Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity - Softcover

Kuskin, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268033250 ISBN 13: 9780268033255

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013

Synopsis

In Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity, William Kuskin asks us to reconsider the relationship between literary form and historical period. As Kuskin observes, most current literary histories of medieval and early modern English literature hew to period, presenting the Middle Ages and modernity as discrete, separated by a heterodox and unstable fifteenth century. In contrast, the major writers of the sixteenth century―Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the Holinshed Syndicate, and their editors―were intense readers of the fifteenth century and consciously looked back to its history and poetry as they shaped their own. Kuskin examines their work in light of the writings they knew―that of Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William Caxton, and the anonymous London Chronicles―to demonstrate that fifteenth-century textual forms exist within the most significant statements of literary modernity. In short, by reconsidering the relationship between literary form and temporality, we can reach across the firewall of 1500 to write a more complex literary history of reading and writing than has previously been told.

Moving beyond his central critique―that notions of period and progress are poor measures of literary history―Kuskin develops and demonstrates the hermeneutic power of recursivity as a powerful challenge to a linear view of literary historical periods. Kuskin appropriates the term “recursion” from computer science, where it describes a computer program’s return to a subprogram within itself to perform a more complex procedure. Books, for Kuskin, are recursive: they imagine within themselves a return to an earlier moment of writing, which, when read, they enact in the present. His is a profound claim for the grip of the past on the present and, more locally, a reclamation of the importance of the fifteenth century for any discussion of sixteenth-century literature and of the relationship between the medieval and the early modern.

About this title

About the Author

William Kuskin is associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the editor of Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Literary history is the story of influence. Its central tenet is that no one writes alone, that all writers derive originality by precedence, creativity through imitation, and distinction from established structures for literary production. Literary studies has told this story across the tables of contents of anthologies and publishers’ catalogues, each section of which―“The Middle Ages,” “The Early Modern Period,” “The Eighteenth Century,” “Modern Literature,” “The Postmodern”―is arrayed like the chapters of a novel or the acts of a play, discrete units that combine to tell a grand narrative.

Such an organization contains more than one contradiction: literary history as a continuous trajectory and a sequence of periods, each a moment of origins unto itself; literature as an autonomous discipline and subordinate to historical groupings, themselves defined by political, economic, and ecclesiastical events; authorship as filtered through temporal and generic contexts and as immortal, an expression of individual genius beyond time itself.

Given the general acceptance of these contradictions, they seem essentially paradoxes, apparently contradictory ideas that are nevertheless true, necessitated by the vast scope and complexity of such a story. Rather than accepting paradox, I suggest these contractions are just that, logical incompatibilities, and should alert us to the dangers of too absolute a subscription to a chronological narrative of period.

When the categories of chronology and period are loosened, we can see these contradictions less as paradoxes sustained in their truth by the extraordinary dictates of modern historicity than as simply error messages created when the spiraling relationship of reading and writing is reified against the grid of chronological time.

By laying aside the dictates of chronology and period, we can understand literary history as neither progressive nor revolutionary but as a story of influence in which the past is never completely superseded by the present but is instead embedded within every literary page, each a point of origin in its own right, and accessible through the technologies of reproduction that enable the literary imagination.

Atomized across a linear narrative of temporality, we are always alone; distilled into each moment, each point in the enduring circuit of production and consumption, the past exists with us as a facet of some greater totality that we only partially fulfill.

(excerpt from Chapter 2)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268033250
• ISBN 13: 9780268033255
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296