Among the purported benefits of antiquarian historical practice, according to Friedrich Nietzsche in The Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life, is a certain comfort in its non-arbitrary basis. To collect, taxonomize, and analyze material remains from a specific location and time offers a sense of rootedness, even as it risks tedium and political quietism. Implicit in Nietzsche’s evaluation of antiquarianism is a worry that proceeding without the aid of antiquarian collections increases the likelihood of veering in the direction of the arbitrary or subjective. While Nietzsche’s observation lodges in the philosopher’s exploration of the uses and abuses of history for life, this panel turns to the methods of literary studies to questions its the appeals to history and its comforts.

With its attention to particularity and to the individual artifact, antiquarianism arguably is the historiographical mode with which literary historicism most closely aligns. How do our professional dispositions take shape in relation to the comforts of materialist histories? Conversely, might creative-critical practices and associative modes of criticism, for example, be said to break free from the arbitrary anchoring of history? And what if literary-historiography’s narratives were themselves simultaneously more arbitrary and queerer than we’d supposed. Panelists consider how historicist literary scholarship and formalist criticism have negotiated, exploited, or refused the alluring comforts of the non-arbitrary. Taken together, the four speakers below range in expertise from antiquity to the contemporary, each drawing on a distinct archive to apprehend the comforts of literary historicisms.

Colleen Rosenfeld, Professor of English at Pomona College, confronts the charge of arbitrary literary interpretation with “On the Merely Associative.” Here, Rosenfeld theorizes and defends the role of the critic’s subjectivity in literary analysis, asking what might be possible were one not to require the comforts of the non-arbitrary. How might critical supposition and association generate vital work without history’s imprimatur. John Parker, Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia, will deliver “Historicism in the Service of Life.” For Parker, Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return of the same has implications for the study of literature and our discipline’s reflexive reliance on historical periodization. He utilizes an expansive archive ranging from the rise of Christianity to the Reformation to expose the shallowness of the historical divisions that conceptually demarcate literary study. How might we reconceptualize early moder theater, for example, without the grand narrative of secularization underpinning it? Ali Madani, Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford, returns to the scene of antiquarianism’s ascendance in literary study with H. H. Furness’s New Variorum project of the mid-nineteenth century. Book history in extremis, Furness’s variorum attempted to collect, collate, edit, and print the history of Shakespeare editions and scholarship. Yet the variorum mandate of a universal edition fundamentally clashed with the material constraints of printing, especially given the romantic, psychological criticism newly popular on both sides of the Atlantic. How has this apparent divide between the antiquarian/objective and romantic/subjective reemerged in the newest, digital, variorum project currently in production? Joan Lubin, Assistant Professor of English at Yale, attends to the supposed comforts of the non-arbitrary with “Hysterical/Historical.” She turns to Justin Torrez’s National Book Award-winning novel Blackout (2024) and its rerouting of queer history through sexology and its medical designation of “Puerto Rican Syndrome” as a form of colonial PTSD. How might this classification of the hysterical-historical subject prompt us to reconsider Fredric Jameson’s notion that history is what hurts? Does comfort extend to historiography’s queer subjects?