Geoff Eley's 'Is All The World A Text?'

In his overarching article Is All the World a Text? which was written in 1996, Geoff Eley summarizes the prevalent approaches to history writing and claims that things began to change around 1980’s and ‘discursive shift in the rhetoric and practice of the profession from “social” to “cultural” history effected via… the linguistic turn’ (Eley, 1996, 194) The most prominent characteristic of these new times fostered by the discursive shift according to Eley, was the eagerness of historians to become their own theoreticians by literary means instead of focusing on methodology and this kind of an independent theorizing , affected particularly the new and undisciplined fields of feminist theory and cultural studies due to lack of an existing practice

‘Literary theory, has sharpened the practice of reading to a point of technical sophistication where meanings can seemingly be endlessly disclosed’ by focusing on ‘authorial intention and the text’s single attainable meaning’. (Eley, 1996, 208) Linguistics and literature theory says that language is the only reality, which eventually constructs the reality. Canning defines linguistic turn as ‘rather than simply reflecting social reality or historical context, language is seen instead as constituting historical events and human consciousness’ (Canning, 1994, 370) However, for Eley, this does not make history pointless or undoable. ‘History’s value is not as an archive or a court of real experience. It is as a site of difference, a context of deconstruction partly because it is de facto always being fought over’ says Eley as a response to the literary theorists who presupposes a resemblance between literature and history which degrades history to a fiction just as Stedman Jones who claims that ‘history like other social sciences, is totally an intellectual operation that takes place in the present and in the head of the historian.’ (Jones, 1976,

She explains how the feminist historians effected by different approaches to history writing; and one of the most influential impacts was Lacan’s language-centered theory. This interpretation of gender makes the categories of man and women problematic by suggesting that masculinity and femininity are subjective and fictional constructs instead of inherent characteristics. Still, Scott is uneasy with the tendency of reifying ‘subjectively originating antagonism between males and females as the central fact of gender’ (Scott, 1988, 39) because the terms suggested by Lacan do not provide the possibility to think of the construction of subjectivity within social and historical