H ERBERT G RABES The Role of Literature in Major Cultural Changes What is the role of literature in major cultural changes? In order to approach an acceptable answer, I will endeavour to combine some theoretical considerations with empirical examples from English cultural history since the sixteenth century, starting with my use of the terms ‘literature’ and ‘cultural change.’ What I’ll be doing is basically to tick off stations of change in thought and literary culture that are familiar to all of us but which merit rehearsal. Closer examination shows that cultural change is constant and continuous - even if there must also be something significant that persists for a longer time in order for us to be able to speak about ‘culture’ at all. What will be understood in this sense as ‘culture’ is, above all, a particular hierarchy of shared values, signifying practices, rituals, and customs. As the process of change is almost imperceptible, I take my examples from major cultural shifts that were radical enough to affect notions of cultural conformity and basic assumptions. This is possible because cultural change, historiographically speaking, is continuous but not uniform; phases of more pronounced change separate periods of relative stability. A quite similar development obtains, of course, in Darwinian evolution, 1 complex social systems, 2 and science and technology. 3 With regard to Europe, the prevailing view among cultural historians is that there have been at least three such periods in more recent history: the Renaissance, the late eighteenth century, and the advent of modernism, with further, unresolved debate on whether postmodernism has been merely a continuation and intensification of modernism or a new period of its own. Particular weightings are additionally possible: in Britain, for example, one might argue that more radical change took place in the later seventeenth Longer periods of fairly static equilibrium are almost always separated by brief spurts of more radical change. 1 Ernst Mayr, “Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution,“ Evolution as a Process, ed. Julian Huxley, A.C. Hardy and E.B. Ford (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), 157-180. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria: The Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered,“ Paleobiology 3.2 (1977): 115-151. 2 Connie Gersick, “Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm,” The Academy of Management Review 16.1 (1991): 10- 36. 3 D.A. Levinthal, “The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change,“ Industrial and Corporate Change 7.2 (1988): 217-247. H ERBERT G RABES 4 century than elsewhere. And if one looks at the aetiology of postmodernism, the strong originary influence of France on the United States has been followed by a degree of attenuation elsewhere. My understanding of the term ‘literature’ accords with its application in almost all British histories of English literature, which is twofold: on the one hand, the term covers the specific generic domains of poetry, fictional narrative, and drama; on the other, it embraces the much broader domain of culturally important writing, consisting, for example, of philosophical, theological, historical, political, economic, and scientific writings. And although my major concern will be to trace the role of ‘literature’ in the former, narrower sense of language art, the wider area of culturally important writing will at least be touched on as a comparative foil. As is well known, the early modern period of sixteenth-century England was born of several major innovations. The first, Renaissance humanism, was brought by English scholars from Italy to Cambridge, where the centre of humanist studies was soon to have a major influence on education, including that of the young Queen Elizabeth. It was already a change based on the literary record, in this case on ancient Greek texts brought to Italy by those who had fled there after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The second innovation was the immense extension of the known world with the discovery of America and the ensuing reports on ‘the Indies,’ including, for example, Sir Walter Raleigh’s accounts of the paradisiacal Guianas in 1596. The third innovation was the early influence of the new heliocentric world-picture as developed on the Continent, the Copernican version of which was disseminated in England by 1576 in Thomas Digges’s A perfit description of the Celestiall Orbes. The fourth innovation was the introduction of the scientific, or inductive, method as promoted by Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning of 1605. By that time, too, the new print technology established by Gutenberg in the late fifteenth century had become immensely important for the dissemination of new ideas. Likewise worthy of mention is the radical improvement in the knowledge of the human body brought by systematic anatomical dissection, an art brought to England in a pirated edition of Vesalius’s De humani corporis libri septem of 1545. However, it was the Reformation that turned out to be the most incisive single factor in early modern cultural change, as is evident from the fact that some eighty percent of all publications in sixteenth-century Britain were at least partly devoted to the matter of religion. The break with Papal Rome and the emergence of the Anglican Church headed by the monarch reinforced national identity, and the notion of England as an elect nation, which was articulated and disseminated in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments of 1563, was to become the justificatory backbone of territorial expansion from the Age of Drake through to the apotheosis of the British Empire in the nine- The Role of Literature in Major Cultural Changes 5 teenth century. On the dissenting flanks of Anglicanism, there were also others who wrote out of deep religious conviction, either radical Puritan sectarians or recusant and often exiled Catholics who defied censorship by having their pamphlets printed abroad and smuggled into the country. Both currents of faith helped lay the foundation for a modern public sphere. 4 Regarding the role of literature in a narrower sense within this major cultural change, the development of a much greater range of genres, subgenres, and styles already bespeaks multifarious and energized forces of influence. The central position of court culture favoured the extensive practice, first in manuscript and then in print, of often sophisticated love poetry, ranging from the continuation of the Petrarchan tradition to John Donne’s introduction of far-fetched metaphors or from Spenser’s moral conception of love to Donne’s ideal of a union of body and soul and even George Wither’s coolly insouciant “if she be not for me, / What care I, for whom she be.” 5 * The quite real social hardships caused by major economic changes found expression in such social satires as Nashe’s Pierce Penniless (1592), and everyday social life was reflected in the newly proliferating drama, as in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) or Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614). Resistance to cultural change is exemplified by Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (1590-96) with its great display of traditional moral views, whereas Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (1604) with its cynical inflections exemplifies openness to cultural change and the implications of new knowledge. It may, however, be taken as a sign of the complexity of the relation between literature and cultural change that in Shakespeare’s plays we find evidence of both functions. While, for instance, the distribution of sympathy in Richard II (1594) reveals a nostalgic bias toward the sanctity of kingship and a world-picture dominated by the Great Chain of Being, the bias of Romeo and Juliet (1598) is clearly in favour of the young couple who resist their parents’ wishes regarding marriage, and the central message of Measure for Measure (1603), that justice is incomplete without the redeeming virtue of mercy, was far ahead of its time, in which one was ready to kill or die for one’s convictions but mercy was largely unknown. And we may assume that the demonstration on the public stage of the dire consequences of what were still widespread views must have had a significant impact and was certainly an agent of change. 4 Cf. Herbert Grabes, Das englische Pamphlet I. Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit (1521- 1640) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990); Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). 5 George Wither, “Shall I wasting in Dispaire,” The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, eds. Herbert Grierson and Geoffrey Bullough (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1934; repr. 1966), 285, ll. 39-40. H ERBERT G RABES 6 The next major cultural change came about with the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution in the later seventeenth century. With the spreading of what T.S. Eliot called the “dissociation of sensibility,“ 6 Ecclesiastical authority could not, however, prevent the beginning of the ‘Age of Reason’ with its investigation of the nature and scope of certain knowledge, as foregrounded by Locke in his radically empiricist Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bishop Berkeley’s subjective idealism in his Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and Hume’s psychological empiricism in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1739). Hume’s Enquiry is typical of the new intellectual attitude revealed in the shift, in the midseventeenth century, from the ‘anatomy’ as the most popular book-title to that of the ‘enquiry’ - in the period between 1660 and 1700, there were some 94 published ‘anatomies’ as against 299 ‘enquiries,’ and more than a thousand of the latter were to come in the eighteenth century, among them Samuel Pycroft’s A Brief Enquiry into Free-thinking in Matters of Religion; and Some a moderate distinction between religious and mundane affairs, the national Anglican Church and the State, became possible, so that at last dissenters were tolerated and Catholics were no longer persecuted. The quarrels between Puritans and more traditional Anglicans about the right interpretation of Scripture had reduced the authority of revealed religion to the point where a ‘religion of nature’ took shape, with the conviction that it was better to study the Book of Nature as a Divine Creation. This was also a result of the fact that, after the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 and the publication of Newton’s Philosophia Mathematica in 1687, the world picture began to shift once more under pressure from the ascendant natural sciences, and a compromise had to be struck with the ever-strong demands of religious faith. A solution was presented by Deists like John Toland (in his Christianity Not Mysterious, 1696), William Wollaston (in The Religion of Nature Delineated, 1722), and Anthony Collins (in A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of Christian Religion, 1724). There were of course, various counter-measures taken by the Anglican bishops, who had already been alarmed by the rise of strictly secular conceptions of society and the state, and had not only brought Parliament to condemn Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and De Cive in 1666 but also to pass a more general bill against atheism. Their influence remained so strong that John Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689 still had to be published anonymously. 6 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, 2 nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951; repr. 1966), 281-291, 286. The Role of Literature in Major Cultural Changes 7 Pretended Obstruction to it (1713) and Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1764). 7 In this context, one could say that Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), the greatest work of literature of this period, was also styled as an enquiry into “the ways of God to men.” 8 Milton sought to justify these ways by promising true believers that they could “possess / A paradise within” 9 However, that - in spite of the more recently uttered skepticism - a “dissociation of sensibility” had indeed occurred at that time can be gathered from the fact that, beside such pious and remedial works, there were quite a few satirical and even cynical ones of excellent quality. One need only mention Samuel Butler’s burlesque of Puritanism, Hudibras (1663), Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels (1726), or Pope’s Dunciad (1728) as pertinent examples of a quite mundane, critical, and often vicious attitude far removed from the high moral tone of Milton, Bunyan, and even Defoe. Within the same broad stream, then, there can be countervailing currents and undertows of change, in proto-Hegelian patterns of thesis and antithesis, such as the release from Puritan constriction represented by Restoration comedy, which, playing the changes on both excoriated and condoned immorality, ranged from the witty if often unfair repartee of Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) to the frivolous talk and manners of Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675). at a time when hopes of building a heavenly Jerusalem on earth had ebbed away. Such a turn from institutionalized religion to a personal embracing of faith also becomes evident in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), in which the strenuous life journey from birth to death serves as an extended metaphor or allegory for the inner pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem beyond; and it appears likewise, if with a mercantile spin, in its rival for the position of the first British novel, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). If we add Dryden’s heroic tragedies with their spectacular action and heralding of romantic love, as in The Indian Emperor (1665) or The Conquest of Granada (1672), and the rise of the moral and quotidian essay not much later in the hands of Steele, Addison, and The Tatler (1709-11) and The Spectator (1711-12), it becomes evident that literature in the narrower sense was as varied and contrasting as the oppositional mental and social trends typical of an ongoing major cultural change. On the Continent, it was the late eighteenth century that was marked not only by the political upheaval of the French Revolution but also by such a 7 Cf. Herbert Grabes, “Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment,” Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory, eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning and Sibylle Baumbach [REAL 25], (Tübingen: Narr, 2009), 65-80. 8 John Milton, Paradise Lost 1.26, ed. Alastair Fowler (Harlow: Longman, 1998). 9 Milton, Paradise Lost 12.586-87. H ERBERT G RABES 8 significant modernization that historians tend to consider this period as the historic moment of the advent of modernity. In Britain, however, the fear that the French Revolution might be contagious not only led to press censorship and even a temporary suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in the 1790s but also to a massive reaction against change and to a delaying of proposed social reforms. Thomas Paine’s defence of the French Revolution in The Rights of Man (1791) and his attack on Christianity in The Age of Reason (1792) had to be published in Paris; Jeremy Bentham’s Treatise on Civil and Penal Legislation and his Theory of Penalties and Rewards appeared first in a French translation (the former in 1802, the latter in 1818); and in 1803, William Blake was accused of sedition and brought to trial. In fact, even after Waterloo it was dangerous to propose any kind of reform, and one needs only mention the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to realize how rigorously the government reacted to any real or imagined threat. This does not mean that the demand for major change made by Paine and Bentham but also, for instance, by Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793) could be suppressed in the long run. This was especially the case since changes were indirectly supported in the 1820s by such Evangelical churchmen as William Wilberforce, who, after successfully campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade, published an appeal on behalf of the slaves of the West Indies (1823), and by liberal theologians such as Thomas Erskine and Thomas Arnold. Under the influence of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, significant social reforms were achieved, not least thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832. It can also be said that, in this same political climate in Britain, the major change of sensibility and style in poetry that became known as Romanticism preceded and at least partly initiated more general cultural changes. Taken individually, the specific traits of Romantic poetry (such as the rediscovery of nature, delight in the marvellous, heightened interest in and sympathy with “humble folk,” the dominance of emotion over reason, a predilection for medievalism and primitivism, and even a concentration on inner experiences including the power of the imagination over the experience of outward reality) can all be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century with its exploration of the gothic and the sublime. What one will not find before the Romantic poets, however, is the relative retreat by William Blake from the life-world (save in the social commitment of “The Tyger” and “The Little Black Boy”) in favour of the world of the imagination, beginning with the Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), and reaching its peak in the period from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) to Vala, or the Four Zoas (1795-1807). What one does not find earlier, either, is that combination of the aforementioned traits as it first appears in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Bal- The Role of Literature in Major Cultural Changes 9 lads from 1798. Most important was the revolt against both the stance and the stylistic conventions of the Neoclassical school, above all its so-called ‘poetic diction,’ in favour of a wide range of poetic styles, including quite simple and seemingly banal ones. And what turned out to be prophetic in view of further cultural developments was the raising of the individual subject to epic proportions in long autobiographical poems, above all in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1805, revised up to 1850), but also in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-16) and Shelley’s Alastor (1816). Byron demonstrated in Don Juan (1819-24) that this did not necessarily mean heroizing the self but could also be a display of Romantic irony, and when he presented a heroic stance, it could only be found in revolt, in a spirit that remained unvanquished even in defeat, as we encounter it in his Cain of 1822. In literary periodization, then, the term ‘Romantic Revolt’ is aptly applied to writers who endeavoured to establish a culture that ran counter to the dominance of Deistic theology, political traditionalism, increasing utilitarianism, significant progress in the sciences, and industrialization. This counterculture could, of course, only have an indirect pragmatic impact on the wider cultural scene in which it was embedded, an indirect humanization that became tangible in slight improvements regarding child labour or the termination of first the slave trade and then plantation slavery as such. * The next major cultural change in the domain of the arts and in culture at large was, of course, the turn to ‘modernism.’ This was shaped to a large extent by inventions in the realm of technology that radically changed modes of transport and communication and thus ‘modernized’ the world. In the late 1870s, Bell developed the first telephone and in the 1920s, radio became widely disseminated; in the 1880s, Daimler developed the first motor car, and in 1903, the first flight by the Wright brothers with a motor-driven plane was successful. Yet there are good reasons to call the period of modernism one of delusion rather than of hopes and illusions. Eighteenth-century physicotheology as a compromise between faith and science no longer seemed possible after Charles Lyell’s Elements of Geology (1838) and Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859); Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary view of society in his Principles of Sociology (1874), and Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887) deconstructed the notion of a moral universe; Marx in Das Kapital (1867-94) sought to show that capitalism as it had developed along with industrialization was wrong from the start; Freud, from Die Traumdeutung (1900) onwards, came to show that we are not masters of our own self; Bergson, in his Essai sur les H ERBERT G RABES 10 données immediates de la conscience (1889), demonstrated that our inner experience of time is by no means in accordance with the internationally shared clock-time that dominated the industrial age; Einstein, in his special and general theories of relativity of 1905 and 1915 respectively, alleged that even measured clock-time was relative to velocity; and Vaihinger in his study Die Philosophie des Als Ob of 1911 showed that the principles of all fields of culture are merely more or less useful fictions. What remained was a thorough epistemological skepticism, or the insight that the result of all our efforts to obtain greater knowledge of the ‘real’ in terms of the ‘Ding an sich’ or ‘thing in itself’ will, metaphorically speaking, be more and more photos of a person we will never be able to meet, so that we will never be sure which one is the most similar. All the new insecurities - what W.H. Auden termed “the Age of Anxiety” 10 When we come to the role of literature in early modernist culture in Britain, we find many works in the domain of narrative fiction that reflect the waning or radical loss of traditional certainties and values, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). They certainly called attention to what was at stake, and this was even truer for the war poems of Wilfred Owen (written 1917-18, published posthumously 1920) and for many of Yeats’s later poems from the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) onwards. - called for an antidote, which was found at the time in a strong belief in one or the other ideology as a kind of secular religion that offered an overall meaning. As we well know, the three dominant ones were nationalism (which partly included racism), fascism, and communism. In Britain it was still above all nationalism, and the consequences were in comparison less disastrous than what befell Italy, Germany, Spain, and Russia. Most important with respect to cultural change were, of course, works that mediated the new epistemological skepticism through a more or less radical perspectivism, as in Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903) and, later, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), or those which reduce the validity of perceived reality to a continuous merger of the present with quite individual moments from the past in a stream of consciousness, as in T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). And even more radical, of course, are works such as Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses (both from 1922) which symbolize the breakdown of a unified world-view by means of a montage of heterogeneous styles, discourses, and themes. As a result, modernist literature was no longer beautiful or sublime but became, like twelve-tone music and abstract painting, quite strange both for 10 W.H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (London: Faber and Faber, 1947). The Role of Literature in Major Cultural Changes 11 the untrained eye and ear, and for those accustomed to an earlier aesthetic. As I have endeavoured to show in my own investigation of the modernist aesthetic, this strangeness can be interpreted as an index of the unstable distinction of subject and ‘world,’ culture and ‘nature.’ 11 What should not be forgotten is the fact that modernist literature or, more precisely, its strangeness gave an immense boost to its partner (or parasitic) institutions, literary criticism and theory. The critic would attempt to reduce its strangeness, and the theorist explain why it had to be there in the first place. It meant the advent of a whole new cultural industry. The philosopher T.E. Hulme, for instance, influenced both Pound and Eliot by his new definition of the image and by the concept of the organic unity of a poem; This means that the major works of Anglo-American literature from 1910 to 1930 were definitely avant-garde and only in retrospect look like expressions of the Zeitgeist. The strange new way of writing was not popular at the time. Notably, too, most of those who established literary modernism in Britain were foreigners: Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot were Americans, Yeats was Irish, and, on the same level, only Virginia Woolf was an English writer. More esteemed in that period and reflecting mainstream culture was the ‘Georgian’ poetry that appeared in five anthologies between 1912 and 1922 and to which such poets as A.E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden contributed. It was certainly different from the late-Romantic poetry of the 1890s, but in comparison to the ‘strange’ poems of Pound and Eliot, it was quite traditional. 12 * C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, with their semantic study The Meaning of Meaning (1923), laid the foundation for New Criticism, and Richards’s disciple William Empson, with his Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), that of the later reader-response theory. According to both cultural and literary critics, there was another major cultural turn in the early 1960s, a turn to what became known as ‘postmodernism,’ a period that lasted at least until the late 1980s but in many respects persists to this day. The 1960s are kept in communal memory as the decade of a cultural revolution, a change that was most radical in the United States but soon spread to Europe. Though in Britain it was less radical, there were significant changes in the domain of social values, evident in a raft of liberal 11 Herbert Grabes, Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 158-163. 12 T.E. Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry” (1909), Selected Writings, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998), 59-67. H ERBERT G RABES 12 legislation on sexual equality, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, censorship, and the death penalty. The 1960s were also the time when youth culture became dominant, most prominently observable in the pop-music scene, from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and The Who, through Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Elton John, and Gary Glitter in the 1970s, to hip hop, rap, Michael Jackson, and Madonna in the 1980s. What greatly helped a change were the spectacular technological advances in the area of communication, from colour TV, audiocassettes, video recorders, digital cameras, and mobile phones to personal computers, the beginnings of the internet, and email. An already mobile society became even more so in the new jet age, and space travel was no longer reserved for science fiction. And in the area of architecture, a major visual shift took place from sober modernist functionalism to a hitherto impugned mixing of styles, a return of ornamentation, and bland irony. Regarding literature in a wider sense, the ideas behind these changes were disseminated in Ihab Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971), Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1975; in French, 1973), Jean- François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984; in French, 1979), and Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). That Britain was on the receiving end in this respect had a lot to do with the strong political orientation of the ‘new left’ from Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton and of cultural materialism as represented by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. It was much too serious to even come near the radical relativism and playfulness of postmodern sensibility with its preference for ironic, parodic, or travestying déjà-vu effects. This may also be the reason why British contributions to postmodern literature were initially few, generally came late, and were rather tame. Among the exceptions are, of course, B.S. Johnson’s novel The Unfortunates (1969) with its 27 chapters presented loosely in a box, or Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Thru (1975) with its experimental arrangement of words on a page. John Fowles’s bestseller The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), with its pastiche make-up and alternative three endings, can count as somewhat postmodern, as can, in the 1980s, novels with a hybrid mixture of styles and genres such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), historiographic metafiction like Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Nigel Williams’s Witchcraft (1987), Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987), or Antonia Byatt’s Possession (1990), and the faking of authenticity in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987). All in all, it can be said, however, that in Britain the traditional mode of realistic narrative with its imitative world-making remained quite alive. Something similar can be said for the work of the most celebrated poets of the period, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. For all its stylistic excellence The Role of Literature in Major Cultural Changes 13 and human depth, their poetry is ‘traditional’ and far from the experimentation of postmodern American poets like John Ashbery or Charles Bernstein. * As is to be expected, the role of literature in a narrower sense within the major cultural changes under observation has not been uniform. There were avant-garde works promoting change, works adhering to the mainstream, and works that countered change by affirming traditional values. The advantage of fictional stories, poems, and plays is that they do not consist of general statements expecting assent but present particular situations, characters, actions, events, thoughts, and feelings and are therefore less likely to raise inner defences or provoke public censorship. And their fictional status also helps, of course, in this respect: any possible deviation from cultural norms seems less objectionable outside of what is regarded as the ‘real’ world. Literary works can thus function as ‘hidden persuaders’ motivating or supporting change, but they can also operate against change in this way. Bearing this in mind, what has proved at least as important regarding cultural change has been literature in the wider sense of the literature of ideas, knowledge, and belief. From Foxe’s Acts and Monuments and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning to Foucault’s The Order of Things (1971, in French: 1966), and The Archeology of Knowledge (1972, in French: 1969) or Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), particular books have had an immense influence on cultural change, the development of ‘new vocabularies’ (Richard Rorty), values, signifying practices, and whole ‘discursive formations’ (Foucault). Heeding Vaihinger’s warning that all our ‘true’ axioms regarding the real are merely useful fictions, the difference between such writings and fictional writings appears, anyway, to be one of kind rather than of category. And in view of both the continuous and incidental changes in both domains I would like to end with the comforting assurance that our cultural archive in terms of our libraries (fast disappearing physically but hopefully reconstituting digitally) allows us to create and experience the new against the horizon of the past and our communal memory. For, to recall an astute observation by Odo Marquard, “Zukunft braucht Herkunft,” 13 or ‘where we are going has to do with where we’ve come from’ - in order to shape the future, we need to be aware of our heritage. 13 Odo Marquard, Zukunft braucht Herkunft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003). H ERBERT G RABES 14 Works Cited Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety. London: Faber and Faber, 1947. Eliot, T.S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Essays, 2 nd ed. 1951. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. 281-291. Gersick, Connie. “Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm.” The Academy of Management Review 16: 1 (1991): 10-36. Gould, Stephen Jay and Niles Eldredge. “Punctuated Equilibria: the Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered.” Paleobiology 3: 2 (1977): 115-151. Grabes, Herbert. Das englische Pamphlet I: Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit (1521-1640). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990. ---. “Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment.” Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory. Eds. Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning and Sibylle Baumbach. [REAL 25] Tübingen: Narr, 2009. 65-80. ---. Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic.’ Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008. Hulme, T.E. “A Lecture on Modern Poetry” (1909). Selected Writings. Ed. Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet, 1998. 59-67. Levinthal, D.A. “The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change.” Industrial and Corporate Change 7.2 (1988): 217-247. Marquard, Odo. Zukunft braucht Herkunft. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Mayr, Ernst. “Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution.” Evolution as a Process. Eds. Julian Huxley, A.C. Hardy, and E.B. Ford. London: Allen and Unwin, 1954. 157-180. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler. Harlow: Longman, 1998. Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Wither, George. “Shall I wasting in Dispaire.” The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse. Ed. Herbert Grierson and Geoffrey Bullough. 1934. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966. 285.