Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now
- I Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- 1 Coping with Contemporariness
- 2 Rethinking Periodization for the ‘Now-Time’
- 3 (After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity in Choreography
- II Contemporary Politics and French Thought
- III The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- IV Writing the Contemporary Self
- V Novel Rereadings
- VI Memory: Past and Future
- Contributors
- Index
2 - Rethinking Periodization for the ‘Now-Time’
from I - Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now
- I Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- 1 Coping with Contemporariness
- 2 Rethinking Periodization for the ‘Now-Time’
- 3 (After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity in Choreography
- II Contemporary Politics and French Thought
- III The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- IV Writing the Contemporary Self
- V Novel Rereadings
- VI Memory: Past and Future
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
Periodization has routinely been accepted as a standing order of criticism that eschews the kinds of controversy surrounding national literature, canon, and patrimony. Certainly in departments of national literature, where there is often scant consensus about field or disciplinary approach in hiring priorities, period is the default position: ‘Yes, let's go for an early modernist or an eighteenth-century specialist.’ The assumption is that period is a neutral category of scholarship and criticism.
And yet, having made this claim I must inevitably backpedal, because in fact the politics of periodization (and chronology more generally), are of course historically contentious. As Anthony Grafton has shown, in the early seventeenth century scholars like Joseph Justus Scaliger ushered in historicist approaches to dating and chronology that posed ‘a radical challenge to biblical chronology,’ and invented ‘what became the modern discipline of chronology,’ culminating in Giambattista Vico's hyper-historicist demonstration that ‘all detailed chronologies of ancient times rested on a misconception of the nature of ancient record keeping.’ Dating, with its crucial definition of period units, played a crucial role in the story of Enlightenment secularization. Subsequently, the imposition of Western time-keeping devices and the standardization of time played equally crucial roles in the history of industrialization and the administration of empire. In anthropology, the division into ‘ages of man’ led to cultural distinctions between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ that, while discredited, continue to generate racist developmental narratives of third and first world modernity. And at the present pass, the politics of periodization defines how ‘globalization’ is mapped onto the humanities, often producing institutional and disciplinary configurations that reproduce economic inequality.
In what follows, I want to review (very schematically) how the concept of period is tested and reworked in transdisciplinary fields. I will concentrate first on the intractable problem of Eurochronology in literary history; second, on what I call the ‘chronic’ ageism embedded in period definition; third, on experiments with ‘anachronic’ periodization; and fourth, on models of ‘contemporaneity,’ ‘now-ness,’ and co-existent community that challenge protocols of time-management in societies of control—protocols that regulate the actuarial calculation of life and the rates of exchange in global finance capital.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016