Russell Berman: Period

Russell Berman is American academic. Explore interesting quotes on period.

Russell Berman: 34 quotes0 likes

“The relevance of canonicity has nothing to do with the notion of codified establishments of hierarchical judgment (for which it typically attracts revisionist hostility). Instead, canonicity is important as the capacity to permit vibrant reading relationships to works from the past. … Whatever else the canon may do, its primary function has been the preservation of the reception of literature across periodic borders, thereby calling into question the significance of those borders or the fetishism of contexts. The canon tunnels under the Berlin Wall that periodizers erect between literary regimes. As a fundamental level, therefore, periodization stands at odds with canonicity. Canonicity maintains, cultivates, and develops community over time and across generations; periodization breaks up that identity and suppresses the historical continuities through a strategy of temporal separation.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 19.

“The modern reading of ancient literature involves a mode of reception that is not merely scholarly or antiquarian. Instead, aesthetic experience allows for a direct relationship between reader and work, despite the historical distance. Today’s consumer cannot participate in the ancient economy by trying to use an Athenian coin as legal tender; but today’s reader can participate in the ancient literary imagination though an authentic engagement with the Homeric text (no matter how much contemporary circumstances necessarily also enter into that encounter with the ancient text). Thus the historicist imperative of periodization evidently stands at odds with the potential for immediacy associated with literary reception and aesthetic experience.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 14.

“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.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

“Periodization sequesters human experience. The historicist separation of the past from the present prohibits empathy with the past and therefore precludes criticism in the present.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 18.

“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.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.

“Periodization is the disciplinary strategy with which the present establishes its rule over all time and encourages conformism, to the detriment of autonomy, individual and aesthetic.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 20.