The Present Moment of the Past: History in and out of Literature

Scientific paper - Other

• Author: Tomislav Brlek
• Author's institution: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of Comparative literature)
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Interdisciplinary Humanistic Studies

Abstract (english)

Starting from Timothy Bahti’s claim that “literary studies in the university are still the heir to the historicism after Hegel,” readily verified by sundry historically organised takes on literary criticism and theory steadily advancing towards the present moment of comprehension, even as the true sources of the thought of the authors under scru-tiny as well as of the actual origins of critical problems are unfailingly revealed to stem from the “real world,” the paper aims to present T.S. Eliot’s very different thinking about literature, criticism and history as a salubrious contravention of the worldwide dominance of approaches to reading works of literature predicated on unexamined notions of context and identity, which Timothy Clark dubbed “institutional Ameri-canism,” contending that it is no accident that the final thesis advanced by the histo-rian Elco Runia in his recent Moved by the Past, which proposes a complete overhaul of certain certainties on which how we conceive of the past is predicated, should have a distinctly Eliotic ring to it: “By burying the dead we create not our future, but our past.”

• Keywords (english): history; literature; modernity; hermeneutics; theory; T.S. Eliot; “institutional Americanism”
• Language: english
• Publication type: Scientific paper - Other
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review: Peer review - international
• Publication version: Published version
• Journal title: Working Papers in American Studies. Vol. 3. The (Un)usable Pasts in American Studies
• Numbering: vol. 3, pp. 25-41
• e-ISSN: 1849-6180
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17234/WPAS.2018.2
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:401028
• Publication: 2018
• Conference: Title: The (Un)usable Pasts in American Studies; Location: Zagreb, Croatia; Organizer: Hrvatsko udruženje za američke studije; Start date: 2016-05-14; End date: 2021-05-14
• Document URL: http://www.huams.hr/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/wpas_v3_huams_2018.pdf
• Type of resource: Text
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2021-03-09 14:40:15