[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

50 Christoph Reinfandt

in danger of ‘tipping over’ into a self-confirmatory practice by letting its provisional answers ‘harden’ into dogma. However, oversimplifications of abstract theoretical thought will always find their limits in the resistance of texts with their precarious, complex and contingent relation to material history in its inaccessible totality. And it is this complex interrelation between the human and material dimensions of history in an increasingly mediatized and globalized world that can be addressed through reflexive strategies of reading texts after the linguistic turn.58

Notes

1 Cf. P. Schöttler, ‘Wer hat Angst vor dem “Lingustic Turn”?’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft 23, 1997, 134–151; idem, ‘Historians and Discourse Analysis’, History Workshop Journal 27, 1989, 37–65. For a more recent overview cf. J.E. Toews, ‘Linguistic Turn and Discourse Analysis in History’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001, vol. 13, pp. 8916–8922.

2Cf. K. Jenkins, Re-Thinking History, London: Routledge, 1991 and B. Skordili, ‘Little Narratives’, in V.E. Taylor and C.E. Winquist (eds), Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 230–232.

3Cf. R.J. Evans, In Defense of History [1997], New York/London: Norton, 2000, p. 7f. The debate, of course, is not confined to questions of history, but implicates the foundations of scientific and philosophical truth in general. See, for example, from a philo-

sophical perspective P. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Oxford: Clarendon, 2006, and, from a journalistic perspective, O. Benson and J. Stangroom, Why Truth Matters, New York/London: Continuum, 2006.

4Cf., for example, G.M. Spiegel (ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, New York/London: Routledge, 2005, in which only five out of 13 contributors hold positions in history while the remaining eight have backgrounds in political science, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and English studies.

5Cf. R. Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

6For a programmatic textbook cf. C.G. Brown, Postmodernism for Historians. Harlow: Pearson, 2005, and with regard to the tacit linguistic turn=postmodernism equation esp. pp. 33–48.

7A recent survey study in German (D. Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2006) identifies no less than seven turns under the general heading of ‘Cultural Turns’: the interpretive turn, the performative turn, the reflexive or literary turn, the postcolonial turn, the translational turn, the spatial turn, and the iconic turn.

8Cf. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Presidential Address 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base’, PMLA – Publications of the Modern Language Association 102.3, 1987, 281–291.

9Cf. J. Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 1.

10Cf. P. Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 11–32.

11Barry, Beginning Theory, pp. 32–36.

12Needless to say, the condensation of this huge field of theorizing about reading and meaning within the confines of just one chapter will necessarily be reductive, but it is to be hoped that these very restrictions will facilitate the emergence of a map, the functional point of which, if it is to serve its purpose of orientation, is its reductiveness.

Reading texts after the linguistic turn 51

13Cf. M.H. Abrams, ‘Types and Orientations of Critical Theories’, in: idem, Doing Things With Texts, New York: Norton, 1989, pp. 3–30.

14On the seminal importance of the Reformation for the emergence of modernity cf. Alan Sinfield, ‘Protestantism: Questions of Subjectivity and Control’, in idem, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, Oxford: Clarendon, 1992, pp. 143–180.

15Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York: Seabury, 1975.

16For an extensive overview in English cf. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Freely Translated and Condensed by Harriet Martineau [1896], Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2000. Available from the McMaster Archive for the History of Economic Thought: <http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html> (accessed 10 January, 2008).

17For a concise introduction to Marxist thought cf. Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction [1980], Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

18Ordered, for example, according to Hippolyte Taine’s (1828–93) famous triad race/milieu/moment or Wilhelm Scherer’s (1841–1886) version das Erlernte/Ererbte/Erlebte (‘education’/‘inheritance’/‘experience’).

19Cf. J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, who explicitly draws upon Marx’s and Engels’s The German Ideology (1845).

20Cf. A. Richardson, Literature, Education and Romanticism: Reading as a Social Practice, 1780–1832, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

21It is this affinity between two critical counter-narratives that might explain why (neo-) Marxists succumbed so easily to the charms of aesthetic autonomy, as in Adorno’s clinging to the notion of true and authentic art which somehow resists commodification or in Althusser’s conviction that art is not among the ideologies (cf. McGann, The Romantic Ideology, p. 66).

22K. Thomas, ‘New Ways Revisited: How History’s Border’s Have Expanded in the Past Forty Years’, Times Literary Supplement October 13, 2006, 3f., 4.

23S. Tillyard, ‘All Our Pasts: The Rise of Popular History’, Times Literary Supplement October 13, 2006, 7–9, 9.

24On a larger scale this development can be described in terms of a shift from ontological and essentialist conceptions of scientific truth to constructivist conceptions of scientific truth. See, for example, N. Luhmann, ‘The Modernity of Science’, New German Critique 61, 1994, 9–23. Again, it is important to point out that both dimensions were present in modern culture from fairly early on. Cf., for example, Kant’s concept of an allpervasive critique as indicated in the 1781 preface to his Critique of Pure Reason (‘Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit.’ Quoted from <http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/prefs.html> P 009n, accessed on Jan. 14, 2008) as opposed to the longing for objectivity underlying his work at large.

25Cf. I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism [1929], London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

26Cf. Abrams’s ‘objective theories’ and the hermeneutic and Romantic heritage in notions of aesthetic autonomy as well as the larger frame of liberal humanism as indicated in the preceding sections of this chapter.

27Cf. J.C. Ransom, The New Criticism [1941], Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979.

28Cf. E.M. Thompson, Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, The Hague: Mouton, 1971.

29V. Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, Harlow: Longman, 1988, pp. 15–30.

30I. Tynianov, The Problem of Verse Language [1924], Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981.

31I. Tynianov and R. Jakobson, ‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language’ [1928], in Matejka and Pomorska, Readings in Russian Poetics, pp. 79–81.

32R. Jakobson and C. Levi-Strauss, ‘Les Chats of Charles Baudelaire’ [1962], in R. Jacobson, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, The Hague: Mouton, 1981, pp. 447–464.

52 Christoph Reinfandt

33For a brief and accessible introduction to Structuralism cf. Barry, Beginning Theory,

pp.39–60.

34Cf. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, London: Duckworth, 1983.

35Cf., for example, J. MukarBovskyO, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts

[1936], Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1970; C. Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked [1964], New York: Harper and Row, 1969; R. Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ [1966], New Literary History 6, 1975, 237–262 and Mythologies [1957], New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.

36R. Barthes, Elements of Semiology [1964], New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

37For the philosophy-linguistics-interface in this process and its recent shift towards history and culture cf. M. Currie, Difference, The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge, 2004.

38For an accessible and concise introduction to Poststructuralism and Deconstruction cf. Barry, Beginning Theory, pp. 61–80. The by now classic introduction in English is J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.

39Cf. J. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ [1966], in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory, pp. 107–123 and Of Grammatology

[1967], Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

40The most instructive illustration of this principle is probably the analogy to second language learners who are only allowed a monolingual dictionary for a written exam: every word that they look up is encoded in new words, a certain percentage of which would have to be looked up again etc. ad infinitum.

41Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 158.

42See, for example, the assessment in Evans, In Defense of History, pp. 106–108, 206–210 and the broad overview in R. Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

43Cf. N. Luhmann, ‘Why Does Society Describe Itself as Postmodern?’, Cultural Critique 30, 1995, 171–186.

44For some basic contours see also R. Barthes’s influential essay ‘From Work to Text’ [1971], in J.V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979,

pp.73–81 (also in R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, New York: Hill and Wang, 1989,

pp.56–64). For a concise overview of the implications of this development in terms of a widened scope beyond literary texts cf. P. Childs, Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, pp. 1–10 and passim.

45Cf. S. Greenblatt’s notion of a ‘poetics of culture’ at the heart of the New Historicism as introduced in S. Greenblatt, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism, New York: Routledge, 1989, pp. 1–14. Interestingly, the earlier Positivism/Marxism-divide resurfaced in the new, textual dispensation of the 1980s in the form of a political alternative between the largely U.S.-based New Historicism and an explicitly left-wing Cultural Materialism in the U.K. as well as in discussions about the relation between postmodernism and postcolonialism.

46Typical literary examples of this transformation are the invention of the individualized, subjective ‘speaker’ in lyrical poetry in early modern times (in the English context particularly in sonnets by Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney and then, of course, Shakespeare) as well as the invention of an omniscient authorial voice for the emergent genre of the modern novel by Henry Fielding in the 1740s.

47It is probably the shift towards a fully fledged digital society which enables us to see the mediality of the age of print more clearly than ever while we are already on our way into the ‘next society’ (Peter Drucker) under the auspices of the computer. On the theoretical implications of this shift cf. C. Huck and C. Schinko, ‘The Medial Limits of Culture: Culture as Text vs. Text as Culture’, in G. Sebald and J. Weyand (eds),

GrenzGänge – BorderCrossings: Kulturtheoretische Perspektiven, Münster: LIT, 2006, pp. 57–71.

Reading texts after the linguistic turn 53

48Cf., for example, B.V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice [1984], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 and ‘What’s New in New Literacy Studies? Critical Approaches to Literacy in Theory and Practice’, Current Issues in Comparative Education 5.2, 2003, 77–91 as well as, with a stronger historical focus, Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

49Cf. R. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

50The profession’s awareness of this crucial factor is marked by the inclusion of an article addressing this dimension in the TLS New Ways of History Revisited issue. Cf. Alex Burghart, ‘Web Works’, Times Literary Supplement October 13, 2006, 16–17.

51S. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

52Cf. D.B. Mathewson, ‘A Critical Binarism: Source Criticism and Deconstructive Criticism’, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 98, 2002, 3–28 who argues that the approaches are not antagonistic in a theological context but can rather be taken to mark various stages in a continuing modern/postmodern engagement with the problem of truth under modern conditions.

53Cf. Stephen Greenblatt’s influential analysis of the doubling of enabling and restricting functions in culture as summed up in S. Greenblatt, ‘Culture’, in Lentricchia and McLaughlin (eds), Critical Terms, pp. 225–223.

54On the narratological implications of this threefold frame cf. C. Reinfandt, ‘Dimensions of Meaning in Modern Narrative: A Systems-Theoretical Approach to Narratology’, in S. Tötösy de Zepetnek and I. Sywenky (eds), The Systemic and Empirical Approach to Literature and Culture as Theory and Application, Edmonton/Siegen: LUMIS publications, 1997, pp. 83–90 and ‘A Matter of Perspective: The Social Framing of Narrative Meaning’, in B. Reitz and S. Rieuwerts (eds), Anglistentag 1999 Mainz: Proceedings, Trier: WVT, 2000, pp. 389–402.

55Cf. R. Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’ and ‘The Reality Effect’ in The Rustle of Language, New York: Hill and Wang, 1989, pp. 127–140, 141–148 and F.R. Ankersmit,

The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of Historiographical Topology, Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche, 1989.

56See also the ‘Basic Checklist’ of ‘How to Interpret Primary Sources’ in the introduction to the present volume, pp. 5–14.

57On the implications of a shift from the language/text/discourse-paradigm of the main strand of ‘postmodern’ theory to an alternative paradigm focused on nonfoundationalist notions of observation, mediality, and communication cf. N. Luhmann, ‘Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing’, New Literary History 24, 1993, 763–782.

58Cf. a recent German introduction to historiography ‘in global perspective’ (Markus Völkel, Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Einführung in globaler Perspektive, Wien: Böhlau, 2006) as reviewed by Simon Ditchfield, ‘Noted Down’, Times Literary Supplement November 9, 2007, p. 7.

Select bibliography

Barry, P., Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2nd edn., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Benson, O. and J. Stangroom, Why Truth Matters, London/New York: Continuum, 2006. Childs, P., Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches, Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

Clark, E.A., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.

54 Christoph Reinfandt

Culler, J., Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Curry, M., Difference, The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge, 2004. Eagleton, T., Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Lentricchia, F. and T. McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Studies, 2nd edn., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Spiegel, G.M., ed., Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, New York/London: Routledge, 2005.

Waugh, P., Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Part II

Varieties of primary sources and their interpretation

3 Letters

Miriam Dobson

Even if we cast it as a ‘thirst for knowledge’, the historian’s search for new documents and artefacts from the past stems at least in part from curiosity, even nosiness; there is a desire for secret, perhaps salacious, information about people who lived long ago. In this quest, a heavy file bulging with letters perhaps represents a particularly good haul. Re-opening an envelope dried with time, inching out a crisp letter, and gazing down at a page of crabbed handwriting, the researcher feels she might be experiencing the same emotions felt by the first recipient, however many years ago. Addressed to a named reader (or readers), we feel we are breaking the ties of confidentiality and unlocking the mysteries of a past age. Letters seem to promise the personal, the familiar, the intimate: as such they represent a hugely exciting source for the historian.

Despite their apparent appeal, however, letters represent a troublesome genre. Firstly, there are many different kinds of writing that come under the heading of ‘letter’: business correspondence, petitions to the government, letters to newspaper editors, intellectual dialogue between thinkers, writers, and politicians, and of course the more everyday exchange of news between friends and family geographically separated from one another. Secondly, the letter’s apparently personal nature is rather deceptive. Very often, letters though ostensibly for a single reader have been used in a wider context: in the past many were read aloud, at home or in the coffee-shop, some were re-copied and forwarded to additional readers, while others even made it into print.1 Cécile Dauphin has suggested that letters should be considered ‘an experimental form’, ‘a meeting place between the social and the inner being, between conventions and their use in practice, between the private and political’.2 Issues to be addressed in this chapter therefore include: What kind of letters can be of interest to the historian, and what kind of information can we hope to acquire through reading them? How does the presence of an intended reader, or even unnamed readers, shape the text? How do we go about extracting information from the text? Why have the letters been preserved, and does this affect the way we read them? And can the mere fact that this correspondence took place – regardless of its content – tell us something about the function of written communication in the past?

The chapter will begin by tracing the way in which broader historiographical developments have driven the expansion of the epistolary corpus used by

58 Miriam Dobson

historians: in particular, we shall examine how a focus on the correspondence of ‘eminent men of the age’ has, with the rise of social history, given way to an increasing endeavour to study the writings of ‘ordinary’ men and women. The chapter will then examine how philosophical trends have also impacted on historians’ use of epistolary evidence: in particular, we shall consider the way cultural historians and those responsive to the implications of the ‘linguistic turn’ have interpreted letters. This long middle part of the chapter will focus on how the letter can become a site for creating different kinds of selfhood, community, and citizenship. Finally, and in light of the above, a letter written in 1953 by a Moscow tramdriver and sent to Viacheslav Molotov, then Minister of Foreign Affairs and a leading member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, will be analysed in detail.

The epistolary corpus

Great revolutionary to some, monstrous dictator to others, V.I. Lenin seems to represent one of the great enigmas of the twentieth century, and historians have made extensive use of his letters to try to uncover the real essence of the man. When the Soviet authorities authorized a new edition of Lenin’s correspondence in the mid1960s, John Keep was quick to recognize the new collection’s appeal:

The correspondence of the great has always exercised a powerful fascination for the historian or the biographer. Ideally, it ought to reveal the hidden aspects of a man’s psyche, his secret motivations and objectives; at the least it may cast light upon his personal relationships with others in a way that would not be apparent from more formal documents.3

In using Lenin’s personal correspondence alongside his other writings and speeches, Robert Service’s biography added new dimensions to what we already knew of Lenin. In particular, letters to his mother, wife, and sisters reveal moments of fragility, of despondency and fatigue, as well as insight into the development of his political thought and his reflections on the progress of the revolutionary underground.4 At the other end of the twentieth century, biographers of another ‘great man’, Nelson Mandela, have again used personal correspondence to probe the private life of their subject. Mandela’s tender, sometimes remorseful prison letters to his wife Winnie have been used extensively and are, according to one biographer, evidence of the complex passions that animated his ‘domestic world’.5 In both cases, private letters allow the historian to complicate the image their subject sought to present in public life.

The fact that correspondence has been used as means to conduct political and scholarly discussions also means that intellectual historians have drawn extensively on epistolary sources. This is particularly the case for historians of the early modern period, when limited publishing meant that networks of correspondence fulfilled a unique forum for sharing ideas amongst a group of like-minded people, with letters regularly copied and forwarded on to interested parties.6 In the

Letters 59

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, intellectuals have been more likely to publish their ideas in newspapers, journals books, or lately, the internet, but correspondence has retained its appeal for historians. As with political biographies, letters seem to promise a glimpse into the personal life of philosophers, artists, and scientists.

In political and intellectual history, therefore, private correspondence has always been respected as an important source both for tracing the development of ideas and ideology and for unmasking personal characteristics. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, the profession has seen increasing attempts to write histories that are not only about ‘eminent men’ – powerful politicians and great thinkers

– but also accounts of how ordinary men and women lived in the past. The rise of social history led historians to search for new kinds of sources that would allow them to explore the lives of much wider sectors of the population. In the USA, these trends began in the first half of the twentieth century but became entrenched with the development of ‘New Social History’ in the 1960s and 1970s, an approach that sought to challenge the ‘traditional political master narrative of American history, with its elite, Anglo-Saxon, and male perspective’.7 Letters sent home by new immigrants to the United States, for example, became an important source for examining the history of a social group that had previously been excluded from many historical accounts. Scholars of slavery were also keen to use letters. Explicitly influenced by W.E.B. DuBois’s call for historians to write about ‘the common run of human beings’ instead of their rulers, Robert Starobin studied the letters of house-servants and drivers in the early 1970s. Using the letters of ‘privileged bondsmen’, Starobin explored aspects of slaves’ lives such as their relationships with masters and fellow slaves, as well as controversial issues such as the nature of discipline and resistance on slave plantations.8

As the two above examples suggest, historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular have been drawn to letters as a means to explore the lives of the poor and powerless within society – and for obvious reasons. Although literacy figures are disputed, it is clear that over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ability to read spread to growing sectors of the population in Europe and North America, while in the nineteenth century, the expansion of compulsory elementary education ensured an ever-growing number of citizens who could themselves write.9 Over the same period, postage systems became more accessible. The invention of the ‘penny post’ – a cheap flat-rate for sending a letter – was introduced in Britain in 1840 and soon adopted in many other European countries. With the creation of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) in 1875, inhabitants of the member countries – which included not only countries of Western Europe, but also Russia, Greece, Egypt, and the USA – were linked in a common system of flat-rate postage. The establishment of the UPU meant the number of letters sent and received could be assiduously counted: the statistics produced show a rise in epistolary activity towards the end of the nineteenth century and the years running up to the First World War, an event that itself caused an unprecedented wave of graphomania.10 Four million letters made their way from or to the French front every day, while in the German Empire, about 9.9 million items of post were sent home from