ABSTRACT

We who profess literary studies have been living through a time of infatuation with history. This is not the first such crush, to be sure, but it is a heady one. And like all infatuations, it carries with it a certain overestimation of the object. History seems to know everything that we want to know, and to offer “answers” to knotty textual questions: questions of context, interpretation, and indeed meaning.