|
COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xv+ 248. $21.95.
To appreciate this powerful book one has, at the outset, to make a voluntary suspension of disbelief, for Saree Makdisi asks us to travel through great swathes of time and space. He is a Whig--or rather Hegelian--historian manque, who presents history as a sweeping, continuous and seemingly inevitable process. Makdisi's grand narrative is, so long as we keep our poetic faith, compelling. And we want to keep our faith because it leaves us emotionally involved. Like Byron, we are placed in awe of a mighty temporal process whose effects we lament. Makdisi calls the process, following Jameson and Said, modernization--meaning a globalizing capitalism that has overwhelmed the world, collapsing difference and defining space only in relation to an imperialist center. According to Makdisi, today's world and contemporary consciousness are shaped by it, but it began with a vengeance in the romantic period. Romanticism criticized but also participated in it.
Modernization has enormous power in the world of Makdisi's text. It is the dark sublime that he summons into his narrative to turn the critic into a romantic hero. We are awestruck by its inevitability and universality even as we enjoy our sorrow over its destruction of peoples, places and cultures. Makdisi's modernization, in other words, is a power we love to loathe because it makes the reader a Childe Harold of the twenty-first century, one who feels inwardly the sorrow of inevitable historical loss.
It should come as no surprise that New Historicists can be as complicit with aspects...
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
