Well, not exactly. But I have pretty much stopped reading that still continuing thread on Sade over at C18-L, on the grounds that I’m not a masochist and I’m very, very bored by it.
Since I decided not to read any more of the posts on the subject, I don’t know about this for sure, but: while there was plenty of argument about (eg) whether Sade’s revolting life has any bearing on how we should understand and value his writing and ideas, I don’t recall seeing any real challenge to the basic assertion that (I think this was the meaning intended, although Brandon has pointed out that the sentence is in fact highly ambiguous!) it is necessary to study Sade in order to understand the eighteenth century.
(The writer of the original assertion has since gone further and stated repeatedly that in order to understand Sade one has to read everything he ever wrote and not rely on any other interpreters, which makes me wonder why he runs a journal for Sadist - sorry, Sadean studies…)
Perhaps this is related to a complaint that, I gather, comes up on the list from time to time: it’s overwhelmingly inhabited by literary scholars, who tend to assume more generally that literary texts and writers are the only (or primary) route to understanding their period. The rest is, at best, background. (NB that I’m not categorising all literary scholars this way, but there are some like that.)
As a social historian whose subjects were often illiterate or semi-literate, whose lives and experiences were in many ways utterly different from those with the education, time and/or leisure to write long novels and philosophical tracts, and whose sources are largely archival documents, that is an approach I can have some difficulties with, to say the least.
I have my own blinkers and preferences, but I do try to remember and acknowledge that there are other ways of approaching the past than my own. (I would never assert that studying murder in a certain period is the only way to understand that period, for heaven’s sake.) You don’t have to claim that your subject is the only thing that matters in order to justify your work.
3 comments on “Sadism at C18-L”
Hear hear!
And women and men, educated, ill-educated and uneducated, wrote a great many pieces that were not “literature” in our terms, but are still well worth reading (and are still all too often ignored).
Oh, yes. It’s always wonderful to come across stray letters by servants and the like hiding away in archives. Or if they couldn’t write themselves, they told their stories to those who could - which is how we get an enormous range of source materials from court depositions and pauper petitions, to the Ordinary’s Account and the Newgate Calendar, to many early memoirs/autobiographies; ‘filtered’, yes, but no less important for all that (I read the slave Mary Prince’s autobiography as an MA student; it was amazing).