I have been in love with the historical context of literature—with the deep anxieties, enjoyments, and surprises of never quite determinate context. There is not a little fear, too, in that love.

My career as a literary critic has moved through two distinct yet secretly related stages.

When I started teaching in the English Dept. at Yale University and later at the Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, I was preoccupied with British Romantic literature. I thought about the tragically fated—yet always also contingent, strangely liberating—relation between the Romantic self and the historical contexts it both denied (as I put it) and embraced in "imagination." The result of this thought was my 1989 book, Wordsworth: The Sense of History and a series of theoretical articles published between 1989 and 1996 on the New Historicism and cultural criticism (including "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail," "Wordsworth and Subversion: Trying Cultural Criticism," and "The New Historicism and the Work of Mourning").

Much of my work as a cultural critic of literature, I knew (and strangely enjoyed) consisted of extensive, detailed research in historical, social, political, economic, and biographical materials—a kind of data-mining and data-analysis work that creates "context" as what amounts to what we would now call virtual "simulation." Simultaneously, and at first without seeming relation, I was a very early adopter of personal computing technology (1983; see My Technological Life).

Then it struck me in the early 1990's with sudden and utterly compelling clarity that my next research agenda had to be the contemporary culture of information. For, on the one hand, I saw that "information" is now the apotheosis of context: we are to adore the "global" and the "networked"—all that defines us by submitting us to a grand surround. Yet on the other hand, I saw that such context is so intent on the "new" and "innovative" that it is also the apotheosis of the denial of history. We are the new millennium, the new world order, the new economy, "workplace 2000," and so on.

This rift in the ground of contemporary knowledge between, on the one hand, a rich informational context and, on the other, an unprecedentedly sparse historical context seemed to invite thought. From 1992 to the present, therefore, I reinvented myself professionally to deal with this topic. I learned about information technology and its culture both theoretically and practically. I started a series of large-scale Web projects to study information culture and to serve other humanists finding their way in the information age (e.g., my Voice of the Shuttle). I began to study postindustrial business theory, with which information technology is inextricably interwoven (see my Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation). And I am nearing completion on a book titled The Laws of Cool: The Cultural Life of Information. In 1998, I started a NEH-funded curricular-development project with five colleagues in the English Dept. at U. California, Santa Barbara, to extend such research into pedagogy. The project is titled Transcriptions: Literary History and the Culture of Information.

So much, then, for love of "context." There is no literary text, I think, that does not gain from being read in relation to its deeply complicit, if not always explicit, partner: context, which for me means something like "world." This relation is not reductive (as if "world" could be reductive) because it is complicated by the unstable relation between past and present understandings of context—e.g., between the French Revolution's reinvention of the calendar and the Information Revolution' s restructuring of the workplace ("workplace 2000"). There never was a structure of the world (though the insights of structuralism are not therefore to be dismissed); there was always only restructuring. And true, radical restructuring is never twice the same. The "world" as (re)structure is not a template. It is enough to put the fear of God in one.

And what, therefore, of fear? I fear that the overwhelming context of information (like the older notion of "history" and the even older notions of "God" or "fate" it has replaced) will be thought to be determinative when it really isn't. I fear that those who study or simply enjoy the humanities will not recognize how much is yet to be determined in an information society of knowledge work. And I fear that literature will be prematurely given up for lost even as knowledge work is rife with new forms and media of aesthetic experience (named "cool").

Some context about me: I was born in 1953 in Hong Kong. I immigrated to the U.S. in 1959 on a great, white ship called the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt. I have lost the Chinese language (except for some passive understanding). I took up the learning of English with a vengeance. I took a B.A. in English Literature from Yale Univ. in 1975 and then a Ph.D. in the same from Stanford Univ. in 1980. I was an assistant and associate professor in the Yale English Dept. and British Studies Program from 1979 to 1986. I then moved to the English Dept. at Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, where I became a professor. I have a wife and young daughter, with both of whom I am in love. They are also my context.

Highlights

Major Web Projects Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research Transcriptions: Literary History and the Culture of Information (principal investigator) Palinurus: The Academy and the Corporation — Teaching the Humanities in a Restructured World Romantic Chronology (co-edited with Laura Mandell)

©2000, Alan Liu, English Dept., Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (e-mail)  This page last revised 4/29/01