Periodization vs. Typology

In the absence of a tradition of theorizing about the literary trend as a distinct type of literary grouping, critics have tended to subsume the concept of trend under one of the more established categories forming the two poles of a critical continuum that traditionally has dealt with literary classifications: (1) the general problem of periodization, considered central to literary history; and (2) the problem of literary typology, modeled on conventional classifications of genres, modes, and styles, and considered central to literary theory.

The period model often coincides with an extensional definition of a literary trend (see chap. 1): modernism (or romanticism, symbolism, postmodernism, and so forth) is said to be the collection of works that were written during the modernist (romantic, symbolist, postmodernist) period (the chronological view); or by poets who characterized themselves or were characterized by others as modernists (romantics, symbolists) (the nominalist view). In its extreme formulations, which are, in fact, still quite the norm, the period model lumps together indiscriminately the heterogeneous literary production of an entire era, delimiting it by the beginning or end of a century, the reign of a monarch, the duration of a war. Datelines marking extraliterary events like “twentieth-century literature,” “the Elizabethan age,” or (in Israeli literature) “the 1948 generation” still appear in course and textbook titles as well as in scholarly works as telltale markers of literary categories.^[2] Even critics of the period model find it difficult to avoid the allure of chronological quantification. Ulrich Weisstein, after criticizing what he describes as “annalistic” periodization, himself fails to go beyond it when he suggests that one concept is distinguished from another along the periodological map by the sheer length of the designated time period: from the longer epoch and age to the shorter generation and movement (1973a:68–71).

The genre model, however, is frequently associated with what I described in Chapter 1 as an intensional, or criterial, definition: all modernist (and, similarly, all romanticist, symbolist) works are said to

share a set of common and distinctive features which constitute necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the class, modernism (romanticism), or for application of the attribute, modernist (romanticist). This model is also commonly associated with the antihistoricist reduction of periodization to typology: the recovery of modernist, romanticist, mannerist, or baroque features in the literature of periods dissociated from these trends.^[3] Strict typological approaches may, for example, talk about a modernist style in medieval or in seventeenth-century poetry, or about the baroque as “ecstatic expressionism.”^[4] Most treatments of literary trends, whether they explicitly identify themselves as concerned with periodization or with typology, in practice present some mixture of the two approaches, a tendency I find quite symptomatic. While this means that logically and methodologically the discussions may tend to be inconsistent and even confused, it also suggests that the need for a more pluralistic account may be indicated by the literary corpus itself. My own perspective will focus on the principles implicit in the prevalent practice of this critical “mixed mode.”

The schematic conceptual map presented in Figure 1 is not, then, a representation of a model of literary groupings I would advocate. Rather, it is a heuristic device for describing the general principles embedded in common critical treatments of the subject. Instead of a strict dichotomy of period and genre, as would perhaps have been expected in pre-twentieth-century critical literature, most accounts now seem to presuppose a more graded distinction, presented here as a continuum of degrees between “pure” periodization on the left and “pure” typology on the right, with the literary movement or trend marking off a set of transitional concepts which vacillate between the two poles. Different periodological and typological approaches are distinguished from one another by the segment of the continuum on which they concentrate, the particular concept they privilege, or the pole toward which they gravitate. My own approach is no exception. By diagrammatically presenting the distinction as a continuum of degrees, my account pushes the traditionally central notions of period and genre literally to the margins, while foregrounding the much neglected literary movement or trend in the visual and normative center of the map.

Although different theories describe the transitions between concepts along this continuum differently, there appears to be some consensus about the fundamental divisions. Roughly, the first third of the

Fig. 1.
Literary groupings as a continuum.

continuum, from period to generation, is still under the dominance of the period model, with size (number of years or people involved in each grouping) considered the major distinctive factor. The literary movement and its cognate concepts, the literary current, circle, or cenacle,^[5] are on this account still subsumed under a partonomy of periodization.^[6] The last third of the continuum, from literary school through style and mode to the literary genre proper, is most commonly treated as a typological variant of a literary taxonomy, with mode usually considered a limit case of genre, and style a limit case of the literary school. In this account, the literary trend^[7] and its smaller or more static cognates, the literary salon or school, are no longer seen primarily as period units defined by their social, political, or historical circumstances but rather as distinct, intraliterary poetic types. Finally, the first half of the continuum is more frequently associated with later literature from romanticism onward, whereas the second half is more commonly thought of in connection with preromantic and classical poetics. Thus, for example, Poggioli points out that “whereas we did and do call the old-fashioned regroupings ‘schools,’ we call the modern ones ‘movements’” (1968:17).^[8]

Clearly, this rough conceptual map represents only a series of critical reductions, acceptable neither as periodization nor as typology, and certainly not adequate as a model of literary trends (movements, currents). One of the main thrusts of the research in historical poetics in recent years has been to emphasize that intraliterary criteria should apply to periodization as well as to typology and, concomitantly, that literary styles cannot claim to be free of extraliterary periodological determinants. The same goes for the other attributes so one-sidedly associated with each pole: dynamic vs. static, diachronic vs. synchronic, heterogeneous vs. homogeneous. Critiques of “pure” periodization often point to the differences of “style” within a period, while critiques of the classical genre model emphasize the historicity and variability of all literary typologies. Increasingly, literary trends and movements are invoked as evidence of the typological facets of periodization and the periodological facets of literary types.

The continuum can therefore serve only as a methodological stepping stone for a critique of reductionist approaches to literary groupings. It remains to be seen whether this schematic representation can also serve as a heuristic device for correlating views of period, trend, and style with a more general critical philosophy. Thus, one might want to ask whether socially and historically inclined critics would

more often tend to assimilate the question of literary trends leftward, toward the dynamic/diachronic/heterogeneous/extraliterary period model, while formalist, structuralist, New Critical and other “intrinsic” critics would be more likely to assimilate it rightward, in the political as well as the diagrammatic sense, toward the static/ synchronic/homogeneous/intraliterary genre model. My own major concern will be to observe whether more systemic and pluralistic critical approaches that combine the periodological and the typological perspectives would indeed also tend to focus on the central section of the continuum. If so, could these approaches form the foundation for a theory of the literary trend as a model for literary groupings at large rather than as a borderline case that defies precise description?^[9]

This, then, is where my own approach is located: in exposing the failings of the traditional emphases on period and genre, I hope to develop within an emergent methodological pluralism the beginnings of a focused discussion of the literary trend. I have therefore been on the lookout for those systemic or pluralist approaches whose point of departure is either a critique of the “pure” (chronological or nominalist) period model or a rejection of the “pure” (static, ahistorical) genre model. In the field of genre theory, I have found quite a proliferation of such systemic and pluralistic approaches which challenge and indeed present alternatives to the classical conceptions of genres as static checklists of necessary and sufficient conditions. The research is at a much more preliminary state in the area of literary historiography in general, and theories of periodization in particular, yet primarily within this framework the discussion of the literary trend takes shape.