[Fredric] Jameson sees "a seemingly unresolvable alternation between Identity and Difference…"

"If we choose to affirm the identity of the alien object with ourselves--if, in other words, we decide that Chaucer, say, or... the narratives of nineteenth-century Russian gentry are more or less directly or intuitively accessible to us with our own cultural moyens du bord--then we have presupposed in advance what was to have been demonstrated, and our apparent 'comprehension' of these alien texts must be haunted by the nagging suspicion that we have all the while remained locked on our own present ... that we have never really left home at all ... Yet, if as a result of such hyperbolic doubt, we decide to reverse this initial stance, and to affirm, instead and from the outset, the radical Difference of the alien object from ourselves, then at once the doors of comprehension begin to swing closed and we find ourselves separated by the whole density of our own culture from objects or cultures thus initially defined as Other from ourselves and thus as irremediably inaccessible."

* * * * * * * * * *

Freed from static "world pictures," and faced with the opportunity to approach literary texts as agents as well as effects of cultural change, as participating in a cultural conversation rather than merely representing the conclusion reached in that conversation, as if it could have reached no other--at least partially freed from these tired habits and the collapsed assumptions on which they rested, we ought to be able to produce a criticism that would at least make significant strides toward understanding "language in history: that full field."

Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" (1990)