The assertion of the priority of contemporaneity, the celeb… - Russell Berman

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The assertion of the priority of contemporaneity, the celebration of the present, defines the politics of periodization. It is either a matter of our present, defined as the vanguard of historical progress, or it is the historical present of the objects of study, presumed to be fully grounded in that single, isolated moment of time. In either case, the classificatory impulse inherent in periodization tends to proscribe the more complex temporalities of tradition and anticipation.

Russell Berman

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About Russell Berman

Russell A. Berman (born May 14, 1950) is an American professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature. He is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University.

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Walter Benjamin George Steiner Northrop Frye Jacques Derrida Terry Eagleton

Additional quotes by Russell Berman

The reified focus on the moment of literary production, in a distanced context—the typical topic of periodization—suppresses the experience of reception, the actualization of the past in the reader’s present.

Historicism runs counter to the specific capacity of the literary work to escape the limits of historical time, to allow for the cross-generational flourishing of tradition, and open the present to a multidimensional temporality.

Literature is most social when it is least social.

The assertion of the priority of contemporaneity, the celebration of the present, defines the politics of periodization. It is either a matter of our… - Russell Berman

About Russell Berman

Additional quotes by Russell Berman