|
COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. 236. $46.95.
"This is a book about hope," the opening sentence of Christensen's book proclaims in all earnestness. It asserts a romantic hope (or the oddly described romantic "conspiracy") that existed before New Historicism, before Marx and, certainly, before the modernist angst of post-history, a hope that might still exist amongst us today. It is a tall order in this age of post-everything except Osama bin Laden, but this is a glib and intelligent author who writes with facility and occasional verve about the many possibilities he foresees for the recovery of a romantic (but largely political) version of history as hope. "Being antihistoricist does not entail a denial of history but a rejection of the inevitability of history, then, now, and for the future. History is what happened, not what had or has to happen." This promising rejection of Darwinian determination as it might apply to historiography is followed by an even more promising sentence: "Unlike the historicist, dead set on decoding the iron logic of past events, the Romantic fully credits the possibility of accidents and readies himself or herself to take advantage of swerves or lapses from the norm as opportunities for change" (2). This seems like an espousal of Lamarckian evolution and the Romantics' resolve to see beyond the fact of extinction, beyond the lost species and lacunae in natural evolution, and beyond the failure of aspirations in nature, to a future pattern and promise--what Keats in Hyperion called "fresh perfection." But, no, this defiant and very large romantic...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
