I have been reading Barbara Lewalski’s excellent biography, The Life of John Milton (Blackwell, 2000) – so what a surprise to find that she has a former protégé at Stanford – Prof. Roland Greene, director of the Stanford Humanities Center.
Here’s an excerpt from his appreciation for his “beloved mentor and colleague” over at Stanford’s Arcade. The article, “The Critical Horizon of Barbara K. Lewalski,” was written some time after the scholar’s death on March 2, 2018. He opens with her early 1953 article “The Authorship of Ancient Bounds,” about the provenance of an unsigned Puritan tract. Then on to the great Puritan poet, the subject of her first book in 1966, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained:
More than fifty years on, it is still the best thing ever written on Paradise Regained, but at this distance one is struck by how carefully Lewalski draws the horizons of her scholarship: that is, the sense of what this work is ultimately about. In a blog post called Misplaced Horizons in Literary Studies, I have written about the drawing of horizons in criticism and the perspectives that contribute to them, and how (especially now, as our common enterprise seems less and less urgent to the rest of the academy, let alone the public) we have to see the making of a horizon as a statement of values: is the horizon the real world, or intellectual history, or the Bible and its influence, with literary texts inside that horizon as perspective? Or is literature itself the horizon, with all of these things inside it as perspective? It is the latter kind of project, I argue, that has met certain parochial customs and rewards of our discipline while pulling us away from the intellectual life of other disciplines—because historians, philosophers, social scientists, and others simply do not see literature as a valuable horizon in relation to the real world.” He writes that Lewalski “broaches Biblical poetics as a guiding concept or a horizon. Suddenly the limitations of genre as a horizon are plain, and while that term continues to play an important role as a contributing perspective, from here on it is nearly always controlled by Lewalski’s more powerful and original concepts of Biblical and Protestant poetics that permit her to chart the flow of ideas and figures into and out of seventeenth-century literature.”
“Lewalski’s later work, notably three distinguished monographs, builds on this foundation, but the definitive moment in her scholarship is the passage through the first three books to 1979. A year later, she left Brown University, where she had taught since 1956, for Harvard, and remained there until her retirement in 2015. I had the privilege of knowing her as my teacher and adviser in my undergraduate years at Brown and then a few years later as my colleague at Harvard. For many of us, Barbara at Brown was her essential phase, in which her approach was still being formed in conversation with … peers such as [Earl] Miner, who became my Ph.D. adviser. By contrast, Barbara at Harvard in the 1980s and nineties was an eminence who embodied a settled method, a then somewhat old-fashioned historical scholarship that stood apart from the fashion for the New Historicism of the time. In the Brown years, moreover, she was younger (not yet fifty when I first knew her) and more informal, and her human existence took place in Providence, where she lived until the end of her life, as it never did in Cambridge. I can see Barbara in shabby Horace Mann House at Brown in about 1977, wearing casual clothes she would never appear in at Harvard, sitting at the head of the seminar table with one leg tucked under her and reciting in a brassy, colloquial tone: “Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus / Through windows and through curtains call on us?” As I told my students a few days after Barbara’s passing, I’ll always hear certain poems in her voice. Maybe our voices that survive resonantly in the memories of students are as powerful as those in our criticism; or maybe these voices are somehow the same. I believe Barbara found her voice in those early books and in the Brown era.”
Read the whole thing here.
September 21st, 2022 at 2:41 am
We have to see the making of a horizon as a statement of values: is the horizon the real world, intellectual history, or the Bible and its influence, with literary texts inside that horizon as perspective? Or is literature itself the horizon, with all of these things inside it as perspective? So all these ideas are the topics of the debate.