new historicism assignment

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You are here, engl 300: introduction to theory of literature, - the new historicism.

In this lecture, Professor Paul Fry examines the work of two seminal New Historicists, Stephen Greenblatt and Jerome McGann. The origins of New Historicism in Early Modern literary studies are explored, and New Historicism’s common strategies, preferred evidence, and literary sites are explored. Greenblatt’s reliance on Foucault is juxtaposed with McGann’s use of Bakhtin. The lecture concludes with an extensive consideration of the project of editing of Keats’s poetry in light of New Historicist concerns.

Lecture Chapters

Origins of New Historicism
The New Historicist Method and Foucault
The Reciprocal Relationship Between History and Discourse
The Historian and Subjectivity
Jerome McGann and Bakhtin
McGann on Keats
Tony the Tow Truck Revisited

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So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism. It was definable in ways that I’ll turn to in a minute and, as I say, prevalent to a remarkable degree everywhere. It began probably at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices, in part, of Stephen Greenblatt, whose brief essay you’ve read for today. Greenblatt and others founded a journal, still one of the most important and influential journals in the field of literary study, called –always has been and still is an organ for New Historicist thought. It’s a movement which began primarily preoccupied with the Early Modern period, the so-called “Renaissance.” The New Historicism is, in effect, responsible for the replacement of the term “Renaissance” with the term “Early Modern.” Its influence, however, quickly did extend to other fields, some fields perhaps more than others. It would be, I think, probably worth a lecture that I’m not going to give to explain why certain fields somehow or another seem to lend themselves more readily to New Historicist approaches than others. I think it’s fair to say that in addition to the early modern period, the three fields that have been most influenced by the New Historicism are the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and Americanist studies from the late colonial through the republican period. That age–the emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the United States–has been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly influenced by this approach. When we discuss Jerome McGann’s essay, you’ll see how it influences Romantic studies. Now the New Historicism was–and this probably accounts for its remarkable popularity and influence in the period roughly from the late seventies through the early nineties–was a response to an increasing sense of ethical failure in the isolation of the text as it was allegedly practiced in certain forms of literary study. Beginning with the New Criticism through the period of deconstruction, and the recondite discourse of Lacan and others in psychoanalysis, there was a feeling widespread among scholars, especially younger scholars, that somehow or another, especially in response to pressing concerns–post-Vietnam, concerns with globalization, concerns with the distribution of power and global capital–all of these concerns inspired what one can only call a guilt complex in academic literary scholarship and led to a “return to history.” It was felt that a kind of ethical tipping point had been arrived at and that the modes of analysis that had been flourishing needed to be superseded by modes of analysis in which history and the political implications of what one was doing became prominent and central. I have to say that in debates of this kind there’s always a considerable amount of hot air, perhaps on both sides. In many ways it’s not the case that the so-called isolated approaches really were isolated. Deconstruction in its second generation wrote perpetually about history and undertook to orient the techniques of deconstruction to an understanding of history, just to give one example. The New Historicism, on the other hand, evinced a preoccupation with issues of form and textual integrity that certainly followed from the disciplines, the approaches, that preceded them. Also to a large degree–and this is, of course, true of a good many other approaches that we’re about to investigate, approaches based in questions of identity also–to a large degree, appropriated the language of the generation of the deconstructionists and, to a certain extent, certain underlying structuralist ideas having to do with the binary relationship between self and other, and binary relationships among social entities, as opposed to linguistic entities; but still, as I say, essentially inheriting the structure of thought of preceding approaches. So, as I say, it was in a polemical atmosphere and at a moment of widespread self-doubt in the academic literary profession that the New Historicism came into its own–a response, as I say, to the isolation of the text by certain techniques and approaches to it. Now very quickly: the method of New Historical analysis fell into a pattern, a very engaging one, one that’s wonderfully exemplified by the brief introduction of Greenblatt that I have asked you to read: a pattern of beginning with an anecdote, often rather far afield, at least apparently rather far afield, from the literary issues that are eventually turned to in the argument of a given essay. For example: a dusty miller was walking down the road, thinking about nothing in particular, when he encountered a bailiff, then certain legal issues arise, and somehow or another the next thing you know we’re talking about . This rather marvelous, oblique way into literary topics was owing to the brilliance in handling it of Greenblatt, in particular, and Louis Montrose and some of his colleagues. This technique became a kind of a hallmark of the New Historicism. In the long run, of course, it was easy enough to parody it. It has been subjected to parody and, in a certain sense, has been modified and chastened by the prevalence of parody; but it nevertheless, I think, shows you something about the way New Historicist thinking works. The New Historicism is interested, following Foucault–and Foucault is the primary influence on the New Historicism. I won’t say as much about this today as I might feel obliged to say if I weren’t soon be going to return to Foucault in the context of gender studies, when we take up Foucault and Judith Butler together–but I will say briefly that Foucault’s writing, especially his later writing, is about the pervasiveness, the circulation through social orders, of what he calls “power.” Now power is not just–or, in many cases in Foucault, not even primarily– the power of vested authorities, the power of violence, or the power of tyranny from above. Power in Foucault–though it can be those things and frequently is–is much more pervasively and also insidiously the way in which knowledge circulates in a culture: that is to say, the way in which what we think, what we think that it is appropriate to think–acceptable thinking–is distributed by largely unseen forces in a social network or a social system. Power, in other words, in Foucault is in a certain sense , or to put it another way, it is the explanation of how certain forms of knowledge come to exist–knowledge, by the way, not necessarily of something that’s true. Certain forms of knowledge come to exist in certain places. So all of this is central to the work of Foucault and is carried over by the New Historicists; hence the interest for them of the anecdotes. Start as far afield as you can imaginably start from what you will finally be talking about, which is probably some textual or thematic issue in Shakespeare or in the Elizabethan masque or whatever the case may be. Start as far afield as you possibly can from that, precisely in order to show the pervasiveness of a certain kind of thinking, the pervasiveness of a certain social constraint or limitation on freedom. If you can show how pervasive it is, you reinforce and justify the Foucauldian idea that power is, as I’ve said, an insidious and ubiquitous mode of circulating knowledge. All of this is implicit, sometimes explicit, in New Historicist approaches to what they do. So as I said, Foucault is the crucial antecedent and of course, when it’s a question of Foucault, literature as we want to conceive of it–perhaps generically or as a particular kind of utterance as opposed to other kinds–does tend to collapse back into the broader or more general notion of discourse, because it’s by means of discourse that power circulates knowledge. Once again, despite the fact that New Historicism wants to return us to the real world, it nevertheless acknowledges that that return is language bound. It is by means of language that the real world shapes itself. That’s why for the New Historicist–and by this means, I’ll turn in a moment to the marvelous anecdote with which Greenblatt begins the brief essay that I’ve asked you to read–that’s why the New Historicist lays such intense emphasis on the idea that the relationship between discourse–call it literature if you like, you might as well–and history is reciprocal. Yes, history conditions what literature can say in a given epoch. History is an important way of understanding the valency of certain kinds of utterance at certain times. In other words, history is–as it’s traditionally thought to be by the Old Historicism, and I’ll get to that in a minute–history is a background to discourse or literature. But by the same token there is an agency, that is to say a capacity, to circulate power in discourse . Call it “literature”: “I am Richard II, know you not that?” says Queen Elizabeth when at the time of the threatened Essex Uprising she gets wind of the fact that Shakespeare’s is being performed, as she believes, in the public streets and in private houses. In other words, wherever there is sedition, wherever there are people who want to overthrow her and replace her with the Earl of Essex, the pretender to the throne, is being performed. Well, now this is terrifying to Queen Elizabeth because she knows–she’s a supporter of the theater–she knows that is about a king who has many virtues but a certain weakness, a political weakness and also a weakness of temperament–the kind of weakness that makes him sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of kings, that kind of weakness, who is then usurped by Bolingbroke who became Henry IV, introducing a whole new dynasty and focus of the royal family in England. Queen Elizabeth says, “They’re staging this play because they’re trying to compare me with Richard II in preparation for deposing me, and who knows what else they might do to me?” This is a matter of great concern. In other words, literature–Fredric Jameson says “history hurts”–literature hurts, too. [laughs] Literature, in other words, has a discursive agency that affects history every bit as much as history affects literature: literature “out there,” and theater–especially if it escapes the confines of the playhouse because, as Greenblatt argues, the playhouse has a certain mediatory effect which defuses the possibilities of sedition. One views literary representation in the playhouse with a certain objectivity, perhaps, that is absent altogether when interested parties take up the same text and stage it precisely for the purpose of fomenting rebellion. Literature, especially when escaped from its conventional confines, becomes a very, very dangerous positive influence, depending on your point of view on the course of history. So the relationship between history and discourse is reciprocal. Greenblatt wants to argue with a tremendous amount of stress and, I think, effectiveness that the New Historicism differs from the Old Historicism. This is on page 1443 in the right-hand column. John Dover Wilson, a traditional Shakespeare scholar and a very important one, is the spokesperson in Greenblatt’s scenario for the Old Historicism. The view I’m about to quote is that of John Dover Wilson, a kind of consensus about the relationship between literature and history: is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor order. The play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion, regards the deposition of the legitimate king as a “sacrilegious” act that drags the country down into “the abyss of chaos”; “that Shakespeare and his audience regarded Bolingbroke as a usurper,” declares J. Dover Wilson, “is incontestable.” But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure… Greenblatt wins. It’s a wonderful example. It’s the genius of Greenblatt to choose examples that are so telling and so incontrovertible. We know Queen Elizabeth was scared [laughs] on this occasion, which makes it quite simply the case that John Dover Wilson was wrong to suppose that was no threat to her. It’s not at all the point that a broad, ideological view of was any different from what Wilson said; that was perfectly true. Bolingbroke considered a usurper. It was considered tragic that was deposed; but that doesn’t mean that the text can’t be taken over, commandeered and made subversive. Wilson doesn’t acknowledge this because his view of the relationship between history and literature is only that history influences literature, not that the influence can be reciprocal. You see, that’s how it is that the New Historicism wants to define itself over and against the Old Historicism. If there is a political or ideological consensus about the legitimacy of monarchy, the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of succession under the sanction of the Church of England and all the rest of it–all of which is anachronistic when you’re thinking about these history plays–if there is this broad consensus, that’s , hat’s what the play means according to the Old Historicism, even though plainly you can take the plot of the play and completely invert those values, which is what the Essex faction does in staging it in those places where Queen Elizabeth suspects that it’s being staged. Okay. Now another way in which the Old Historicism and the New Historicism differ–correctly, I think– according to Greenblatt is that in the Old Historicism there is no question–I’m looking at page 1444, the right-hand column about a third of the way down–of the role of the historian’s own subjectivity. “It is not thought,” says Greenblatt, “to be the product of the historian’s interpretation…” History is just what is. One views it objectively and that’s that. Now notice here that we’re back with Gadamer. Remember that this was Gadamer’s accusation of historicism, the belief of historicism–what Greenblatt calls the Old Historicism–that we can bracket out our own historical horizon and that we can eliminate all of our own historical prejudices in order to understand the past objectively in and for itself. This is not the case, said Gadamer, remember. Gadamer said that interpretation must necessarily involve the merger of horizons, the horizon of the other and my own horizon as an interpreter. I cannot bracket out my own subjectivity. Okay. If that’s the case, then Gadamer anticipates Greenblatt in saying that the naïveté of the Old Historicism is its supposition that it has no vested interest in what it’s talking about–that is to say, its supposition that it wants history to accord in one way or another with its own preconceptions, but isn’t aware of it. The anecdote–again, wonderfully placed in the polemical argument–that after all, John Dover Wilson delivered himself of these opinions about before a group of scholars in Germany in 1939 is, after all, rather interesting. Hitler is about to be the Bolingbroke of Germany. John Dover Wilson wants his audience to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Stick with vested authority. [laughs] You have a weak democracy, but it a democracy. Don’t let it get away from you.” And so he is speaking, the horse already having escaped from the barn, in this reassuring way about German politics as a means of sort of reinforcing his own view of the politics of Elizabethan England. But this, Greenblatt supposes, is something about which he has very little self-consciousness. That is to say, his own interest, as of course it should be on this occasion, is in the preservation of vested authority, and his own interest then folds back into his understanding of Elizabethan ideology in such a way that it can conform to that interest. He has, in other words, as we say today, a hidden agenda and is very little aware of it, unlike the New Historicist who, following Gadamer in this respect, is fully cognizant of the subjective investment that leads to a choice of interest in materials, a way of thinking about those materials, and a means of bringing them to life for us today and into focus. In other words, it’s okay for Greenblatt, as it was for Gadamer–much to the horror of E. D. Hirsch–to find the significance of a text, as opposed to the meaning of a text. The significance of the text is that it has certain kinds of power invested in it. Those kinds of power are still of interest to us today, still of relevance to what’s going on in our own world. All of this is taken up openly as a matter of self-consciousness by the New Historicists in ways that, according to Greenblatt and his colleagues, were not available consciously in the older Historicism. Now the world as the New Historicism sees it–and after I’ve said this, I’ll turn to McGann–is essentially a dynamic interplay of power, networks of power, and subversion: that is to say, modes of challenging those networks even within the authoritative texts that generate positions of power. The Elizabethan masque, for example, which stages the relation of court to courtier, to visitor, to hanger-on in wonderfully orchestrated ways, is a means–because it’s kind of poly-vocal–of containing within its structure elements of subversion, according to the argument that’s made about these things: the same with court ritual itself, the same with the happenstance that takes place once a year in early modern England, in which the Lord of Misrule is so denominated and ordinary authority is turned on its ear for one day. Queen for a day, as it were, is something that is available to any citizen once a year. These are all ways of defusing what they, in fact, bring into visibility and consciousness–mainly the existence, perhaps the inevitable existence, of subversion with respect to structures and circulatory systems of power. It’s t his relationship between power and subversion that the New Historicism, especially in taking up issues of the Early Modern period, tends to focus on and to specialize in. Now it’s not wholly clear that Jerome McGann has ever really thought of himself as a New Historicist. He has been so designated by others, but I think there is one rather important difference in emphasis, at least between what he’s doing and what Greenblatt and his colleagues do in the Early Modern period. McGann doesn’t really so much stress the reciprocity of history and discourse. He is interested in the presence of history, the presence of immediate social and also personal circumstances in the history of a text. His primary concern is with–at least in this essay–textual scholarship. He himself is the editor of the new standard works of Byron. He has also done a standard works of Swinburne, and he has been a vocal and colorful spokesperson of a certain point of view within the recondite debates of textual scholarship: whether textual scholarship ought to produce a text that’s an amalgam of a variety of available manuscripts and printed texts; whether the text it produces ought to be the last and best thoughts of the author–that’s the position that McGann seems to be taking in this essay–or whether the text, on the contrary, ought to be the first burst of inspiration of the author. All the people who prefer the earliest versions of Wordsworth’s , for example, would favor that last point of view. In other words, McGann is making a contribution here not least to the debates surrounding editing and the production of authoritative scholarly texts. It’s in that context that the remarks he’s making about Keats have to be understood. I think the primary influence on McGann is not so much Foucault, then, with the sense of the circulation of power back and forth between history and literary discourse, as it is Bakhtin, whom he quotes on pages eighteen and nineteen; or whose influence he cites, I should say rather, in a way that, I think, does pervade what you encounter in reading what he then goes on to say at the bottom of page eighteen in the copy center reader: That is to say, phenomena voiced by the material circumstances that produce them or phenomena, in other words, in which the voice of the Romantic solitary individual is not really that voice at all, but is rather the polyglossal infusion of a variety of perspectives, including ideological perspectives, shaping that particular utterance and also, in the case of the textual scholar, shaping which of a variety of manuscripts will be chosen for publication and for central attention in the tradition of the reception of a given text. So all of this McGann takes to be derived from Bakhtin rather than from Foucault. I do think that’s a significant difference between our two authors. Now McGann’s most important contribution to the return to history of the seventies and eighties is a short book called and this book–well, what it is is an attack on Romanticism. At least it’s an attack on certain widely understood and received ideas about Romanticism–ideas with which, by the way, I don’t agree, but this course isn’t about me. is an amalgam of two titles. One of them is the important early critique of Romanticism by the German poet and sometime Romantic Heinrich Heine called , or , in which the subjectivity, even solipsism, and the isolation from social concern and from unfolding historical processes of the Romantic poets is emphasized and criticized. In addition to that–that’s where the word “Romantic” comes from in the title –the other title that it amalgamates is Marx’s book which is about many things but is in particular about intellectuals who think with Hegel– still following Hegel despite believing themselves to be progressive–who think with Hegel that thought produces material circumstances rather than the other way around: in other words people, in short, who are idealists and therefore, under this indictment, also Romantic. McGann’s title, as I say, cleverly amalgamates these two other titles and sets the agenda for this short book, which is an attack not just on Romanticism but on what he believes to be our continued tendency still to be “in” Romanticism, still to be Romantic. There his particular object of attack is the so-called Yale school, which is still under attack in the essay that you’ve read for today. Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman’s well-known essay on Keats’s “To Autumn” are singled out for particular scorn and dispraise, all sort of on the grounds that yes, it’s all very well to read Romanticism, to come to understand it, and even to be fascinated by it; but we can’t Romantic. In other words, our reading of Romanticism–if we are to be social animals, politically engaged, and invested in the world as a social community–must necessarily be an anti-Romantic critique. This is, as I say, still essentially the position taken up by McGann. All right. So I’ve explained the ways in which he differs from Greenblatt in leaning more toward Bakhtin than toward Foucault. I have explained that McGann is engaged primarily in talking about issues of textual scholarship in this particular essay, that he defends Keats’s last deliberate choices, that he believes the so-called “indicator” text of 1820 of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is Keats’s last deliberate choice, as opposed to the 1848 text published by Monckton Milnes in the edition of Keats’s poems that he brought out at that time. Now I think that in the time remaining to sort of linger over McGann, I do want to say a few things about what he says about Keats. I want to emphasize that his general pronouncements about the historicity of texts, about the permeation of texts by the circumstances of their production, their conditioning by ideological factors, is unimpeachable. It seems to me that this is a necessary approach at least to have in mind if not, perhaps, necessarily to emphasize in one’s own work of literary scholarship. The idea that a text just falls from a tree–if anybody ever had that idea, by the way [laughs] –is plainly not a tenable one, and the opposite idea that a text emerges from a complex matrix of social and historical circumstances is certainly a good one. So if one is to criticize, again it’s not a question of criticizing his basic pronouncements. It seems to me nothing could be said really against them. The trouble is that in the case of McGann–who is a terrific, prominent Romantic scholar with whom one, I suppose, hesitates to disagree–everything he says about the text that he isolates for attention in this essay is simply, consistently, wrong. It’s almost as if by compulsion that he says things that are wrong about these texts, and the reason I asked you in my e-mail last night to take a look at them, if you get a chance, is so that these few remarks that I make now might have some substance. Take for example “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” In the first place, who we only read the 1848 text? A scholarly edition–and his main object of attack is Jack Stillinger’s scholarly edition of Keats–gives you basically a variorum apparatus. Yeah, maybe it gives you a particular text in bold print, but it gives you the variant text in smaller print in a footnote. It doesn’t withhold the variant text from you. It says, “No, look, there’s this too. Take your choice.” Really the atmosphere of a variorum scholarly edition is an atmosphere of take your choice, not a kind of tyrannical imposition on the public of a particular version of the text. Everybody knows the 1820 text. “What can ail thee, wretched wight?” is at least as familiar to me, as a Romanticist, as “What can ail thee, knight at arms?” the way in which the 1848 text begins; and frankly how many people who aren’t Romanticists know anything about either text? What are we talking about here? [laughter] [laughs] The Romanticists know what’s going on. They’re not in any way hornswoggled by this historical conspiracy against the 1820 text, and people who aren’t Romanticists don’t care. That’s what it comes down to; but, if it’s not enough simply to say that, turning to the question of which text is better–well, it’s hard to say which text is better. McGann’s argument is that the 1820 version is better because it’s a poem about a guy and a girl who sort of meet, and the next thing you know they’re having sex and that doesn’t turn out so well. In other words, it’s about the real world. These things happen. It’s not a romance, whereas the “What can ail thee, wretched knight?” in the 1848 version–and all of its other variants, the “kisses four” and so on–the 1848 version is a kind of unselfconscious–in McGann’s view–romance subscribing to certain medieval ideas about women, simultaneously putting them on a pedestal and fearing, at the same time, that they’re invested with a kind of black magic which destroys the souls and dissipates the sap of deserving young gentlemen: all of this is ideologically programmed, according to McGann, in the 1848 version. Why? Because Charles Brown behaved despicably toward women, he didn’t like Fanny Brawne, and because Monckton Milnes, the actual editor of the 1848 edition, loved pornography and was a big collector of erotica. So that’s why the 1848 text with its fear of and denigration of women, in contrast to the 1820 text, is inferior. Well, two things: first of all, who’s to say the 1848 text wasn’t Keats’s last thoughts? In other words, yes, he was already ill when the text was published in 1820. It is pretty close to the end of his ability to think clearly about his own work and to worry very much about the forms in which it was published, but at the same time we don’t know when Brown received his version of the text. We can’t suppose, as McGann more than half implies, that Brown just sort of sat down and rewrote it. [laughs] Nobody has ever really said that, and if he didn’t rewrite it, then Keats must have given it to him in that form. Who’s to say that wasn’t his last and best thoughts? Who’s to say Keats didn’t really want to write a poem of this kind? After all, the title, taken from a medieval ballad by Alain Chartier, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” bears out the “What can ail thee, knight at arms?” version. It’s about a Morgan Le Fay-type. For better or worse, whatever we think of that ideologically, it is about, if the title is right, the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1848 version, as opposed to the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1820 version. So the 1848 version is simply more consistent with the title. That’s one point to be made, but the additional point to be made is that taking advantage of the New Historicist acknowledgement that one’s own subjectivity, one’s own historical horizon, is properly in play in thinking about these things, McGann is then able to infuse Keats’s text and therefore Keats’s intentions with a pleasing political correctness. That is to say, Keats can’t possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. By the way, everything– I like Keats, but everything in his letters suggests that he –but back to McGann: Keats can’t possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. Therefore, the 1820 text is the text that he intended and preferred. Okay. That, of course, makes Keats more consistent with our own standards and our own view of the relations between the sexes, but does it, in other words, make sense the Keats whom we know and, despite his weaknesses and shortcomings, love? There is a great deal, in other words, to be said over against McGann’s assertions about this textual issue, not necessarily in defense of the 1848 text but agnostically with respect to the two of them, saying, “Yeah, we’d better have both of them. We’d better put them side-by-side. We’d better read them together; but if by some fiat the 1820 were somehow subsequently preferred to the 1848, that would be every bit as much of an historical misfortune as the preference, insofar as it has actually existed, of the 1848 or the 1820.” I think that’s the perspective one wants to take. Now I was going to talk about “To Autumn.” I’ll only say about his reading of “To Autumn” that McGann, who doesn’t seem to like the poem very much–he likes “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” so he makes it politically correct. He doesn’t like “To Autumn” because he thinks that “Autumn” was published in collusion with Keats’s conservative friends in the of 1820, which bowdlerized everything he had to say of a progressive political nature. He thinks that “To Autumn” is a big sellout, in other words, and that yes, 1819 happened to be a year of good harvest, and so Keats turns that year of good harvest into something permanent, into a kind of cloud cuckoo-land in which the fruit falls into your basket and the fish jump into your net and everything is just perfect. Well, do you think the poem is really like that? You’ve read the third stanza, which McGann totally ignores apart from “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” In other words, he gives you the opening but he doesn’t give you any sense of the rest of the stanza, because for him “To Autumn” is all about the first stanza. For him, Keats seems to identify with the bees who think warm days will never cease, “for Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.” Keats is like a bee. He’s all into the sensuous. Well, again just in terms of historical evidence, this is outmoded by at least eighteen months if we consult Keats’s letters. He was like that early in his career, but he has had severe misgivings about a point of view which is represented in what he said in an early letter: “Oh, for a life of sensations rather than thoughts…” That’s no longer Keats’s position when writing “To Autumn.” Keats’s position when writing “To Autumn” is the position of a guy who has a sore throat just as his tubercular brother did, who is increasingly afraid that he’s going to die soon and is trying to confront mortality in writing what is in fact–and I say “in fact” advisedly–the most perfect lyric ever written in the English language, and which is most certainly not a celebration of sort of wandering around like an aimless bee, thinking that the autumn is perfect but that autumn is always perfect, that warm days will never cease, and that everything is just lovely in the garden. It is not that kind of poem, and it’s really a travesty of it to suppose that it is simply on the grounds that it was published in the of 1820 as a kind of sellout to the establishment under the advice of Keats’s conservative friends. All right. So much then for McGann’s remarks on Keats, which I want to say again in no way impugn or undermine the general validity of the claims that he’s making about taking historical circumstances into account. Precisely, we need to take them into account and we need to get them right. That’s the challenge, of course, of working with historical circumstances. You have to get it right. With that said, let me turn quickly to a review of from Bakhtin to the New Historicism. I may glide over according to Jameson, because we did that at the end of the last lecture, so let me go back to Bakhtin. You can see the way in which in the structure of the first part of the poem is absolutely saturated with the first person singular: I do this, I do that, I like my job, I am stuck–I, I, I, I. Then as you read along through the text you see that the “I” disappears, or if it still appears, it’s in the middle of a line rather than at the beginning of a line. In other words, the “I,” the subjectivity, the first person singular, the sense of having a unique voice–this is gradually subsumed by the sociality of the story as it unfolds. I am no longer “I” defined as a Romantic individual. I am “I,” rather defined as a friend–that is to say, as a person whose relation with otherness is what constitutes his identity, and in that mutuality of friendship, the first person singular disappears. What is spoken in , in other words, in the long run is not the voice of individual subjectivity but the voice of social togetherness, the voice of otherness. According to Jauss, the important thing about is that it is not the same story as In other words, in each generation of reception, the aesthetic standards that prevail at a given time are reconsidered and rethought, reshuffled. A new aesthetic horizon emerges, and texts are constituted in a different way, much also as the Russian formalists have said, only with the sense in Jauss of the historical imperative. is all about the inversion of power between the little guy and the big guy, so that the little guy helps the big guy and that is unequivocal, showing, as in in the Bible, that the valleys have been raised and the mountains have been made low. That’s not the way works. The little guy himself needs help. He needs the help of another little guy. There is a reciprocity not dialectically between little and big, but a mutual reinforcement of little-by-little, and that is the change in aesthetic horizon that one can witness between and In Benjamin the important thing, as I think we’ve said, is the idea that . The humanization of a mechanized world, through our identification with it, is what takes place in In other words, all these cars and trucks, all these smiling and frowning houses, of course, have as their common denominator their non-humanity, but the anthropomorphization of the cars and trucks and of the houses constitutes them as the human. They are precisely the human. We see things, in other words, from the point of view of the apparatus. Just as the filmgoer sees things from the point of view of the camera, so we see from the point of view of the tow truck, right? And what happens? Just as the camera eye point of view leaves that which is seen, as Benjamin puts it, “equipment-free”–so, oddly enough, if we see things from the standpoint of equipment, what we look at is the moral of the story: in other words, the humanity of the story. What we see, in other words, surrounded by all of this equipment, is precisely the equipment-free human aspect of reality. So works in a way that is consistent with Benjamin’s theory of mechanical reproduction. For Adorno, however, the acquiescence of this very figure–the apparatus of mechanical reproduction, of towing again and again and again–in the inequity of class relations, rejected as always by Neato and Speedy, proves that the apparatus which Benjamin’s theory takes to be independent of the machinations of the culture industry, that the apparatus in turn can be suborned and commandeered by the culture industry for its own purposes. All right. I will skip over Jameson. The Old Historicist reading of simply reconfirms a status quo in which virtue is clear, vice is clear, both are uncontested, and nothing changes–in other words, a status quo which reflects a stagnant, existent, unchanging social dynamic. The New Historicism in a lot of ways is doing this, but let me just conclude by suggesting that if literature influences history, might well explain why today we’re promoting fuel-efficient cars, why the attack on the gas guzzler and the SUV or minivan–remember the car that says “I am too busy”–is so prevalent in the story, and why if we read today’s headlines we need to get rid of the Humvee if GM is to prosper, and we need to downsize and streamline the available models. The little guys, Tony and Bumpy, reaffirm the need for fuel-efficient smaller vehicles and you can plainly see that is therefore a discourse that produces history. All of this, according to the prescription of , is actually happening. All right. Thank you very much. One thing that needs to be said about is it has no women in it, and that is the issue that we’ll be taking up on Thursday. [end of transcript]

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So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism. It was definable in ways that I’ll turn to in a minute and, as I say, prevalent to a remarkable degree everywhere. It began probably at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices, in part, of Stephen Greenblatt, whose brief essay you’ve read for today. Greenblatt and others founded a journal, still one of the most important and influential journals in the field of literary study, called –always has been and still is an organ for New Historicist thought. It’s a movement which began primarily preoccupied with the Early Modern period, the so-called “Renaissance.” The New Historicism is, in effect, responsible for the replacement of the term “Renaissance” with the term “Early Modern.”

Its influence, however, quickly did extend to other fields, some fields perhaps more than others. It would be, I think, probably worth a lecture that I’m not going to give to explain why certain fields somehow or another seem to lend themselves more readily to New Historicist approaches than others. I think it’s fair to say that in addition to the early modern period, the three fields that have been most influenced by the New Historicism are the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and Americanist studies from the late colonial through the republican period. That age–the emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the United States–has been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly influenced by this approach. When we discuss Jerome McGann’s essay, you’ll see how it influences Romantic studies.

Now the New Historicism was–and this probably accounts for its remarkable popularity and influence in the period roughly from the late seventies through the early nineties–was a response to an increasing sense of ethical failure in the isolation of the text as it was allegedly practiced in certain forms of literary study. Beginning with the New Criticism through the period of deconstruction, and the recondite discourse of Lacan and others in psychoanalysis, there was a feeling widespread among scholars, especially younger scholars, that somehow or another, especially in response to pressing concerns–post-Vietnam, concerns with globalization, concerns with the distribution of power and global capital–all of these concerns inspired what one can only call a guilt complex in academic literary scholarship and led to a “return to history.” It was felt that a kind of ethical tipping point had been arrived at and that the modes of analysis that had been flourishing needed to be superseded by modes of analysis in which history and the political implications of what one was doing became prominent and central.

I have to say that in debates of this kind there’s always a considerable amount of hot air, perhaps on both sides. In many ways it’s not the case that the so-called isolated approaches really were isolated. Deconstruction in its second generation wrote perpetually about history and undertook to orient the techniques of deconstruction to an understanding of history, just to give one example. The New Historicism, on the other hand, evinced a preoccupation with issues of form and textual integrity that certainly followed from the disciplines, the approaches, that preceded them. Also to a large degree–and this is, of course, true of a good many other approaches that we’re about to investigate, approaches based in questions of identity also–to a large degree, appropriated the language of the generation of the deconstructionists and, to a certain extent, certain underlying structuralist ideas having to do with the binary relationship between self and other, and binary relationships among social entities, as opposed to linguistic entities; but still, as I say, essentially inheriting the structure of thought of preceding approaches. So, as I say, it was in a polemical atmosphere and at a moment of widespread self-doubt in the academic literary profession that the New Historicism came into its own–a response, as I say, to the isolation of the text by certain techniques and approaches to it.

Now very quickly: the method of New Historical analysis fell into a pattern, a very engaging one, one that’s wonderfully exemplified by the brief introduction of Greenblatt that I have asked you to read: a pattern of beginning with an anecdote, often rather far afield, at least apparently rather far afield, from the literary issues that are eventually turned to in the argument of a given essay. For example: a dusty miller was walking down the road, thinking about nothing in particular, when he encountered a bailiff, then certain legal issues arise, and somehow or another the next thing you know we’re talking about . This rather marvelous, oblique way into literary topics was owing to the brilliance in handling it of Greenblatt, in particular, and Louis Montrose and some of his colleagues. This technique became a kind of a hallmark of the New Historicism.

In the long run, of course, it was easy enough to parody it. It has been subjected to parody and, in a certain sense, has been modified and chastened by the prevalence of parody; but it nevertheless, I think, shows you something about the way New Historicist thinking works. The New Historicism is interested, following Foucault–and Foucault is the primary influence on the New Historicism. I won’t say as much about this today as I might feel obliged to say if I weren’t soon be going to return to Foucault in the context of gender studies, when we take up Foucault and Judith Butler together–but I will say briefly that Foucault’s writing, especially his later writing, is about the pervasiveness, the circulation through social orders, of what he calls “power.” Now power is not just–or, in many cases in Foucault, not even primarily– the power of vested authorities, the power of violence, or the power of tyranny from above. Power in Foucault–though it can be those things and frequently is–is much more pervasively and also insidiously the way in which knowledge circulates in a culture: that is to say, the way in which what we think, what we think that it is appropriate to think–acceptable thinking–is distributed by largely unseen forces in a social network or a social system. Power, in other words, in Foucault is in a certain sense , or to put it another way, it is the explanation of how certain forms of knowledge come to exist–knowledge, by the way, not necessarily of something that’s true. Certain forms of knowledge come to exist in certain places.

So all of this is central to the work of Foucault and is carried over by the New Historicists; hence the interest for them of the anecdotes. Start as far afield as you can imaginably start from what you will finally be talking about, which is probably some textual or thematic issue in Shakespeare or in the Elizabethan masque or whatever the case may be. Start as far afield as you possibly can from that, precisely in order to show the pervasiveness of a certain kind of thinking, the pervasiveness of a certain social constraint or limitation on freedom. If you can show how pervasive it is, you reinforce and justify the Foucauldian idea that power is, as I’ve said, an insidious and ubiquitous mode of circulating knowledge. All of this is implicit, sometimes explicit, in New Historicist approaches to what they do.

So as I said, Foucault is the crucial antecedent and of course, when it’s a question of Foucault, literature as we want to conceive of it–perhaps generically or as a particular kind of utterance as opposed to other kinds–does tend to collapse back into the broader or more general notion of discourse, because it’s by means of discourse that power circulates knowledge. Once again, despite the fact that New Historicism wants to return us to the real world, it nevertheless acknowledges that that return is language bound. It is by means of language that the real world shapes itself. That’s why for the New Historicist–and by this means, I’ll turn in a moment to the marvelous anecdote with which Greenblatt begins the brief essay that I’ve asked you to read–that’s why the New Historicist lays such intense emphasis on the idea that the relationship between discourse–call it literature if you like, you might as well–and history is reciprocal.

Yes, history conditions what literature can say in a given epoch. History is an important way of understanding the valency of certain kinds of utterance at certain times. In other words, history is–as it’s traditionally thought to be by the Old Historicism, and I’ll get to that in a minute–history is a background to discourse or literature. But by the same token there is an agency, that is to say a capacity, to circulate power in discourse . Call it “literature”: “I am Richard II, know you not that?” says Queen Elizabeth when at the time of the threatened Essex Uprising she gets wind of the fact that Shakespeare’s is being performed, as she believes, in the public streets and in private houses. In other words, wherever there is sedition, wherever there are people who want to overthrow her and replace her with the Earl of Essex, the pretender to the throne, is being performed. Well, now this is terrifying to Queen Elizabeth because she knows–she’s a supporter of the theater–she knows that is about a king who has many virtues but a certain weakness, a political weakness and also a weakness of temperament–the kind of weakness that makes him sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of kings, that kind of weakness, who is then usurped by Bolingbroke who became Henry IV, introducing a whole new dynasty and focus of the royal family in England. Queen Elizabeth says, “They’re staging this play because they’re trying to compare me with Richard II in preparation for deposing me, and who knows what else they might do to me?” This is a matter of great concern.

In other words, literature–Fredric Jameson says “history hurts”–literature hurts, too. [laughs] Literature, in other words, has a discursive agency that affects history every bit as much as history affects literature: literature “out there,” and theater–especially if it escapes the confines of the playhouse because, as Greenblatt argues, the playhouse has a certain mediatory effect which defuses the possibilities of sedition. One views literary representation in the playhouse with a certain objectivity, perhaps, that is absent altogether when interested parties take up the same text and stage it precisely for the purpose of fomenting rebellion. Literature, especially when escaped from its conventional confines, becomes a very, very dangerous positive influence, depending on your point of view on the course of history.

So the relationship between history and discourse is reciprocal. Greenblatt wants to argue with a tremendous amount of stress and, I think, effectiveness that the New Historicism differs from the Old Historicism. This is on page 1443 in the right-hand column. John Dover Wilson, a traditional Shakespeare scholar and a very important one, is the spokesperson in Greenblatt’s scenario for the Old Historicism. The view I’m about to quote is that of John Dover Wilson, a kind of consensus about the relationship between literature and history:

is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor order. The play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion, regards the deposition of the legitimate king as a “sacrilegious” act that drags the country down into “the abyss of chaos”; “that Shakespeare and his audience regarded Bolingbroke as a usurper,” declares J. Dover Wilson, “is incontestable.” But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure…

Greenblatt wins. It’s a wonderful example. It’s the genius of Greenblatt to choose examples that are so telling and so incontrovertible. We know Queen Elizabeth was scared [laughs] on this occasion, which makes it quite simply the case that John Dover Wilson was wrong to suppose that was no threat to her. It’s not at all the point that a broad, ideological view of was any different from what Wilson said; that was perfectly true. Bolingbroke considered a usurper. It was considered tragic that was deposed; but that doesn’t mean that the text can’t be taken over, commandeered and made subversive.

Wilson doesn’t acknowledge this because his view of the relationship between history and literature is only that history influences literature, not that the influence can be reciprocal. You see, that’s how it is that the New Historicism wants to define itself over and against the Old Historicism. If there is a political or ideological consensus about the legitimacy of monarchy, the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of succession under the sanction of the Church of England and all the rest of it–all of which is anachronistic when you’re thinking about these history plays–if there is this broad consensus, that’s , hat’s what the play means according to the Old Historicism, even though plainly you can take the plot of the play and completely invert those values, which is what the Essex faction does in staging it in those places where Queen Elizabeth suspects that it’s being staged.

Okay. Now another way in which the Old Historicism and the New Historicism differ–correctly, I think– according to Greenblatt is that in the Old Historicism there is no question–I’m looking at page 1444, the right-hand column about a third of the way down–of the role of the historian’s own subjectivity. “It is not thought,” says Greenblatt, “to be the product of the historian’s interpretation…” History is just what is. One views it objectively and that’s that.

Now notice here that we’re back with Gadamer. Remember that this was Gadamer’s accusation of historicism, the belief of historicism–what Greenblatt calls the Old Historicism–that we can bracket out our own historical horizon and that we can eliminate all of our own historical prejudices in order to understand the past objectively in and for itself. This is not the case, said Gadamer, remember. Gadamer said that interpretation must necessarily involve the merger of horizons, the horizon of the other and my own horizon as an interpreter. I cannot bracket out my own subjectivity.

Okay. If that’s the case, then Gadamer anticipates Greenblatt in saying that the naïveté of the Old Historicism is its supposition that it has no vested interest in what it’s talking about–that is to say, its supposition that it wants history to accord in one way or another with its own preconceptions, but isn’t aware of it. The anecdote–again, wonderfully placed in the polemical argument–that after all, John Dover Wilson delivered himself of these opinions about before a group of scholars in Germany in 1939 is, after all, rather interesting. Hitler is about to be the Bolingbroke of Germany. John Dover Wilson wants his audience to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Stick with vested authority. [laughs] You have a weak democracy, but it a democracy. Don’t let it get away from you.” And so he is speaking, the horse already having escaped from the barn, in this reassuring way about German politics as a means of sort of reinforcing his own view of the politics of Elizabethan England.

But this, Greenblatt supposes, is something about which he has very little self-consciousness. That is to say, his own interest, as of course it should be on this occasion, is in the preservation of vested authority, and his own interest then folds back into his understanding of Elizabethan ideology in such a way that it can conform to that interest. He has, in other words, as we say today, a hidden agenda and is very little aware of it, unlike the New Historicist who, following Gadamer in this respect, is fully cognizant of the subjective investment that leads to a choice of interest in materials, a way of thinking about those materials, and a means of bringing them to life for us today and into focus. In other words, it’s okay for Greenblatt, as it was for Gadamer–much to the horror of E. D. Hirsch–to find the significance of a text, as opposed to the meaning of a text. The significance of the text is that it has certain kinds of power invested in it. Those kinds of power are still of interest to us today, still of relevance to what’s going on in our own world. All of this is taken up openly as a matter of self-consciousness by the New Historicists in ways that, according to Greenblatt and his colleagues, were not available consciously in the older Historicism.

Now the world as the New Historicism sees it–and after I’ve said this, I’ll turn to McGann–is essentially a dynamic interplay of power, networks of power, and subversion: that is to say, modes of challenging those networks even within the authoritative texts that generate positions of power. The Elizabethan masque, for example, which stages the relation of court to courtier, to visitor, to hanger-on in wonderfully orchestrated ways, is a means–because it’s kind of poly-vocal–of containing within its structure elements of subversion, according to the argument that’s made about these things: the same with court ritual itself, the same with the happenstance that takes place once a year in early modern England, in which the Lord of Misrule is so denominated and ordinary authority is turned on its ear for one day. Queen for a day, as it were, is something that is available to any citizen once a year. These are all ways of defusing what they, in fact, bring into visibility and consciousness–mainly the existence, perhaps the inevitable existence, of subversion with respect to structures and circulatory systems of power. It’s t

his relationship between power and subversion that the New Historicism, especially in taking up issues of the Early Modern period, tends to focus on and to specialize in.

Now it’s not wholly clear that Jerome McGann has ever really thought of himself as a New Historicist. He has been so designated by others, but I think there is one rather important difference in emphasis, at least between what he’s doing and what Greenblatt and his colleagues do in the Early Modern period. McGann doesn’t really so much stress the reciprocity of history and discourse. He is interested in the presence of history, the presence of immediate social and also personal circumstances in the history of a text. His primary concern is with–at least in this essay–textual scholarship. He himself is the editor of the new standard works of Byron. He has also done a standard works of Swinburne, and he has been a vocal and colorful spokesperson of a certain point of view within the recondite debates of textual scholarship: whether textual scholarship ought to produce a text that’s an amalgam of a variety of available manuscripts and printed texts; whether the text it produces ought to be the last and best thoughts of the author–that’s the position that McGann seems to be taking in this essay–or whether the text, on the contrary, ought to be the first burst of inspiration of the author. All the people who prefer the earliest versions of Wordsworth’s , for example, would favor that last point of view. In other words, McGann is making a contribution here not least to the debates surrounding editing and the production of authoritative scholarly texts.

It’s in that context that the remarks he’s making about Keats have to be understood. I think the primary influence on McGann is not so much Foucault, then, with the sense of the circulation of power back and forth between history and literary discourse, as it is Bakhtin, whom he quotes on pages eighteen and nineteen; or whose influence he cites, I should say rather, in a way that, I think, does pervade what you encounter in reading what he then goes on to say at the bottom of page eighteen in the copy center reader:

That is to say, phenomena voiced by the material circumstances that produce them or phenomena, in other words, in which the voice of the Romantic solitary individual is not really that voice at all, but is rather the polyglossal infusion of a variety of perspectives, including ideological perspectives, shaping that particular utterance and also, in the case of the textual scholar, shaping which of a variety of manuscripts will be chosen for publication and for central attention in the tradition of the reception of a given text. So all of this McGann takes to be derived from Bakhtin rather than from Foucault. I do think that’s a significant difference between our two authors.

Now McGann’s most important contribution to the return to history of the seventies and eighties is a short book called and this book–well, what it is is an attack on Romanticism. At least it’s an attack on certain widely understood and received ideas about Romanticism–ideas with which, by the way, I don’t agree, but this course isn’t about me. is an amalgam of two titles. One of them is the important early critique of Romanticism by the German poet and sometime Romantic Heinrich Heine called , or , in which the subjectivity, even solipsism, and the isolation from social concern and from unfolding historical processes of the Romantic poets is emphasized and criticized. In addition to that–that’s where the word “Romantic” comes from in the title –the other title that it amalgamates is Marx’s book which is about many things but is in particular about intellectuals who think with Hegel– still following Hegel despite believing themselves to be progressive–who think with Hegel that thought produces material circumstances rather than the other way around: in other words people, in short, who are idealists and therefore, under this indictment, also Romantic.

McGann’s title, as I say, cleverly amalgamates these two other titles and sets the agenda for this short book, which is an attack not just on Romanticism but on what he believes to be our continued tendency still to be “in” Romanticism, still to be Romantic. There his particular object of attack is the so-called Yale school, which is still under attack in the essay that you’ve read for today. Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman’s well-known essay on Keats’s “To Autumn” are singled out for particular scorn and dispraise, all sort of on the grounds that yes, it’s all very well to read Romanticism, to come to understand it, and even to be fascinated by it; but we can’t Romantic. In other words, our reading of Romanticism–if we are to be social animals, politically engaged, and invested in the world as a social community–must necessarily be an anti-Romantic critique. This is, as I say, still essentially the position taken up by McGann.

All right. So I’ve explained the ways in which he differs from Greenblatt in leaning more toward Bakhtin than toward Foucault. I have explained that McGann is engaged primarily in talking about issues of textual scholarship in this particular essay, that he defends Keats’s last deliberate choices, that he believes the so-called “indicator” text of 1820 of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” is Keats’s last deliberate choice, as opposed to the 1848 text published by Monckton Milnes in the edition of Keats’s poems that he brought out at that time.

Now I think that in the time remaining to sort of linger over McGann, I do want to say a few things about what he says about Keats. I want to emphasize that his general pronouncements about the historicity of texts, about the permeation of texts by the circumstances of their production, their conditioning by ideological factors, is unimpeachable. It seems to me that this is a necessary approach at least to have in mind if not, perhaps, necessarily to emphasize in one’s own work of literary scholarship. The idea that a text just falls from a tree–if anybody ever had that idea, by the way [laughs] –is plainly not a tenable one, and the opposite idea that a text emerges from a complex matrix of social and historical circumstances is certainly a good one. So if one is to criticize, again it’s not a question of criticizing his basic pronouncements. It seems to me nothing could be said really against them. The trouble is that in the case of McGann–who is a terrific, prominent Romantic scholar with whom one, I suppose, hesitates to disagree–everything he says about the text that he isolates for attention in this essay is simply, consistently, wrong. It’s almost as if by compulsion that he says things that are wrong about these texts, and the reason I asked you in my e-mail last night to take a look at them, if you get a chance, is so that these few remarks that I make now might have some substance.

Take for example “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” In the first place, who we only read the 1848 text? A scholarly edition–and his main object of attack is Jack Stillinger’s scholarly edition of Keats–gives you basically a variorum apparatus. Yeah, maybe it gives you a particular text in bold print, but it gives you the variant text in smaller print in a footnote. It doesn’t withhold the variant text from you. It says, “No, look, there’s this too. Take your choice.” Really the atmosphere of a variorum scholarly edition is an atmosphere of take your choice, not a kind of tyrannical imposition on the public of a particular version of the text. Everybody knows the 1820 text. “What can ail thee, wretched wight?” is at least as familiar to me, as a Romanticist, as “What can ail thee, knight at arms?” the way in which the 1848 text begins; and frankly how many people who aren’t Romanticists know anything about either text? What are we talking about here? [laughter] [laughs]

The Romanticists know what’s going on. They’re not in any way hornswoggled by this historical conspiracy against the 1820 text, and people who aren’t Romanticists don’t care. That’s what it comes down to; but, if it’s not enough simply to say that, turning to the question of which text is better–well, it’s hard to say which text is better. McGann’s argument is that the 1820 version is better because it’s a poem about a guy and a girl who sort of meet, and the next thing you know they’re having sex and that doesn’t turn out so well. In other words, it’s about the real world. These things happen. It’s not a romance, whereas the “What can ail thee, wretched knight?” in the 1848 version–and all of its other variants, the “kisses four” and so on–the 1848 version is a kind of unselfconscious–in McGann’s view–romance subscribing to certain medieval ideas about women, simultaneously putting them on a pedestal and fearing, at the same time, that they’re invested with a kind of black magic which destroys the souls and dissipates the sap of deserving young gentlemen: all of this is ideologically programmed, according to McGann, in the 1848 version. Why? Because Charles Brown behaved despicably toward women, he didn’t like Fanny Brawne, and because Monckton Milnes, the actual editor of the 1848 edition, loved pornography and was a big collector of erotica. So that’s why the 1848 text with its fear of and denigration of women, in contrast to the 1820 text, is inferior.

Well, two things: first of all, who’s to say the 1848 text wasn’t Keats’s last thoughts? In other words, yes, he was already ill when the text was published in 1820. It is pretty close to the end of his ability to think clearly about his own work and to worry very much about the forms in which it was published, but at the same time we don’t know when Brown received his version of the text. We can’t suppose, as McGann more than half implies, that Brown just sort of sat down and rewrote it. [laughs] Nobody has ever really said that, and if he didn’t rewrite it, then Keats must have given it to him in that form. Who’s to say that wasn’t his last and best thoughts? Who’s to say Keats didn’t really want to write a poem of this kind? After all, the title, taken from a medieval ballad by Alain Chartier, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” bears out the “What can ail thee, knight at arms?” version. It’s about a Morgan Le Fay-type. For better or worse, whatever we think of that ideologically, it is about, if the title is right, the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1848 version, as opposed to the kind of woman who is evoked in the 1820 version.

So the 1848 version is simply more consistent with the title. That’s one point to be made, but the additional point to be made is that taking advantage of the New Historicist acknowledgement that one’s own subjectivity, one’s own historical horizon, is properly in play in thinking about these things, McGann is then able to infuse Keats’s text and therefore Keats’s intentions with a pleasing political correctness. That is to say, Keats can’t possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. By the way, everything– I like Keats, but everything in his letters suggests that he –but back to McGann: Keats can’t possibly have thought in that demeaning way about women. Therefore, the 1820 text is the text that he intended and preferred.

Okay. That, of course, makes Keats more consistent with our own standards and our own view of the relations between the sexes, but does it, in other words, make sense the Keats whom we know and, despite his weaknesses and shortcomings, love? There is a great deal, in other words, to be said over against McGann’s assertions about this textual issue, not necessarily in defense of the 1848 text but agnostically with respect to the two of them, saying, “Yeah, we’d better have both of them. We’d better put them side-by-side. We’d better read them together; but if by some fiat the 1820 were somehow subsequently preferred to the 1848, that would be every bit as much of an historical misfortune as the preference, insofar as it has actually existed, of the 1848 or the 1820.” I think that’s the perspective one wants to take.

Now I was going to talk about “To Autumn.” I’ll only say about his reading of “To Autumn” that McGann, who doesn’t seem to like the poem very much–he likes “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” so he makes it politically correct. He doesn’t like “To Autumn” because he thinks that “Autumn” was published in collusion with Keats’s conservative friends in the of 1820, which bowdlerized everything he had to say of a progressive political nature. He thinks that “To Autumn” is a big sellout, in other words, and that yes, 1819 happened to be a year of good harvest, and so Keats turns that year of good harvest into something permanent, into a kind of cloud cuckoo-land in which the fruit falls into your basket and the fish jump into your net and everything is just perfect.

Well, do you think the poem is really like that? You’ve read the third stanza, which McGann totally ignores apart from “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?” In other words, he gives you the opening but he doesn’t give you any sense of the rest of the stanza, because for him “To Autumn” is all about the first stanza. For him, Keats seems to identify with the bees who think warm days will never cease, “for Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.” Keats is like a bee. He’s all into the sensuous.

Well, again just in terms of historical evidence, this is outmoded by at least eighteen months if we consult Keats’s letters. He was like that early in his career, but he has had severe misgivings about a point of view which is represented in what he said in an early letter: “Oh, for a life of sensations rather than thoughts…” That’s no longer Keats’s position when writing “To Autumn.” Keats’s position when writing “To Autumn” is the position of a guy who has a sore throat just as his tubercular brother did, who is increasingly afraid that he’s going to die soon and is trying to confront mortality in writing what is in fact–and I say “in fact” advisedly–the most perfect lyric ever written in the English language, and which is most certainly not a celebration of sort of wandering around like an aimless bee, thinking that the autumn is perfect but that autumn is always perfect, that warm days will never cease, and that everything is just lovely in the garden. It is not that kind of poem, and it’s really a travesty of it to suppose that it is simply on the grounds that it was published in the of 1820 as a kind of sellout to the establishment under the advice of Keats’s conservative friends.

All right. So much then for McGann’s remarks on Keats, which I want to say again in no way impugn or undermine the general validity of the claims that he’s making about taking historical circumstances into account. Precisely, we need to take them into account and we need to get them right. That’s the challenge, of course, of working with historical circumstances. You have to get it right.

With that said, let me turn quickly to a review of from Bakhtin to the New Historicism. I may glide over according to Jameson, because we did that at the end of the last lecture, so let me go back to Bakhtin. You can see the way in which in the structure of the first part of the poem is absolutely saturated with the first person singular: I do this, I do that, I like my job, I am stuck–I, I, I, I. Then as you read along through the text you see that the “I” disappears, or if it still appears, it’s in the middle of a line rather than at the beginning of a line. In other words, the “I,” the subjectivity, the first person singular, the sense of having a unique voice–this is gradually subsumed by the sociality of the story as it unfolds. I am no longer “I” defined as a Romantic individual. I am “I,” rather defined as a friend–that is to say, as a person whose relation with otherness is what constitutes his identity, and in that mutuality of friendship, the first person singular disappears. What is spoken in , in other words, in the long run is not the voice of individual subjectivity but the voice of social togetherness, the voice of otherness.

According to Jauss, the important thing about is that it is not the same story as In other words, in each generation of reception, the aesthetic standards that prevail at a given time are reconsidered and rethought, reshuffled. A new aesthetic horizon emerges, and texts are constituted in a different way, much also as the Russian formalists have said, only with the sense in Jauss of the historical imperative. is all about the inversion of power between the little guy and the big guy, so that the little guy helps the big guy and that is unequivocal, showing, as in in the Bible, that the valleys have been raised and the mountains have been made low. That’s not the way works. The little guy himself needs help. He needs the help of another little guy. There is a reciprocity not dialectically between little and big, but a mutual reinforcement of little-by-little, and that is the change in aesthetic horizon that one can witness between and

In Benjamin the important thing, as I think we’ve said, is the idea that . The humanization of a mechanized world, through our identification with it, is what takes place in In other words, all these cars and trucks, all these smiling and frowning houses, of course, have as their common denominator their non-humanity, but the anthropomorphization of the cars and trucks and of the houses constitutes them as the human. They are precisely the human. We see things, in other words, from the point of view of the apparatus. Just as the filmgoer sees things from the point of view of the camera, so we see from the point of view of the tow truck, right? And what happens? Just as the camera eye point of view leaves that which is seen, as Benjamin puts it, “equipment-free”–so, oddly enough, if we see things from the standpoint of equipment, what we look at is the moral of the story: in other words, the humanity of the story. What we see, in other words, surrounded by all of this equipment, is precisely the equipment-free human aspect of reality. So works in a way that is consistent with Benjamin’s theory of mechanical reproduction. For Adorno, however, the acquiescence of this very figure–the apparatus of mechanical reproduction, of towing again and again and again–in the inequity of class relations, rejected as always by Neato and Speedy, proves that the apparatus which Benjamin’s theory takes to be independent of the machinations of the culture industry, that the apparatus in turn can be suborned and commandeered by the culture industry for its own purposes.

All right. I will skip over Jameson. The Old Historicist reading of simply reconfirms a status quo in which virtue is clear, vice is clear, both are uncontested, and nothing changes–in other words, a status quo which reflects a stagnant, existent, unchanging social dynamic. The New Historicism in a lot of ways is doing this, but let me just conclude by suggesting that if literature influences history, might well explain why today we’re promoting fuel-efficient cars, why the attack on the gas guzzler and the SUV or minivan–remember the car that says “I am too busy”–is so prevalent in the story, and why if we read today’s headlines we need to get rid of the Humvee if GM is to prosper, and we need to downsize and streamline the available models. The little guys, Tony and Bumpy, reaffirm the need for fuel-efficient smaller vehicles and you can plainly see that is therefore a discourse that produces history. All of this, according to the prescription of , is actually happening.

All right. Thank you very much. One thing that needs to be said about is it has no women in it, and that is the issue that we’ll be taking up on Thursday.

[end of transcript]

RE A UMBER of similarities between this school and Marxism, especially a British group of critics making up a school usually referred to as Cultural Materialism. Both New Historicists and Cultural Materialists are interested in recovering lost histories and in exploring mechanisms of repression and subjugation. The major difference is that New Historicists tend to concentrate on those at the top of the social hierarchy (i.e. the church, the monarchy, the upper-classes) while Cultural Materialists tend to concentrate on those at the bottom of the social hierarchy (the lower-classes, women, and other marginalized peoples). Also, though each of the schools practices different kinds of history, New Historicists tend to draw on the disciplines of political science and anthropology given their interest in governments, institutions, and culture, while Cultural Materialists tend to rely on economics and sociology given their interest in class, economics, and commodification. New Historicists are, like the Cultural Materialists, interested in questions of circulation, negotiation, profit and exchange , i.e. how activities that purport to be above the market (including literature) are in fact informed by the values of that market. However, New Historicists take this position further by then claiming that all cultural activities may be considered as equally important texts for historical analysis: contemporary trials of hermaphrodites or the intricacies of map-making may inform a Shakespeare play as much as, say, Shakespeare's literary precursors. New Historicism is also more specifically concerned with questions of power and culture (especially the messy commingling of the social and the cultural or of the supposedly autonomous self and the cultural/ political institutions that in fact produce that self).

Part of the difficulty of introducing this school is that a number of different approaches to history and culture often get lumped together under the category of "new historicism." The sheer number of historical and cultural studies that have appeared since the early 1990s, including the dominance of the still-larger umbrella term, Cultural Studies, makes the cordoning off of a group of critics as "New Historicists" difficult. The effort to do so is certainly not helped by the fact that some of the most prominent New Historicists, like Stephen Greenblatt and Alan Liu, either reject or critique the very term, "New Historicism." Nonetheless, this critical school and those scholars commonly associated with the school have been hugely influential on scholarship of the last decade, so it's important to come to grips with some of the general trends and common practices of this critical approach. As in the other sections of this Guide to Theory, I here also provide Modules on individual theorists in order to give a somewhat more detailed introduction to a few influential figures. I have chosen to offer one important precursor, Michel Foucault, as well as one exemplary practitioner, Stephen Greenblatt (who applies the methods of the school to Renaissance texts). The links on the left will lead you to specific ideas discussed by these critics; however, you might like to begin with a quick overview:

is quite possibly the most influential critic of the last quarter-century. His interest in issues of power, epistemology, subjectivity, and ideology have influenced critics not only in literary studies but also political science, history, and anthropology. His willingness to analyze and discuss disparate disciplines (medicine, criminal science, philosophy, the history of sexuality, government, literature, etc.) as well as his questioning of the very principle of disciplinarity and specialization have inspired a host of subsequent critics to explore interdisciplinary connections between areas that had rarely been examined together. Foucault also had the ability to pick up common terms and give them new meaning, thus changing the way critics addressed such pervasive issues as "power," "discourse," "discipline," "subjectivity," "sexuality," and "government."

brilliant studies of the Renaissance have established him as the major figure commonly associated with New Historicism. Indeed, his influence meant that New Historicism first gained popularity among Renaissance scholars, many of whom were directly inspired by Greenblatt's ideas and anecdotal approach. This fascination with history and the minute details of culture soon caught on among scholars working in other historical periods, leading to the increasing popularity of culturally- and historically-minded studies. This general trend is often referred to as Cultural Studies.

. Date of last update, which you can find on the . Purdue U. Date you accessed the site. <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/newhistoricism/modules/introduction.html>.

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That actually explain what's on your next test, new historicism, from class:, british literature i.

New Historicism is a literary theory that emphasizes the importance of historical context in understanding a text, suggesting that literature cannot be fully understood without considering the cultural, social, and political circumstances of the time in which it was produced. This approach often examines how power dynamics and historical events influence both the creation of a text and its interpretation by readers.

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5 Must Know Facts For Your Next Test

New Historicism emerged in the 1980s as a response to traditional historicism, which tended to view literature primarily as a reflection of historical events without considering broader cultural influences.
The movement emphasizes that literary texts are not just products of their time but also contribute to shaping history and culture in return.
New Historicists often analyze how texts engage with power structures and ideologies prevalent in their historical contexts, including issues of class, gender, and race.
This approach encourages reading literature alongside historical documents and other cultural artifacts to gain a fuller understanding of the social dynamics at play.
Key figures in New Historicism include Stephen Greenblatt, who advocates for examining both literary works and historical contexts to reveal the interplay between text and society.

Review Questions

New Historicism differs from traditional historicism by emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between literature and history. While traditional historicism tends to view literature as a mere reflection of historical events, New Historicism argues that literary texts actively engage with and shape their historical context. This means that understanding a text involves considering not only its historical background but also how it interacts with and comments on the cultural, social, and political dynamics of its time.
In New Historicist analysis, power dynamics are central to understanding both the creation and interpretation of literary texts. By examining how societal hierarchies—such as class, gender, and race—are represented in literature, New Historicists reveal how these texts reflect and challenge existing power structures. This analysis often involves looking at how authors respond to or are influenced by the political climate of their time, allowing readers to see literature as a site of conflict and negotiation regarding power relations.
New Historicism has significantly influenced modern literary studies by encouraging scholars to explore the complex relationships between literature and its cultural context. For works like 'Beowulf', this means analyzing how themes of heroism and morality reflect the social values of early medieval society while considering the influence of oral tradition on its narrative structure. Similarly, for 18th-century novels, New Historicism prompts readers to examine how these texts comment on emerging ideas about individualism, class relations, and colonialism. This approach enriches our understanding of literature as not only an artistic expression but also a commentary on contemporary social issues.

Related terms

Cultural Materialism : A critical approach that focuses on the relationship between culture and material conditions, emphasizing how economic factors shape literature and cultural practices.

Historical Context : The background of time and place in which a literary work is created, encompassing events, societal norms, and prevailing attitudes that influence the text.

Intertextuality : The relationship between texts, highlighting how they reference or echo each other, revealing how meaning is constructed through connections to other works within a historical framework.

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What is new historicism.

"New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape one’s own “historicity,” the meaning of a text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history."

Brief Overviews:

New Historicism/Cultural Poetics (Literary Theory Handbook)
New Historicism (The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism)
New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (A Companion to Literary Theory)

Notable Scholars:

Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt, Stephen, and Michael Payne. The Greenblatt Reader . Blackwell Pub., 2005.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture . Routledge, 1990.
Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism . University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. University of California Press, 1988.

Louis Montrose

Montrose, Louis Adrian. “‘ Eliza, Queene of Shepheardes,’ and the Pastoral of Power. ” English Literary Renaissance , vol. 10, no. 2, 1980, pp. 153–82.
Montrose, Louis Adrian. “New Historicisms.” In Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies . Edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, 392–418. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992.

Hayden V. White

White, Hayden. “ The Historical Text as Literary Artifact .” Clio , vol. 3, no. 3, 1974, pp. 277–303.
White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
White, Hayden V. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Introductions & Anthologies

Also see other recent eBooks discussing or using new historicism in literature and scholar-recommended sources on new historicism and Hayden White via Oxford Bibliographies.

Definition from: " New Historicism ." Glossary of Poetic Terms. Poetry Foundation.(20 July 2023)

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New Historicism by Neema Parvini LAST REVIEWED: 26 July 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 26 July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0015

New historicism has been a hugely influential approach to literature, especially in studies of William Shakespeare’s works and literature of the Early Modern period. It began in earnest in 1980 and quickly supplanted New Criticism as the new orthodoxy in early modern studies. Despite many attacks from feminists, cultural materialists, and traditional scholars, it dominated the study of early modern literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Arguably, since then, it has given way to a different, more materialist, form of historicism that some call “new new historicism.” There have also been variants of “new historicism” in other periods of the discipline, most notably the romantic period, but its stronghold has always remained in the Renaissance. At its core, new historicism insists—contra formalism—that literature must be understood in its historical context. This is because it views literary texts as cultural products that are rooted in their time and place, not works of individual genius that transcend them. New-historicist essays are thus often marked by making seemingly unlikely linkages between various cultural products and literary texts. Its “newness” is at once an echo of the New Criticism it replaced and a recognition of an “old” historicism, often exemplified by E. M. W. Tillyard, against which it defines itself. In its earliest iteration, new historicism was primarily a method of power analysis strongly influenced by the anthropological studies of Clifford Geertz, modes of torture and punishment described by Michel Foucault, and methods of ideological control outlined by Louis Althusser. This can be seen most visibly in new-historicist work of the early 1980s. These works came to view the Tudor and early Stuart states as being almost insurmountable absolutist monarchies in which the scope of individual agency or political subversion appeared remote. This version of new historicism is frequently, and erroneously, taken to represent its entire enterprise. Stephen Greenblatt argued that power often produces its own subversive elements in order to contain it—and so what appears to be subversion is actually the final victory of containment. This became known as the hard version of the containment thesis, and it was attacked and critiqued by many commentators as leaving too-little room for the possibility of real change or agency. This was the major departure point of the cultural materialists, who sought a more dynamic model of culture that afforded greater opportunities for dissidence. Later new-historicist studies sought to complicate the hard version of the containment thesis to facilitate a more flexible, heterogeneous, and dynamic view of culture.

Owing to its success, there has been no shortage of textbooks and anthology entries on new historicism, but it has often had to share space with British cultural materialism, a school that, though related, has an entirely distinct theoretical and methodological genesis. The consequence of this dual treatment has resulted in a somewhat caricatured view of both approaches along the axis of subversion and containment, with new historicism representing the latter. While there is some truth to this shorthand account, any sustained engagement with new-historicist studies will reveal its limitations. Readers should be aware, therefore, that while accounts that contrast new historicism with cultural materialism—for example, Dollimore 1990 , Wilson 1992 , and Brannigan 1998 —can be illuminating, they can also by the terms of that contrast tend to oversimplify. Be aware also that because new historicism has been a controversial development in the field, accounts are seldom entirely neutral. Mullaney 1996 , for example, was written by a new historicist, while Parvini 2012 was written by an author who has been strongly critical of the approach.

Brannigan, John. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . Transitions. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26622-7

Introduction to new historicism and cultural materialism aimed at the general reader and student, which does much to elucidate the differences between those two schools. In doing so, however, it is perhaps guilty of oversimplification, especially as regards the new historicists, who, according to Brannigan, never progress beyond the hard version of the containment thesis.

Dollimore, Jonathan. “Critical Developments: Cultural Materialism, Feminism and Gender Critique, and New Historicism.” In Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide . New ed. Edited by Stanley Wells, 405–428. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

A cultural-materialist take on “critical developments” over the decade of the 1980s that elaborates on the differences between new historicism and cultural materialism. Useful document of its time, but be aware of identifying new historicists too closely with the containment thesis it outlines, which became softer and more nuanced in later new-historicist work.

Hamilton, Paul. Historicism . New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 1996.

DOI: 10.4324/9780203426289

Guide to wider tradition of historicism from ancient Greece to the late 20th century. Chapters on Michel Foucault and new historicism usefully view both subjects through this wider lens, although some of the nuances (for example, the differences between new historicism and cultural materialism) are lost along the way. See especially pp. 115–150.

Harris, Jonathan Gil. “New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, Alan Sinfield.” In Shakespeare and Literary Theory . By Jonathan Gil Harris, 175–192. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Structured into three parts: the first on Foucault, the second on Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” (see Greenblatt 1988 , cited under Essays ), and the third on the cultural materialist Sinfield. Concise, if cursory, overview. Its focus on practice rather than theory renders it too specific to serve as a lone entry point, but useful introductory material if considered alongside other accounts.

Mullaney, Steven. “After the New Historicism.” In Alternative Shakespeares . Vol. 2. Edited by Terence Hawkes, 17–37. New Accents. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

By its own admission a “partisan account” (p. 21) of new-historicist practice by one of its own foremost practitioners. Argues that the view of new historicism become distorted through oversimplification. Reminds us of the extent of new historicism’s theoretical and methodological innovations, which detractors “sometimes fail to acknowledge” (p. 28).

Parvini, Neema. Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

DOI: 10.5040/9781472555113

More comprehensive in coverage than other available guides, perhaps owing to its more recent publication. Features a timeline of critical developments, a “Who’s Who” in new historicism and cultural materialism, and a glossary of theoretical terms. Includes sections on Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault and offers clear distinctions between early new-historicist work and “cultural poetics.”

Robson, Mark. Stephen Greenblatt . Routledge Critical Thinkers. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Although centered on Greenblatt, this book effectively doubles as an introduction to new historicism and its concepts. Lucidly written, it features some incisive analysis and a comprehensive reading list to direct further study.

Wilson, Richard. “Introduction: Historicising New Historicism.” In New Historicism and Renaissance Drama . Edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton, 1–18. Longman Critical Readers. New York and London: Longman, 1992.

Gains from being very theoretically well informed. Argues that new historicism is best understood, ironically, if historicized in the context of Ronald Reagan’s America and the final years of the Cold War. An excellent entry point to understanding new historicism and its concerns. A section contrasting cultural materialism with new historicism closes the piece.

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Understanding New Historicism: How does literature act not just as a self-contained story, but as a historical document showing the cultural and political attitudes of the time period it was written in? Using both contemporary and older texts and media in a way students will understand, this unit includes PowerPoint slides, activities, assignments, and included media to help students understand this Literary Critical Theory. Best paired with the Diogenes Education Critical Literary Theories unit.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism

Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 16, 2017 • ( 2 )

While he was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Greenblatt helped to found a journal called Representations , in which some of the earlier important New Historicist criticism appeared. However, it was his introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1982) that spurred the growth of the New Historicism . In this introduction, Greenblatt differentiated what he called the “ New Historicism ” from both the New Criticism, which views the text as a selfcontained structure, and the earlier historicism which was monological and attempted to discover a unitary political vision. Both of these earlier modes of analysis, according to Greenblatt , engaged in a project of uniting disparate and contradictory elements into an organic whole, whether in the text itself or in its historical background. The earlier historicism, moreover, viewed the resulting totality or unity as a historical fact rather than the product of interpretation or of the ideological leanings of certain groups. Such a homogenizing procedure allows the unified vision of historical context to serve as a fixed point of reference which could form the background of literary interpretation.

In contrast with this earlier formalism and historicism, the New Historicism questions its own methodological assumptions, and is less concerned with treating literary works as models of organic unity than as “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses.” New Historicism also challenges the hierarchical distinction between “literary foreground” and “political background,” as well as between artistic and other kinds of production. It acknowledges that when we speak of “culture,” we are speaking of a “complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs.”

Greenblatt elaborated his statements about New Historicism in a subsequent influential essay, Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987). He begins by noting that he will not attempt to “define” the New Historicism but rather to “situate it as a practice.” What distinguishes it from the “positivist historical scholarship” of the early twentieth century is its openness to recent theory; Greenblatt remarks that his own critical practice has been informed by Foucault , as well as anthropological and social theory. He proposes to situate this practice in relation to Marxism , on the one hand, and poststructuralism , on the other. Citing passages from the Marxist Fredric Jameson and the poststructuralist Jean-François Lyotard , Greenblatt questions the generalizations made about “capitalism” in each passage. Both writers are addressing the question of the connection between art and society:

Jameson , seeking to expose the fallaciousness of a separate artistic sphere and to celebrate the materialist integration of all discourses, finds capitalism at the root of the false differentiation; Lyotard , seeking to celebrate the differentiation of all discourses and to expose the fallaciousness of monological unity, finds capitalism at the root of the false integration. History functions in both cases as a convenient anecdotal ornament upon a theoretical structure, and capitalism appears not as a complex social and economic development in the West but as a malign philosophical principle.

Greenblatt further charges that both Jameson and Lyotard are trying to provide a “single, theoretically satisfactory” answer to the question of the relation between art and society. Neither of these theorists can “come to terms with the apparently contradictory historical effects of capitalism.” Jameson treats capitalism as the agent of “repressive differentiation,”and Lyotard treats it as the agent of “monological totalization” (“TPC,” 5).In contrast to these reductive theories, Greenblatt espouses a critical practice that would recognize capitalism’s production of “a powerful and effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those domains into one another. It is this restless oscillation . . . that constitutes the distinct power of capitalism” (“TPC,” 6). Greenblatt wishes to move beyond literary criticism ’s familiar terminology for treating the relationship between art and society: allusion, symbolism, allegory, representation, and mimesis. We need to develop, he urges, terms to describe the ways in which material “is transferred from one discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property,” a process which is not unidirectional because the “social discourse is already charged with aesthetic energies” (“TPC,” 11). The New Historicism is marked by a “methodological self-consciousness,” rather than the old historicist “faith in the transparency of signs and interpretative procedures.” The New Historicism will view the work of art itself as “the product of a set of manipulations . . . the product of a negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society” (“TPC,” 12). The general movement here is away from a mimetic theory of art to an interpretative model that will “more adequately account for the unsettling circulation of materials and discourses that is . . . the heart of modern aesthetic practice” (“TPC,” 12).

There are some problems with Greenblatt ’s arguments as stated above. To some extent, the allegedly unifying models from which New Historicism would distinguish itself are straw targets. The best New Critics engage in intricate analyses which acknowledge the contradictions and tensions in a given literary text. And the best Marxist critics do not engage in naive reflectionist theories of the connection between literary or philosophical texts and their historical contexts. Lukács ’ The Young Hegel , for example, does precisely the opposite, situating Hegel’s work within a complex network of economic and political discourses in a manner that exposes reductive liberal-humanist accounts, treating complex notions such as “contradiction” and “totality” on a high intellectual level. Greenblatt ’s characterization of what he takes to be “the” Marxist perspective violates his own New Historicist principles by treating it in isolation: clearly, the statements of a critic such as Fredric Jameson should be taken within the context of a vast tradition of Marxist thinking which has indeed recognized the complex and contradictory nature of capitalism. Jameson’s own formulation of a “dialectical criticism” at the conclusion of his Marxism and Form is a highly articulate testimony to the non-reductive and genuinely complex character of his Marxist thought, informed as it is (or was at that time) by Hegelian concepts. In fact, Greenblatt ’s own characterization of the “distinctive feature” of capitalism as the “oscillation” between totalizing and fragmenting tendencies is as reductive as the positions he impugns; moreover, this insight is already contained in the work of previous Marxist thinkers. Finally, there appears to be absent in Greenblatt ’s formulation of the New Historicism any assessment of its connections with the earlier forms of historicism discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The historicism of figures such as Dilthey and Gadamer demonstrated anything but a “faith in the transparency of signs and interpretative procedures.” It should be noted that, in both of the articles discussed above, when Greenblatt refers to the “earlier historicism,” he is thinking not of the historicism descending from Hegel or of figures such as Gadamer and Dilthey , but of the historical literary scholarship which preceded the New Criticism and which was continued in the work of figures such as Dover Wilson . In the second article, as we have seen, Greenblatt refers to this as “the positivist historical scholarship of the early twentieth century” (“TPC,” 1). The connections between the earlier lines of historicism (as opposed to positivist historical scholarship – which is anything but positivistic) and Greenblatt’s version of historicism remain unformulated.

Notwithstanding such objections, Greenblatt’s own books, such as Renaissance Self Fashioning (1980) and Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), are illustrious examples of the critical practice he advocates. The former book, for example, explores the complex ways in which identity was created in the sixteenth century in an atmosphere of competition between various institutions, authorities, and ideologies, political, religious, domestic, and colonial. And, as mentioned earlier, New Historicists have profoundly reassessed the entire image of the Renaissance and other periods, questioning conventional categories of analysis and infusing a new energy, revitalized by recent theories, into the study of literature within its cultural contexts. New Historicism has been of further value in as much as it has refused to align itself with a definite series of positions, and as such, it has drawn upon insights from Marxism , feminism , structuralism , and poststructuralism ; in turn, its insights have been enlisted by critics from a broad range of perspectives.

Glossary of Poetic Terms

New historicism.

A critical approach developed in the 1980s through the works of Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt, similar to Marxism. Moving away from text-centered schools of criticism such as New Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but the end product of a particular cultural moment. New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that their own criticism contains biases that derive from their historical position and ideology. Because it is impossible to escape one’s own “historicity,” the meaning of a text is fluid, not fixed. New Historicists attempt to situate artistic texts both as products of a historical context and as the means to understand cultural and intellectual history.

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The New Historicism

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Following Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists, the New Historicist critics have evolved a method for describing culture in action. Their "thick descriptions" seize upon an event or anecdote--colonist John Rolfe's conversation with Pocohontas's father, a note found among Nietzsche's papers to the effect that "I have lost my umbrella"--and re-read it to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the motive forces controlling a whole society. Contributors: Stephen J. Greenblatt, Louis A. Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Gerald Graff, Jean Franco, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frank Lentricchia, Vincent Pecora, Jane Marcus, Jon Klancher, Jonathan Arac, Hayden White, Stanley Fish, Judith Newton, Joel Fineman, John Schaffer, Richard Terdiman, Donald Pease, Brooks Thomas.

Chapter 1 | 14 pages, towards a poetics of culture, chapter 2 | 22 pages, professing the renaissance: the poetics and politics of culture, chapter 3 | 12 pages, marxism and the new historicism, chapter 4 | 28 pages, the history of the anecdote: fiction and fiction 1, chapter 5 | 12 pages, english romanticism and cultural production, chapter 6 | 13 pages, the use and misuse of giambattista vico: rhetoric, orality, and theories of discourse, chapter 7 | 14 pages, the sense of the past: image, text, and object in the formation of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century britain, chapter 8 | 16 pages, the struggle for the cultural heritage: christina stead refunctions charles dickens and mark twain, chapter 9 | 20 pages, the asylums of antaeus: women, war, and madness—is there a feminist fetishism, chapter 10 | 16 pages, history as usual feminism and the “new historicism”, chapter 11 | 14 pages, co-optation, chapter 12 | 22 pages, the new historicism and other old-fashioned topics, chapter 13 | 9 pages, the nation as imagined community, chapter 14 | 12 pages, literary criticism and the politics of the new historicism, chapter 15 | 6 pages, is there class in this class, chapter 16 | 12 pages, foucault's legacy—a new historicism, chapter 17 | 34 pages, the limits of local knowledge, chapter 18 | 16 pages, the new historicism: political commitment and the postmodern critic, chapter 19 | 10 pages, new historicism: a comment, chapter | 14 pages, commentary: the young and the restless.

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Miami Marlins Designate Former Top Prospect José Devers For Assignment

Sam connon | 1 minute ago.

Sep 1, 2024; San Francisco, California, USA; Miami Marlins second baseman Jose Devers (79) stands in the dugout before the game against the San Francisco Giants at Oracle Park.

Miami Marlins

The Miami Marlins have designated infielder José Devers for assignment, the team announced Thursday afternoon.

Devers had been on the Marlins' big league roster since Aug. 31, when he got called up from Triple-A Jacksonville. He hurt his hand on Sept. 6, though, and only logged four at-bats before getting cut loose Thursday.

The 24-year-old lost his roster spot to infielder Vidal Bruján, who was reinstated from the injured list after missing nearly three weeks. Outfielder David Hensley was also optioned to Triple-A with outfielder Derek Hill coming off the injured list.

Today’s roster update presented by @UMiamiHealth : pic.twitter.com/kZrpAXyoqf — Miami Marlins (@Marlins) September 19, 2024

This isn't the first time Devers has been designated for assignment. He was also cut loose from the Marlins' 40-man roster in November 2022, although he cleared waivers and got outrighted to the minors five days later.

Devers was one of the three players the Marlins got back from the New York Yankees when they traded away superstar Giancarlo Stanton in December 2017. Starlin Castro and Jorge Guzmán made up the rest of the package, but neither of them have seen MLB action since 2021.

That isn't too far off from what Devers has given Miami as of late, considering his three appearances earlier this month were his first since 2021. Devers entered that season as a top 10 prospect in the Marlins' farm system, but he hit just .244 with a .621 OPS in 21 big league games and got sent back down soon after.

Devers missed a good chunk of the 2022 campaign with a shoulder injury, and he spent the entirety of 2023 in Double-A. In his minor league career, Devers is a .261 hitter with a .686 OPS, averaging just five home runs, 56 RBI and 19 stolen bases per 162 games.

The once-promising middle infielder will now hit the waiver wire. If he goes unclaimed, Devers will either be sent back to the minors or released.

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Sam Connon is a Staff Writer for Fastball on the Sports Illustrated/FanNation networks. He previously covered UCLA Athletics for Sports Illustrated/FanNation's All Bruins, 247Sports' Bruin Report Online, Rivals' Bruin Blitz, the Bleav Podcast Network and the Daily Bruin, with his work as a sports columnist receiving awards from the College Media Association and Society of Professional Journalists. Connon also wrote for Sports Illustrated/FanNation's New England Patriots site, Patriots Country, and he was on the Patriots and Boston Red Sox beats at Prime Time Sports Talk.

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Orioles designate reliever Craig Kimbrel for assignment

Associated Press

BALTIMORE -- Craig Kimbrel 's time with the Orioles is over.

The Orioles designated their former closer for assignment Wednesday following the latest in a series of rough outings.

Kimbrel gave up six runs on three hits in 2/3 of an inning of relief in Baltimore's 10-0 home loss to the San Francisco Giants on Tuesday night. Kimbrel has a 13.94 ERA in his last 11 appearances over the past month.

A nine-time All-Star, Kimbrel has pitched in 837 games and amassed a whopping 440 saves. But this season, his first with Baltimore, the right-hander has a 5.33 ERA with six blown saves.

The last of his 23 saves with the Orioles came on July 7. Not long after that, following several poor performances, Kimbrel desperately tried to regain the form that enabled him to pitch in the back end of the bullpen since breaking into the big leagues in 2010 with Atlanta .

It never happened.

"Tough day," manager Brandon Hyde said. "We have so much respect for Craig and his career. It's never easy to say goodbye to someone who's done a lot."

The Orioles have lost nine of 12 games to fall 4.5 games back of the New York Yankees for first place in the AL East. In a corresponding roster move, they recalled right-hander Bryan Baker from Triple-A Norfolk.

Orioles general manager Mike Elias signed Kimbrel to a $13 million contract in December to fill the void left by Felix Bautista , who had 48 saves last year before going on the disabled list with an elbow injury. Bautista underwent Tommy John surgery, which kept him sidelined for the entire 2024 season.

Kimbrel's 23 saves before the All-Star Game helped the defending AL East champions hit the break atop the division.

"Heck of a first half for us. Helped us win a ton of games," Hyde said.

Kimbrel's decline began with a blown save on July 14 against the Yankees. He got the win in that game despite allowing three runs in the ninth inning.

"The game here against New York, that was a struggle, and he never got rolling after that," Hyde said.

Kimbrel blew a save on July 25 in Miami and took a loss the following day against San Diego . At that point, Hyde began using Kimbrel in no-pressure situations in the hope that the 36-year-old would regain the form that landed him in fifth place on the career saves list.

"I tried to give him low-leverage spots, and it seemed like when there were runners on base he had a tough time not allowing that run to score," Hyde said.

Hyde knew of Kimbrel's sensational past, but there were only a few glimpses of that pitcher recently.

"He's a Hall of Famer to me," Hyde said. "Craig has done some amazing things in his career. To be able to pitch in the innings he's pitched, for that long with that type of pressure, there are only a handful of guys who have been able to do that."

Seranthony Dominguez , acquired in a July trade with the Phillies , has taken over the closer's role for Baltimore.

"When we got him in the trade, it wasn't like the next day we were saying Seranthony is going to be the closer now," Hyde said. "It was more of need at that point because Craig was struggling a little bit."

IMAGES

(DOC) New Historicism
(PDF) New Historicism Handout
The New Historicism by Heidie Marie
New Historicism
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Intro to New Historicism with Slides, Teacher Notes, Suggested Texts

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COMMENTS

ENGL 300
Introduction to Theory of Literature. ENGL 300 - Lecture 19 - The New Historicism. Chapter 1. Origins of New Historicism [00:00:00] Professor Paul Fry: So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism.
28 Practicing New Historicism and Cultural Studies
Post your short essay (using either option one or option two) to the New Historicism/Cultural Studies Theoretical Response discussion board. Please include the option you have chosen in your post title. I have included the theoretical response assignment instructions at the end of this chapter. Excerpt from "The Great Gatsby" (1925)
What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?
New Historicism. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who viewed history as a text that could be deconstructed. Foucault's concept of "the discourse" is essential to both New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism. Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) is the American Shakespeare scholar who coined the term "New Historicism."
New Historicism and Cultural Studies Lecture Notes and Presentation
In this presentation for English 211, we will learn more about New Historicism and cultural studies as critical approaches to texts. New Historicism is a term coined by the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt. This form of criticism developed in North America in the latter part of the twentieth century and is an interchangeable term with ...
General Introduction to New Historicism
General Introduction to New Historicism. THERE ARE A NUMBER of similarities between this school and Marxism, especially a British group of critics making up a school usually referred to as Cultural Materialism. Both New Historicists and Cultural Materialists are interested in recovering lost histories and in exploring mechanisms of repression and subjugation.
New Historicism
New Historicism is a literary theory that emphasizes the importance of historical context in understanding a text, suggesting that literature cannot be fully understood without considering the cultural, social, and political circumstances of the time in which it was produced. This approach often examines how power dynamics and historical events influence both the creation of a text and its ...
10.7: New Historicism
When reading a work through a New Historicism reading, apply the following steps: Determine the time and place, or historical context of the literature. Choose a specific aspect of the text you feel would be illuminated by learning more about the history of the text. Research the history.
PDF New Historicism: An Intensive Analysis and Appraisal
Krishnaswamy remarks that "New Historicism is an approach that advocates the parallel reading of literary and non literary text, usually of the same period, in other words, the non-literary text becomes a co-text of the literary text. The literary text is not privileged against the background of historical and non-literary text.
New Historicism: A Brief Note
A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism is characterised by a parallel reading of a text with its socio-cultural and historical conditions, which form the co-text. New Historians rejected the fundamental tenets of New Criticism (that the text is an autotelic artefact), and Liberal Humanism (that the…
Literary Research: New Historicism
New Historicists look at literature alongside other cultural products of a particular historical period to illustrate how concepts, attitudes, and ideologies operated across a broader cultural spectrum that is not exclusively literary. In addition to analyzing the impact of historical context and ideology, New Historicists also acknowledge that ...
New historicism
New Historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand intellectual history through literature and literature through its cultural context, follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics.It first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. [1]
New Historicism Analysis
Origins and founders. The decade of the 1980's marked the emergence of New Historicism as a recognized mode of inquiry in literary and cultural studies. It followed on the heels of and in ...
New Historicism
Introduction. New historicism has been a hugely influential approach to literature, especially in studies of William Shakespeare's works and literature of the Early Modern period. It began in earnest in 1980 and quickly supplanted New Criticism as the new orthodoxy in early modern studies. Despite many attacks from feminists, cultural ...
New Historicism: Lesson, Media, and Assignments
The High School Fiction, Poetry, and Graphic Novels Bundle includes:* Powerpoint lessons aligned to teaching Common Core Standards* Classroom activities and discussions* Assignments, Assessments, and Rubrics/Answers keys when applicable* Graphic organizers* Review Games* Teacher Lesson Plans* "Memes. 10. Products. $41.39 $100.90 Save $59.51.
Student Example Essay: New Historicism
27. Student Example Essay: New Historicism. The following student essay example of New Historicism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition. This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Lorrie Moore's short story, "Terrific Mother.".
New Historicism Assignment
New Historicism Assignment . Wise Geek says New Historicism evaluates how the work is influenced by the time in which it was produced. It also examines the social sphere in which the author moved, the psychological background of the author, the books and theories that may have influenced the author, and any other factors which influenced the work of art.
What is New Historicism?
New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and intrepreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. Based on the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt and influenced by the philosophy of Michel Foucault, New Historicism acknowledges not only that a work ...
New Historicism
A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism is characterised by a parallel reading of a text with its socio-cultural and historical conditions, which form the co-text. New Historians rejected the fundamental tenets …. Continue reading. Literary Theory and Criticism. 14.
Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism
Greenblatt elaborated his statements about New Historicism in a subsequent influential essay, Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987). He begins by noting that he will not attempt to "define" the New Historicism but rather to "situate it as a practice.". What distinguishes it from the "positivist historical scholarship" of the early ...
New Historicism
A critical approach developed in the 1980s through the works of Michel Foucault and Stephen Greenblatt, similar to Marxism. Moving away from text-centered schools of criticism such as New Criticism, New Historicism reopened the interpretation of literature to the social, political, and historical milieu that produced it. To a New Historicist, literature is not the record of a single mind, but ...
Context: New Historicism and Cultural Studies
Context: New Historicism and Cultural Studies. New Historicism and Cultural Studies scrutinize literary works by interweaving them with historical and cultural contexts, emphasizing the reciprocal influence between literature and the socio-political conditions to reveal the complex interplay of power, ideology, and discourse. In the following ...
The New Historicism
Following Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists, the New Historicist critics have evolved a method for describing culture in action. Their "thick
Miami Marlins Designate Former Top Prospect José Devers For Assignment
Infielder José Devers, one of the three players the New York Yankees traded for Giancarlo Stanton back in 2017, has officially lost his spot on the Miami Marlins' 40-man roster.
Orioles designate reliever Craig Kimbrel for assignment
The Orioles have lost nine of 12 games to fall 4.5 games back of the New York Yankees for first place in the AL East. In a corresponding roster move, they recalled right-hander Bryan Baker from ...