(Dis) Continuity: A History of Dreaming

Abstract

This spread of medievalist (ir-) responses to historicist imperatives, The Post-Historical Middle Ages , has a rich history—of which, thankfully, it is unusually aware. Its thought is affiliated with the Foucauldian notion of “genealogy” 1 ; Deleuze and Guattari’s remarks on the political functions of archaism in modernity 2 ; Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire 3 ; Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious 4 ; the Freudian notion of the heritability of unconscious impressions 5 ; Lacan’s emphasis on the historicity of the drives 6 ; de Certeau’s The Writing of History 7 ; in our own field, the work of Paul Strohm, Karma Lochrie, Patricia Ingham, Nicolette Zeeman, Erin Labbie, Michael Uebel, Bruce Holsinger. 8 The editors of this volume, Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala, are themselves authors, respectively, of an impressive genealogical analysis of the recursiveness of the past in subsequent fantasy and enactment ( New Troy , 2003) and an exemplary practice of reading the presence of absence in episodic and critical signification ( Absent Narratives , 2002). 9 Their concerns are prominent in the present essay. I hope this essay will display historicism’s possibilities. As Scala notes, “getting beyond historicism does not meant getting rid of history so much as it means transcending ‘historicism as usual.’” These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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