Young folks these days

"We 'other Victorians,' to borrow a phrase of Michel Foucault--discussing attitudes to sex rather than empire--have been constructing our identities against those world-encompassing Victorians for the past century, and some still feel it necessary."

--Mark F. Proudman, "The Most Important History: The American Historical Review and Our English Past," Journal of the Historical Society 6.2 (2006): 197. 

It's rather distracting to find a misattribution that drastic in an essay complaining about someone else's ignorance of Victorian historiography...

Comments

[bob]

Actually, Foucault uses exactly this phrase as the title of the first section of the first volume of his History of Sexuality. He acknowledges that he took it from Marcus.

[bob]

I should explain that Foucault uses the phrase "We other Victorians" to mean us, the heirs of Victorianism, not the disreputable Victorians Marcus studied.

[Miriam]

Yeah, I remember that Foucault acknowledges that he got the phrase from Marcus, which is partly why I'm "distracted"--a) Marcus' book is still quite famous, and b) Foucault identifies his allusion's source. It's a doubly bizarre mistake.

[Jonathan]

Isn't it, per Bob's explanation, a different sense and thus not a mistake?

[Vance Maverick]

Standing around with the other parents of toddlers at a San Francisco playground this weekend, I saw a woman with a T-shirt from one of our best-known bakeries. On the back was printed "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker -- Willy Wonka." This isn't wrong, but it isn't right either. I'd expect greater scruple in the august Journal....

[degustibus]

A woman's not always a woman, but a good cigar is a horse of another feather.
Pogo, or Walt Kelley or....

[Mark Proudman]

As Bob and Jonathan point out, I borrowed the usage and the meaning from Foucault, and therefore referred to him. That Marcus used the same combination of two words in another sense is, as has been said, a distraction - the fact is irrelevant to the argument. I make no attempt to survey the uses of the phrase; I see nothing erroneous, let alone bizarre.

But it's good to know someone is reading the JHS,

Cheers,

Mark Proudman