Literary Theory

Series II: Handout #4

“A Bellyful of Pooh”: If you know Greenblatt, well, this is just devastatingly dead on: the trafficking in historical trivia of the most tangential relevance (to a conventional historian, at least); the obsession with the “unspeakable” such as sex and body functions; the loss of the work in the mire of historical detail; the various “moves”: thick reading of a small element in a text, the absence of concern with form, the notion that contemporaneousness equals causality, the almost mystical-Cabbalistic linkage to the present. Still, I’m primarily a New Historicist, and I do stuff like this all the time, except when I’m being an “old-fashioned literary historian” or, increasingly, an “eco-critic.”

“Yes, I did get a $1 million

advance for Will in the World.”

Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism: Greenblatt himself—urbane, witty, untouchable in debate; a polymathic “genius” who probably would have been a great as a New Critic, if that was the reigning method (yes, a bit of an ahead-of-the-curve careerist too, well paid and famous. Me, jealous?). Influenced by Foucault, sees literature as field of contending “discourses”—the struggle between conformity and dissent (complicity and resistance), and, as such, all texts are contradictory (thank you Derrida) and not unitary (goodbye New Critics); if you want to understand literature, you need to see it embedded in the web of discourses from which it emerged and which constitute it (though that does not mean you are getting at the “Truth”; you are making a new, provisional truth for yourself—though it should be persuasive to others through evidence); alas, the message of New Historicism is the growth of centralized, panoptic power from which we cannot escape, and to which, indeed, we are merely contributing (farewell Marxists, though the cultural materialists may nostalgically keep your flame alive).

o Replaced New Criticism by the 1980s.

o Expands the field; anything interesting can be included.

o Questions what “literature” is. There no privileging of the “literary.” REPRESENTATIONS. Everything (even whole cultures) are textual in the sense that we can “read” them.

o Dissolves the boundaries between disciplines (e.g., History and Literature). Literature IS history (perhaps more than battles).

o Refuses to make hierarchies of cultures and forms.

o Anecdotal, investigatory, archival. Generalizations must be built on accumulated particulars. Generalizations are historically specific; we never talk about the “human” experience across time and space.

o Representations are best understood by be reconstructing their historical context; not by looking with contemporary eyes.

o However, we can know more (make generalizations) than the cultures we study could not have known about themselves (we have perspective—and organized archives, though they are selective and inherently ideological).

o Historicists respect the past, but they do not glorify it because it is old, or respected by predecessors. No “wondering admiration,” no “hagiography.”

SOME ADVANTAGES:

o Tends to be concerned with issues of equity, social justice, oppression (women’s studies, ethnic studies, African-American, class, sexuality).

o Tends to recover neglected works, using them to illuminate (and question) more famous works.

o Was able to ignore most previous literary criticism (cleared the decks).

SOME PROBLEMS:

o One danger is getting lost in the details. Too much to know—the archive is inexhaustible. (One solution is to use the “telling anecdote,” the micro history of an event and what it might signify.)

o New Historicism—once rebellious—is now the establishment, and it has a HUGE body of scholarship that you have to know when you write—probably bigger than any other school of thought (note academic employment factors).

o Another danger is losing the distinction between representations and actual events. Does anything REALLY happen?

o Another danger is losing the Aesthetic as a category of appreciation.

o Losing respect for cultural institutions, the value of which is not fully known by us (Burke’s view).

o New Historicism also tells us we are embedded in our own cultural text; therefore, our work is ineffectual, a tool of power, even if we think we are resisting.

o But what is this “Power” anyway? Does Chomsky help us here, if we value autonomy and agency? Who benefits, as the Marxists would say?

Q: Are we ending the era of the New Historicism? What will replace it?