Russell Berman: Present

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

Russell Berman: 34 quotes0 likes

“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.

“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.”

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.

“Presentism implies not only a shift toward contemporary material (older material is denounced polemically as tied to dead authors), but an implicit structuring of time as always only a present, without a recollection of its past, without an aspiration to a future.”

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 6.

“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.

“Benjamin describes the revolutionary moment when the past suddenly bursts into the present, as if rising from the grave to rectify the wrongs it suffered at the hands of a banally triumphant progress. Thus Benjamin’s historical materialism implies a capacity to link otherwise separate and distant moments in time through a profound empathy. The empathy takes on a revolutionary character by disrupting the regularity of quotidian temporality. Without this sort of tie to the past, no critical stance in the present is possible.”

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