ABSTRACT
A new impetus to sharper historical perspectives has arisen in two disciplines unrelated to art history. Disturbed by the usual naivete of diachronic studies in this respect, Professor Foucault has developed a concept of historical “archaeol-ogy.” Perhaps the key to any helpful understanding of earlier cultural structures is the realization that human formulations and institutions, including our own, are contingent phenomena without any independent reality of their own. In addition to preserving old categories, but in altered form, new societies construct new categories of their own. The task of understanding a literary text from an earlier generation as it was initially presented is formidable. At a recent conference of humanistic scholars held at Princeton in connection with the series Humanistic Scholarship in America: The Princeton Studies the divergence between “critics” and “scholars” or their equivalents in a variety of fields became surprisingly evident.
