Thursday, August 05, 2004

Intellectual Autobiography

Fisch began his 1944 edition of Vico's Autobiograhy with a detailed summary of the publishing and editorial events that summoned it forth. Moreover, Fisch recorded a series of Modernist efforts, in the US, UK, Germany, and elsewhere, to repeat the exercise of which Vico's writing is the best example.

For a number of years, I have considered extending an invitation to various humanistic scholars primarily interested in literature to write relatively brief (25 ms pp) intellectual autobiographies in the spirit of Vico's response to Procia's call for such documents. Of course, such a call would have to be restricted and modified: we do not have the luxury of space available in the 18th century journals and we will be less anxious to hear as much about family as Porcia originally requested.

When Porcia published Vico's exemplar, he made a comment from which I would like to start out in issuing an invitation. What we want to emulate is simply Vico's "manner of laying before the public the detail of his studies." My interest comes from a simple fact of generational and so institutional change: many of our teachers acquired their education through readings and experiences far different not only from ours, but from our students' and younger colleagues'. My goal is not simply recollective or antiquarian but analytic and historical. In other words, I would like to invite colleagues to record their education with the aim of making a more complete history of the present available. I would like to produce some reminders for a younger generation but I would most like to make available lines of thought and modes of work that likely will be forgotten under the pressures of a less literate, historicist, and political progressive set of pressures.

I would like to invite figures as different as Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, William Spanos, Edward Chalfant, and Hillis Miller to represent complex educational formations and historical experiences across the 20th century. Of course, we would require time to assemble a set of representative figures.

Please, post your criticisms, elaborations, and suggestions to this Blog by adding them as comments to this post. I hope this can be the first step in working together. If this seems an hopelessly romantic idea, one b2 should not pursue, please post your reasons for thinking this.

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