ABSTRACT
However difficult Virginia Woolf deems timekeeping, the arts ingeneral and literature in particular also have their own need to ‘keep time’—and thus literary history is born, bringing in its wake the question of historiography: how to write a history of literature. Writing a history of histories of culture and literature in colonial Bengal, Henry Schwarz asks:
Schwarz undertakes to show that the dual nature of form-the visible outward shape and the inherent shaping impulse-spans the whole range from the superficial and external to the essential and determining. Acceptable historiographical style in the historical
moment of English colonisation of India was an offshoot of the Enlightenment concept of history as fact, which Schwarz describes as
This more or less demarcates the realm of fact and places a certain value upon literature as opposed to fact. Whether meant as such by Plato or not, literature has been construed thus in the west following the hegemonic discourse of post-Enlightenment Reason, thus serving to provide adequate legitimisation for Christian or rationalist theology. Thus history is aligned to fact, while literature is the realm of its opposite. The literary historian and her material are at odds with each other, historically and institutionally. How then does a history of literature get written? That is the issue I wish to introduce in our deliberations. Who is the historian of literature, what is her brief, and what is her methodology for fulfilling the demands of her task? If we do assign positions of power to normative genders, then truly, the historian whatever her gender, can assume maleness if she so desires by signalling her commitment to the central claim of historical narrative, its explication of ‘fact’ rather than fiction.
