Person:

Simpson, William

Our language for the truths of literature is reformist and nominalist; our experience of reading is, by contrast, habitual and idealist. Contrary to the way we talk about what kind of new, liberatory truths literature expresses, our reading practice itself is grounded in long-standing forms of recognition. Every time we interpret we recall deep seated, ingrained and circular protocols that give us access to truths immanent within the separate realms of literary experience. As interpreters, we depend on préjugés that produce recognition of already existing truths. Literary knowledge, that is, is dependent on recognition. We know because we knew. Literary cognition is fundamentally a matter of re-cognition. This default position for reading is certainly at odds with any revolutionary pedagogic program that prizes originality and pure novelty, wholly freed from the strictures of the past. The default practice of “recognitional” reading proposed here is not, however, at odds with a reformist and a nominalist interpretation of a work, since the recognitions of literary experience are not instances of mere repetition; on the contrary, the literary recognitions we care about are memorable because we see a truth—we know the place, we see a face—as for the first time, and as unique. The recognition is old and general; the force of the recognition is reformist and very particular.

This essay is a rebuttal to Debora Shuger’s 2008 essay, “The Reformation of Penance,” in which she takes aim at revisionist Reformation scholarship, and in particular at James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution, published in 2002, as exemplary of the error of the revisionists with regard to penance. Her larger charge against the revisionists is that they tend to offer a history of “loss,” and that they have introduced “polemical distortion” into Reformation scholarship that had been free of that for fifty or so years. This essay challenges Shuger’s scholarly procedure as well as her substantive arguments. The larger aim of the essay is to establish ground rules for engagement in the rapidly developing field of Trans-Reformation cultural studies.