalizing, unidirectional gesture) the poetry of (for example) Ibn Quzman; nor do we ever gain mastery OVER it. Rather, we work (and train ourselves) to enter into something like a conversation with his readers and listening public through the mediation of his poetry, to construct participation frameworks in which we ourselves intervene (as something like participant observers). Within this framework, we don't bracket off our theories (folk and otherwise), but rather place them in explicit dialogue with (once again, returning to Ibn Quzman) Abu Nuwas and Ishaq al-Mawsili. This is a subtle shift, but it may make a significant difference in the work that we do. The results would inevitably be idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and ultimately risky, like all conversations.
Vincent, what a thoughtful post. I love the shift from contexts to the achievement of contextualization. Even as a 20th-centuryist I have the same worries about striking the balance between making something meaningful in my own present and honoring the terminology and conceptual possibilities of the past from which my object of study has come. I've spent the last few weeks talking about "romance novels" from 1900-40 with students--but "romance" meant something quite different then (still closer to med-ren meaning than to the erotic one, as far as literary genre goes) and the phrase "romance novel" was not really available. Nonetheless certain novels from the early c20 make sense in a long history of the romance novel, which consists of a whole series of interesting problems relating to gendered audiences, large-scale literary production, and the history of sexuality that are definitely older than the term itself.
I heard Sheldon Pollock in a recent lecture worry over the same problems--as a philologist studying premodern South Asia he is committed to historical rigor, but he doesn't want to elevate a historicized, "original" interpretation over all the subsequent readings that emerge in the history of a text's reception--or the potential significance of a text for the present-day interpreter. (He's articulated these three possibilities in print in "Political Philology". I think we may be at a moment where the need to foreground the work of real, live (or once living), historical readers--from the moment of a text's first appearance (problematic idea, that "moment") to the present--is particularly urgent. But of course this just pushes the problem back a level: how do we discover and interpret the records of others' readings or contextualizations?
And: how can we have a conversation with the past? After all, it doesn't really talk back.
Andrew: Thanks so much for this suggestive and thoughtful reply (Will the words "suggestive" and "thoughtful" fit on your knuckles as tattoos? Probably not, so skip that idea). Seriously, it means a lot. Thanks also for the references. Your last question is particularly important, as it speaks to methodological issues that we as literary scholars have been putting off for a long time. For instance, how do we train students (and ourselves) to work with manuscript texts, early print materials, archives, digital media, and even living native collaborators to develop something like a full-fledged "ethnography of reading" (already a more or less defined subfield in anthropology) that makes sense within literary studies? I've made some tentative suggestions in the past: renew and expand philology's focus on codicology; borrow from anthropology (especially linguistic anthropology) when appropriate; expand our linguistic focus to pragmatic modes of signification (such as deixis and metapragmatics); foreground micro-social and emergent frameworks of interaction rather than macro-social networks and systems. The key point for me, I think, is to develop effective research methodologies that include ourselves as researchers within the participation networks that we study without unduly privileging our point of view and (professional) folk theories. New media allow us to show and share our work in unprecedented ways, so the necessary checks and peer-review processes should be easy to institute. I tried to show how this kind of thing might be done in my first book (Covert Gestures), but to push this forward in any significant and lasting way it would take a group of interested people to start a broader (and open-ended) discussion about possible ways forward.
As I started thinking about your most interesting post, Vincent (if I may), I realized that I wanted to say more than could be conveniently crammed into a comment. So I posted a little essay over at my blog, New Savanna. First I discuss an essay by Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” After that, two early modern texts from English literature (Pantosto and the Winter's Tale) and, at the end, robots in the Japan of Osamu Tezuka.
Beyond that I note that, when we compare texts with one another, we treat them as contexts for one another--a kind of context degree zero. That is obviously standard procedure and has been since the origins of dirt and of sliced bread. Comparing texts from the same time and place (as I do in my post) establishes one kind of intertextual context. Comparing texts from different times and places gives a different kind of context. Whatever you do, however, the "raw" results of comparative analysis and description is relatively immune from effects having to do with their world vs. ours as it depends only on what's in the texts. It's when you start trying to account for what emerges in the comparison that you have to worry about broader contextual issues.
Hello Vincent! These things have to be confronted - and I have not been doing so enough I don't think: I just wrote an Arcade post from the basic position that in fields where the work hasn't been done the facts have to be presented. There is a lot of assumption right there - but the dynamic I was discussing is a relevant one - both to your post and to Bill Benzon's response: I quite enjoyed, in a funny way, reading the book I reviewed - the command of the tradition that produced it is so rare (now!) that it becomes an interesting if recondite phenomenon in itself. To back up: this was a book written in 2010 about a scholar who died in 994 - written in the style of the, maybe, 1200s. I am exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea. It is not what scholarship should be doing, in my opinion (and in the opinion of most people on Arcade I would guess), but is it preferable to scholarship that has the theoretical framework but no philological roots? Given the painful choice between unfounded but cogent theorizing and uncritical but well-read reiteration - which would one choose? I might go for the latter. And I am going to read (!) your call "renew and expand philology's focus on codicology" in your comment as meaning that you would rather have both - but can't see a way forward without the sort of connection to a text (never mind a time or a place) that manuscript work involves?
Alexander! I guess my suggestion was that it doesn't have to be a matter of either/or, and that a focus on contextualization (as process) might be a way forward. But to answer your question, I do feel pretty strongly -- at least for my own work -- that building our theories and readings of literature out from an analysis of manuscripts and early print editions is crucial. Whether or not there are marginal commentaries and the like that speak directly to modes of readership/authorship and the ways in which people made use of these books (and the texts they contain) to act and think in the world, these objects simply contain too much data for us to ignore them. Parchment or paper? Cheap paper or not? Watermarks? Illuminations? Bound with which other texts (in the case of miscellanies)? Originally part of what sort of library? How many scribes? What sorts of hands? The list of questions is very long, but asking them as part of a broader concern with literary practice (rather than simply "meaning") inevitably leads us, I believe, to a richer and more rigorous account of what we mean by literature. And yes, I agree with you that we need to worry and sweat over certain philological and linguistic facts even as we test out broader theoretical frames for our bigger ideas and hypotheses. The "New Philology" of the 1990s seemed to suggest all this, but then the theories from which it drew (largely Poststructuralist) weren't necessarily productive ones for the materials under analysis. And then calling any approach "new" always seems to be a risky thing.