拉岡視角論文學史 (II-II)

Abstract

近六十年來，「文學史」要在英語世界成為可長可久的「研究客體」，可能性微乎其微，理由是「文學」與「歷史」兩個概念，意義有所扞格。這個僵局被韋勒克與華倫的《文學論》點出之後，保羅．德曼於1970年便嘗作分解；進入九Over the last sixty years, the possibility of literary history as a sustainable object has not yet been established in the English-speaking world, due mainly to the conceptual incompatibility of the literary and history. René Wellek and Austin Warren first brought into view this predicament in their Theory of Literature in the late forties; Paul de Man addressed the same incompatibility in 1970; and David Perkins made the same attempt again in his Is Literary History Possible? in the early nineties, without much progress made, as Robert Hume observed in 2005. On the other hand, critics and theorists—as inquiring subjects—from different schools (structuralist-formalists, new historicists, the genealogists, reader-oriented historians, and the like) have never failed to adopt the concept “literary history” for their own purposes, causing the ramifications of its meanings, dooming further its prospect (possibility) of becoming a sustainable object. To resolve this, we have to start from the Lacanian standpoint to ask what the desire of these subjects is that has driven them to pursue literary history as their common object. It is in de Man’s critique that we see literary history is given rise by the modernist fixation on “now.” But this fixation functions somehow like Kant’s “reflective judgment,” which according to Samuel Weber is likened to the situation in which the Lacanian “subject-supposed-to-know” is called for. The treatment by the New Historicism, meanwhile, cannot escape the impression that its formalism and empiricism have turned literary history into an ideology qua phantasy (S/