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Our Puny Boundaries: Why the Craving for Carving Up the Nineteenth Century?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan J. Wolfson
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Extract

It's almost too convenient that carve evolves, via middle high german (kerben), from the greek graphein: “TO scratch, to write.” Ham-fisted or artful, the verb is the mark of desire, of a craving to inscribe. Given a century, carvings display cravings of the mind, motivated assignments in a march of years all beginning 18—. Figuring out how to carve one's shape in history, or how to carve history into shape, was a perplexity, a founding question even, at the dawn of the century:

      Who knows the individual hour in which
      His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
      [………]
      Hard task to analyse a soul in which
      Not only general habits and desires
      But each most obvious and particular thought,
      Not in a mystical and idle sense,
      But in the words of reason deeply weigh'd
      Hath no beginning.

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 5 , October 2001 , pp. 1432 - 1441
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

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