The Trouble with the Period Model

The major critiques of the period model in this century were themselves not unrelated to the rise, since the advent of romanticism, of literary trends and movements as dominant forms of literary grouping. At the same time, the critiques of periodization also formed a response to the shrinking periodic time span, “the increasingly smaller zones of demarcation with constantly shifting and highly flexible limits” of literary periods in the so-called modern age

(Weisstein, 1973a:71).^[10] The views I present below played an important role in setting in motion a process of radically rethinking the traditional conceptions of period and periodization, a process in which literary historians are still very much engrossed today.

Pioneering work in this area was done by René Wellek, who laid down—in a series of critiques of chronological and nominalist “period terms” (Wellek, 1941, 1970, [1963] 1973; Wellek and Warren, [1949] 1963)—the foundations for the shift of theoretical emphasis from period to trend. Without Wellek's work it is difficult to conceive of subsequent explorations, preliminary though they still are, into the concepts of trend, current, and movement in the work of Poggioli (1968), Guillén (1971 and 1993), and Douwe Fokkema (Fokkema, 1984; Fokkema and Ibsch, 1987). Yet, despite the relative pluralism of their positions, these critics still operate very much within the conceptual map whose reductionism they so aptly criticize. Thus, for example, Wellek and Warren, in their classic Theory of Literature ([1949] 1963:262), while warning against the “dateline approach” to literary periodization, still assimilate movements and trends to periodization, whereas they devote a special chapter to genre theory. In practice, however, a different focus seems to be emerging, for Wellek's concrete discussions typically deal with terms designating not just a chronological period but also a “style,” such as “baroque,” “romanticism,” and “symbolism.”^[11]

More than other critics, Wellek consistently focuses on the formation, spread, and distribution of what he calls “period terms.” He is therefore able to confront the nominalist versions of the period model head on, challenging the automatic identification between label and propositional content. His discussion of symbolism starts out with this general methodological admonition: “[T]he history of the word need not be identical with the history of the concept as we might today formulate it. We must ask, on the one hand, what the contemporaries meant by it, who called himself [by it], or who wanted to be included in a movement called [by that name], and on the other hand, what modern scholarship might decide about who is to be included and what characteristics of the period seem decisive” (1970:90).

The distinction between the history of the term and the history of the concept is, indeed, crucial for literary trends in particular. As Frank Kermode (1988:119) has observed with respect to specific labels such as “metaphysical poetry,” “baroque,” or “rococo,” “Isms … and period descriptions have the same ambivalent quality, quite often

starting life as sneer words and then being converted by other users into eulogism.” Perhaps the most important component of Kermode's argument is his admonition, with Jean Rousset, that “isms [are only] a kind of grid constructed by us…. One must avoid confusing the grid and the artists, the interpretive schema and the works undergoing interpretation” (1988:122-23). Kermode argues convincingly that the use of a period term involves not only chronological and typological classification but often also ideological and evaluative choices. Furthermore, he asserts that period concepts themselves, not just their labels, “inevitably involve valuation” (1988:121) because they are used in shaping and reshaping the canon with “the clear purpose of making a usable past, a past which is not simply past but also new” (1988:116). But when he describes the workings of this mutual implication of periodization, valuation, and canon formation, Kermode's account becomes increasingly troubling. He claims that “the characteristics [of a period] thought to confer value (or its opposite) can be sought anywhere” (1988:121). And because periods and movements are value-laden constructs imposed by “a consensus of a relatively small number of people” (1988:125), the power and legitimacy of these “authoritative choices” mustn't be challenged lest we lose “our” precious contact with the past, rewritten and reevaluated as it may be: “… in the end the question is not whether [the grids we impose on the past] are unfairly selective, but whether we want to break the only strong link we have with the past…” (1988:126).

Wellek's critique of nominalism, unlike Kermode's, betrays the belief that it is not necessary to limit the meaning of modernism, for example, to the conventional extension of that label because it is still possible to decide “what characteristics of the period seem decisive” (1970:90). Wellek holds on to this last vestige of intensionalism, considering some form of definition still implicitly viable. Kermode's work, by contrast, seems to take the critique of period labels to such an extreme that in its profound relativism it begins to meld into the nominalism which it originally criticized. As a result, the concepts, and not only the terms, designating literary trends emerge as arbitrary a posteriori constructs, inventions aimed at making history manageable. Only the isolated works themselves are endowed with factuality, and historical poetics is reduced to a heuristic device for maintaining—through constant reinterpretation—canonical monuments and making them usable for a new audience. By focusing exclusively on the retrospective usefulness of trend labels in maintain-

ing a canonically “usable past,” Kermode's argument diminishes the multiplicity of social and subjective contexts within which that past—when still present—was created. It downgrades both the literary group as a sociopoetic force and those marginal or censored currents on the periphery of a dominant trend that form and inform the very processes of change in literary systems.

In the final analysis, Kermode's critique of nominalism turns full circle to reveal a cynical acceptance, if not a defense, of the periodological status quo, ruled though it may be by arbitrary label and institutional convention:

There must be institutional control of interpretation, … and selfperpetuating institutions resist not only those they think of as incompetent for reasons of ignorance, but also the charismatic outsider. They are bound to be reactionary in some sense; … There is always the possibility that within a large and not particularly centralized institution there may develop subcanons and revisions of periodization, to suit, say, feminists and Afro-Americans or Derrideans, or even feminist Afro-American Derrideans. What is certain is that revolutionary revisions would require transfers of powers, a reign of literary terror … and the business of valuing selected monuments and selected books, saved from the indiscriminate mass of historical fact, would in any case continue. (1988:126)

The “interpretive community” that Kermode invokes in the name of Stanley Fish is thus implicitly advised to resist radical canon reform of any kind, not only the reform aimed at accommodating the most recent fads of lit-crit but also those changes that would allow the repressed voices of marginal literatures, ethnic minorities, and women to be heard. With the traditionally conservative move of raising the specter of a revolutionary reign of terror, Kermode suggests that since periodization is just an “invented grid” anyway, we would all be better off—and certainly safer—with the old canon than with a new or revised one.^[12] While other parts of Kermode's book, and certainly many of his other works, moderate this extreme canonicism, it is important to see the full implications of his position and its ambivalent origin in a critique—which is also a defense—of the nominalist period model.

I do not believe that Kermode's conclusions are a necessary consequence of his premises, and therefore it is possible to accept the latter yet reject the former. The inseparability of applying period labels from value judgment points to the intrinsic connections between

periodization and canon formation. But if literary trends and the periods within which they function are perceived systemically and historically, then exposing the teleological and system-dynamic goals of trend formations (including the processes by which period labels are selected and conventionalized) need not lead to the nominalist defensiveness that Kermode now seems to espouse. In the introduction to an important study of postmodernism, Brian McHale (1987:4–11) argues that just because “romanticism,” “modernism” and “postmodernism” are all “literary historical fictions, discursive artifacts constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively by literary historians,” it does not mean “that all constructs are equally interesting or valuable” (1987:4). Between the two extremes that Wellek originally charted out as “the Platonic idea” of a literary period or trend and its “arbitrary linguistic label” (1970:92) there lies a multiplicity of partially overlapping, fuzzy groupings which are no less aesthetically, psychologically, and historically real for their producers and consumers because their ontology is determined by the specific dynamics of literary intertext and socialhistorical context.

The incongruity between the history of a term and the history of a concept forms the basis for the objection to strict nominalism. The discrepancy between the extensions of the categories of a chronological period and the literary trends within it forms the core of the critique of the dateline approach. Since the 1940s, Wellek has pointed out repeatedly that there is no such period that all individual works in it can be subsumed under the period term. By now, theorists dealing with periodization within anything resembling a pluralist framework start from the premise that conventional periodizations in literary history do not reflect the entire literary production of a period but only that portion which for a variety of reasons became canonical and associated with the dominant literary grouping.^[13] Wellek's contribution is unique, however, because in exposing the monolithic nature of period terms he provides the necessary transition toward a pluralistic, dynamic account of literary trends (though he never quite makes that full transition himself). In the process, Wellek also begins to examine the type of conceptual category that literary groupings constitute:

For many years I have argued the advantage of a multiple scheme of periods, since it allows a variety of criteria…. A multiple scheme comes much closer to the actual variety of the process of history.

Period must be conceived neither as some essence which has to be intuited as a Platonic idea nor as a mere arbitrary linguistic label. It should be understood as a “regulative idea, ” as a system of norms, conventions, and values which can be traced in its rise, spread, and decline, in competition with preceding and following norms, conventions, and values. (1970:92–93; emphasis added)^[14]

A work of art is not an instance of a class, but is itself a part of the concept of a period which it makes up together with other works. It thus modifies the concept as a whole. ([1963] 1973:92; emphasis added)

Although Wellek describes this type of concept as a “regulative idea,” the description fits exactly what John Searle (1969:33) terms a “constitutive” (as opposed to a “regulative”) rule: “[R]egulative rules regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behavior; for example, many rules of etiquette regulate inter-personal relationships which exist independently of the rules. But constitutive rules do not merely regulate, they create or define new forms of behavior. The rules of football or chess, for example, do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but as it were create the very possibility of playing such games.” Searle's definition of constitutive rules may prove important for the Wittgensteinian component of my analysis of modernism. The fact that the category structure of literary trends is more like games than like etiquette may have something to do with why trends seem to follow a family-resemblance model (in the context of Wittgenstein's view of language as a game).^[15]

Wellek purports here to talk about literary periods, but his “multiple scheme” could actually refer to the entire spectrum from period through movement and trend to style, if not genre proper. Implicit in Wellek's critique, though, is a challenge to the linear sequentiality of the continuum of degrees, proposing in its stead a set of multiple, simultaneous spatial schemes. Yet despite the implications of his own model, and his own admonitions against both essentialism and linear continuity, Wellek's language betrays more than a trace of an organicist reification of period as having a unidirectional life cycle—a “rise, spread, and decline”of its own.^[16]

In several ways, Wellek's views are still innovative today. First, as I have argued, is his emphasis on the need for a multiple scheme of periods.^[17] Through a critique of monolithic periodization, Wellek leads to a repudiation of the chronological period model because the temporal sequences of literary production do not all belong to the

same trend. Thus, numerous antimodernist and postmodernist works were written within the supposed modernist time frame. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is not the scheme of periods which is multiple, but the trends, movements, currents within each period. Interestingly, this critique seems intimately linked with Wellek's attempt to extricate himself from the confines of his own formalist and structuralist heritage. Focusing on a short and relatively neglected essay, the last collaborative effort of Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson, “Problems in the Study of Language and Literature,”^[18] Wellek suggests that “what is needed (and this is implied in…Tynjanov and Jakobson) is a modern concept of time, modeled not on the metric chronology of the calendar and physical science, but on an interpenetration of the causal order in experience and memory” (“Evolution in Literary History,” in Wellek, [1963] 1973:51). Applied to the study of modernism, this first revision of the period model is an important step toward understanding, for example, how the variety of trends from futurism to surrealism and data can all be subsumed under one period term, “modernism.”

Second, Wellek underlines the great internal divergences among the various traits of each period concept and the inseparability of the concept and its members (what he terms a “regulative idea”). This is an important step toward developing a logically rigorous yet nonreductionist account of the internal make-up of each literary trend. Wellek's description of the clusters of heterogeneous works “in the actual process of history” as constituting and modifying the concept of period, of which they are part, combines historical relativism with typological pluralism. This amalgamation is made especially clear in his discussions of baroque and symbolism:^[19]

In discussing baroque as a period term we should, however, realize that, also as a period concept, baroque cannot be defined as a class concept in logic can be defined. If it were, all individual works of a period could be subsumed under it. ([1963] 1973:92)

A period concept can never exhaust its meaning. It is not a class concept of which the individual works are cases. (1970:120)

Wellek, however, never exactly defines that elusive “regulative idea” which both constitutes and modifies its membership.

Third—and of particular importance for an international cluster of trends such as modernism—Wellek argues that simple chronology

will not do because the works that have come to be associated with one period, trend, or movement not only are located in discontinuous or at least partially incompatible points in time but are also situated in disparate social and geographic spaces. Many discussions have shown this discontinuity to be true of modernism, but the implication is always that it is due to modernism's special international and contradictory make-up. Wellek's argument turns the need for a geography of periodization into a necessary component of the general theory of literary groupings:

Literary terms most frequently radiate from one center but do so unevenly; they seem to stop at the frontiers of some countries or cross them and languish there or, surprisingly, flourish more vigorously on a new soil. A geography of literary terms is needed which might attempt to account for the spread and distribution of terms by examining rival terms or accidents of biography or simply the total situation of a literature. (1970:91)

No small task this, and one which is of crucial importance for the Hebrew and Yiddish modernist experiments “on a new soil” that are at the center of my study. What seems to undermine the poignancy of Wellek's own call to include a spatial component in periodization is his almost eerie emphasis on terms to the exclusion of the concepts designated by these terms and their social, historical, and geographical frame of reference. It almost seems as if for Wellek the linguistic labels were all that determine “the total situation of a literature.” While this metalinguistic emphasis is perhaps understandable given the terminological confusion surrounding the various -isms of literary periodization, it nevertheless creates a Phantom Tollbooth effect,^[20] where cultural centers radiate with literary terms and disembodied signs are either waved through or detained at national borders. Thus, at the same time that Wellek underscores the significance of national struggles, waves of immigration, and the uprooting of communities for the emergence of radical differences between contemporary works of the same literary period, his language denies the very reality and referentiality of those forces.

All three of Wellek's critiques of the chronological period model—the multiple scheme, the period as regulative idea rather than logical class, and the emphasis on a geography of periodization—motivate, albeit still implicitly, a transition from chronological period terms to the (competing or successive) literary movements and trends which

are active within a given period and which develop within it contradictory yet salient styles.

As I suggested above, Wellek's positions both have their origins in and form a reaction against the intellectual context of late (system-theoretical) Russian formalism and Czech structuralism, especially their models of literary dynamics. At the same time, his views are also to be understood in the context of postwar central European reactions against nineteenth-century historical relativism,^[21] on the one hand, and static typology in the tradition of Geistesgeschichte, on the other.^[22] Interestingly, Wellek's argument seems to be particularly fired up when he reacts against the “purest example” of static periodization “whose roots are a romantic belief in the homogeneous spirit of ages and a love of local color in time…which are…a synchronic counterpart of the diachronic myth of national character” (Guillén, 1971:446). Indeed, Guillén, Wellek, and many other more pluralist scholars of periodization present their alternative accounts quite self-consciously in opposition to this once-dominant trend in German literary history.^[23] This reaction is quite understandable since many of these critics witnessed the classificatory bent of Geistesgeschichte turn into nationalist, “volkish,” and racist ideal typen.^[24] This political impetus is strongly felt throughout the work of many other European scholars, as well as in the research of Guillén, one of the few theorists of the literary trend proper.

In his seminal article, “Second Thoughts on Literary Periods,” Guillén (1971:420-69) struggles to unearth a tradition of theorizing about literary trends, currents, and movements, and to elucidate—like Wellek—the basic terms for discussing this topic. But since such a tradition does not really exist within literary theory itself, he raises the examples of Bogumil Jasinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss as two of the most important early critics of chronological periodization in general and credits them with introducing—each in a different context—the need for a shift of emphasis from period to trend. The connections between their views and those of Wellek are quite striking, although Guillén, who acknowledges his own debt to Wellek, does not explicitly link him to this decidedly continental intellectual chain.

Compare, for example, the arguments in favor of a multiple scheme of periodization and against viewing period as a traditional logical class, which Wellek developed between the 1940s and the 1960s, with Jasinowski's logical analysis of history in an article pub-

lished in Paris in 1937: “Les époques consécutives ne s'excluent donc pas, comme s'excluent les membres d'une division en classes, car les unités périodologiques ne sont pas fondées sur la disjonction des caractères et ne relèvent pas du principe de contradiction dont toute la discrimination dans le domaine du discontinu … reste inséparable.”^[25] Period concepts, then, do not constitute classes in the strict logical and set-theoretical sense because the multiple successions of periods are not mutually exclusive. They are not based on a logical disjunction of features and do not follow the principle of contradiction (the law of the excluded middle).

But does a multiple scheme of periods necessarily preclude their description as logically consistent classes? Not, for example, according to Meyer Schapiro (1970:113) in his important remarks at the New Literary History Symposium on Periods: “The same object can be classed in many different ways, all logical and consistent with our knowledge of the structure of the objects. Hence many different period classifications are possible. It is the problem and the theoretical viewpoint that determine the choice of a classification, with its order of generality and its particular historical boundaries.” While I would take issue with the characterization of periodization as a classification of objects, and while I would want to know more on the exact logical and methodological interrelation of such numerous period classifications, I find the argument useful for an account of the heterogeneous literary trends of modernism.

Guillén, however, completely sidesteps the logical issue of category structure, which Jasinowski, Wellek, and Schapiro all raise. The problem, he argues,

with regard to Jasinowski's view,…is whether a period can adapt itself to the trajectory of time as intimately as such a view assumes. In other words, the distinction between an absolute and a relative periodization is not simply a matter of logical stress—as if, for example, we were saying: when we focus on the dominant features of a period, differences tend to come out sharply; but if, on the other hand, we stress dialectics, and keep in mind the “dominated” traits, which are likely to recur in another period, we tend to obtain a mixture of differences and similarities. Jasinowski's basic concern, essentially, was with temporal (as against merely spatial) typologies, and with their peculiar nature. Our own concern should be with the extent to which periods are supposed to reflect becoming or to parallel the course of time. (1971:435)

Guillén, disregarding the importance of logical analysis in the Polish intellectual tradition of which Jasinowski is a typical representative, writes off this part of Jasinowski's argument as “simply a matter of logical stress.”^[26] The “failure” of period concepts to constitute a logical class in the classical set-theoretical sense, however, continues to be singled out in contemporary criticism as one of the main causes for the impossibility of theorizing about historical concepts (e.g., Perkins 1991, 1992). Since the literary object of study is so intimately dependent on logically loose, variable, and inconsistent period concepts, the argument goes, any hope for “truly theoretical” explanations of literary phenomena must be abandoned.

In fact, a rather similar critique of period concepts from the perspective of a belated logical positivism has been presented by Joszef Szili. The terms of Szili's argument echo Jasinowski's and expand on it using the framework developed by another Polish logician, Tadeusz Pawlowski, in a 1980 study of the logical structure of concepts.^[27] From the historicity and changeability of period concepts, Szili (1988:35) infers the impossibility of logically defined literary concepts in general: “L'idée selon laquelle il existe une notion de littérature cohérente qui changerait tout en restant coherénte, c'est-à-dire garderait son identité tout au long de son évolution n'est qu'une illusion. Je ne pense pas à l'illusion de nos organes sensoriels, mais à celle de notre sens de la formation de notions logiques.” The very historicity of period concepts prevents them, and consequently the notion of literature itself, from maintaining identity over historical change. Therefore period can be nothing but a pseudoconcept (Szili, 1988:34). As Szili acknowledges, this profound skepticism about the possibility of unified concepts in what he calls “aesthetic literature” is shared by a variety of contemporary literary approaches “within the New French criticism, some English and French Marxist theories, American deconstruction, the work of certain semioticians and the school of empirical literary science … centered around the periodical Poetics” (1988:33).

Interestingly, Szili himself is well aware of recent logical and set-theoretical frameworks, based on Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance and on Lotfi Zadeh's (1965) theory of “fuzzy sets,” which could accommodate open-ended, heterogeneous categories such as period concepts. However, given the positivist nature of Szili's theoretical expectations, this accommodation constitutes a profound disappointment:

[I]l n'a qu'à constater à la manière de Wittgenstein que la cohérence n'est fondée que sur une vague “ressemblance familiale.”

Les spécialistes de la logique nous avertissent que des “notion” de la sorte appartiennent à la catégorie des notions ouvertes, ce qui veut dire qu'il n'y a pas de limites exactes qui séparent les objets et leurs subordonnés des autres objets…. Il s'agit donc d'un terme imprécis et doté de plusieurs significations (“Fuzzy”). (1988:35)

Accepting the fuzziness and open-endedness of these categories as a blessing and not as a curse would require, of course, a fundamental revision of our critical expectations. Ironically, literary critics who end up with the most skeptical, antitheoretical conclusions are often those who embrace the most positivistic, rigid views of what constitutes a theory in the first place.^[28]

In discounting Jasinowski's critique of period concepts as failing to form a logical class, Guillén has in fact glossed over one of the most central—and most potentially misleading—repudiations of periodization in literary history. What Guillén considers more crucial to the issue of periodization than Jasinowski's “matter of logical stress” is what he suggestively and rather vaguely describes as “the vaunted reconstitution of becoming” (Guillén, 1971:437). Drawing on the last chapter of Lévi-Strauss's La pensée sauvage (1962), Guillén arrives at an analysis of literary periods as a cross between chronology and typology. Rejecting the notion of period as “an uninterrupted and homogeneous series” (what I have been referring to as the period model, or the first third of the continuum in Figure 1), Lévi-Strauss offers instead the model of “a constant leap from one order to another” (Guillén, 1971:436). This position prefigures, despite its typically structuralist formulation, later poststructuralist and system-theoretical notions of ruptures, glissements, or slippage in the dynamics of literary periods. Guillén is fully aware of the importance of this tension between a linear conception of a sequence of periods and a spatialized view of a discontinuous series of leaps between multiple sequences of periods. He concludes that “[p]eriods, existing somewhere between the order of chronology and that of an atemporal typology, between diachrony and synchrony, are thus a good example of ‘le caractère discontinu et classificatoire de la conaissance historique’ [Lévi-Strauss, 1962:345]” (1971:437-38).

This description, in effect, articulates the conceptual map outlined in Figure 1, a map which, despite its linear distortions, points to the symptomatic location of the literary trend in-between the two poles of

typology and periodization. However, when Guillén offers in the same study examples of the two poles, of “two limit-concepts … toward which most systems of periodization are likely to tend” (1971:445), he fails to go all the way in either direction. Unable to transcend the monologism of the opposition between periodization and typology, which he himself so poignantly criticizes, Guillén ends up describing only the section of the continuum from period to trend. It is quite significant that when it comes to literary styles, modes, and genres, Guillén in the 1970s—like other critics exhibiting pluralism with respect to the first half of the continuum—hung on to a monolithic approach.^[29] While Guillén's later work takes a decidedly Bakhtinian direction and introduces typological and historical variability to the discussion of genre, it continues to subsume the literary trend or current under discussions of periodization, while granting the theory of genres its own name and discourse (see the chapter titled “Genres: Genology,” in Guillén, 1993:109–141).

Douwe Fokkema (1984:1–18), in his semiotically oriented model of literary trends, initially follows Guillén and Wellek in lumping together period and trend, and treating genre as a separate “code.” However, in his application of the five codes “that are operative in virtually all literary texts” (1984:8) to questions of historical poetics, he admits that “variations in the system of genres and subgenres coincide … with the rise of new period codes, or rather group codes.” His subsequent assimilation of genre and period to trend forms the core of Fokkema's innovative argument. Combining Guillén and Wellek's challenges to chronological periodization with the methodology of Russian semiotics—especially Jurij Lotman's (1977) development of the notion of code—Fokkema directly advocates a focus on the center of the continuum: “I would suggest that the literary historian who wishes to come to any general observations, and possibly also explanations, should work with the concept of group code or sociocode, i.e. the code designed by a group of writers often belonging to a particular generation, literary movement or current, and acknowledged by their contemporary and later readers. Together, these writers and their readers form a semiotic community in the sense that the latter understand the texts produced by the former” (1984:11). This emphasis on the sociocode is of crucial importance in integrating the critique of periodization into a socially oriented systemic approach. Since Fokkema's challenge to the period model and his use of the concept of sociocode were designed not only with twentieth-century literature in

mind but also with an eye to accounting for non-Western and marginal literatures, it warrants detailed presentation.

There are several reasons why the term period code is not very appropriate. First, it assumes a unilinear development of all literature, which is wrong, even if one tacitly restricted oneself to European and American literature. Not only are there Asian and African literatures which do not participate in European periodization, but the quick succession and frequent coexistence of different avant-garde movements in twentieth-century European literature in fact forbid the term period code and suggest its replacement by group code or socio-code. Secondly, the term period code obscures the simultaneous existence of avant-garde, canonized, and popular literature …, produced and read by different semiotic communities. The concept of period code tends to obfuscate the fact that, apart from the succession of avant-garde literature, older types of literature are still being read…. The term socio-code may enable us to describe the protracted existence of codes that once were avant-garde but later became canonized or even trivial. Literary history, then, can be described with reference to more or less dominant sociocodes. (1984:11–12)

While Fokkema's actual application of these ideas to readings of modernist literature in effect denies the ideological pluralism of his critique of periodization, his position integrates—at least on the level of programmatic declaration of intent—some of the ideas I wish to develop further. Even so, Fokkema's emphasis on the concept of group results in an interpretation of the center of our continuum which is too literally sociological. In fact, only the self-conscious literary movements, circles, cenacles strictly fit his description. Clearly, not even all subtrends within modernism, one of the most movement-oriented literary groupings of all time, could be said to have had members that regarded themselves and were acknowledged by their contemporaries as belonging to one group. And, yet, one would want to account somehow for these poetically affiliated but sociologically unaffiliated modernists as well. Thus, for example, replacing “period” with “sociocode” will do nothing to remedy the marginalization of women within the canons of modernism, since they did not form a special female modernist “group code,” their literary production—and its suppression—cutting across the movements and trends of international modernism. Elaborating on Joan Kelly's famous title-question, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1984), Gilbert and Gubar suggest that an alternative literary history needs “to interrogate not only

‘accepted schemes of periodization’ [Kelly, 1984:19], but the very concept of periodization in and of itself” (Gilbert and Gubar, 1991:74). The model of marginal modernist prototypes, which I propose here, is in part an attempt to question the very concept of periodization by disrupting the all too automatic identification of biographical group membership with poetic grouping or affiliation with literary trends.

In the first chapter of their book, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature 1910–1940, Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch (1987:1) briefly address some of these difficulties:

The term “movement” pertains to a sociological process. If a group of writers can be clearly distinguished, with manifestoes and other collective publications, one can speak of a movement, e.g., the Futurist movement. If the texts produced by a movement are considered as literature rather than as the result of an intentional function, they can be said to constitute a literary current. Expanding a suggestion by Claudio Guillén [1971:421], we consider the term “literary current” as a complement, not only of “literary period” but also of “literary movement.” The literary current manifests itself in texts, the movement in action.

But is locating the literary current “in texts” any less of a reification of dynamic historical formations than viewing the literary movement as a purely sociological process is a denial of its textuality? As with some of the previous views which I have examined, the problem seems to lie in the entrenched critical practice of bipolar thinking. As a corrective, I wish to emphasize, quite deliberately, the terminological metaphor of a literary trend as a way to fuse and mediate between the current and the movement, as well as the larger oppositions of periodization and typology, society and text.

As Fokkema and Ibsch acknowledge in their account of currents and movements, the new focus on the literary group is indeed unimaginable without their immediate precursor, Guillén. However, Georg Brandes—especially through Guillén's construction of his role as the father of the literary current—provides all these critics with the initial metaphor for the shift from period to trend.