Search Results

‘Who's there?’ is central to New Historicists' self-definition; who they say they are, what they say they are about, and how they say they are going to carry that out. The question should provide the focus of their critical drama — a ‘whodunit’ with a novel twist, if the notices are to be believed, in which the villain is not the butler but nobody. This chapter turns to that critical drama, mindful that notices, particularly those written by the performing company, are not always accurate.

This chapter considers the version of rhetorical exordium the method uses to place its argument in play. Just as Philip Sidney solicits his audience in the Apology for Poetry, so Stephen Greenblatt and others—to quote Jean E. Howard's early criticism of the technique—broach their argument through “painstaking description of a particular historical event, place, or experience” whose “supposedly paradigmatic moment” sketches “a cultural law.” So thoroughgoing is such paradigmatism that exordium is convertible with digressio: even when a New Historicist study internalizes a paradigm as its centerpiece rather than its opening, the paradigm retains a throwaway quality. The chapter's discussion of why not? of the New Historicism serves primarily to repress the urgency of its real questions about literature and history. The reason the repression is necessary is because the urgency of these questions is not motivated by curiosity about literature and history in the past.

New Historicists, given their self-definitions and critical practice, were seen to have many reasons to focus on Hamlet as a key text to substantiate their arguments regarding notions of subjectivity. Yet Hamlet was an absent presence, often sensed but rarely seen; the play was described as the ghost that walked across the New Historicist stage, representing as it did both an unacknowledged past and a critical task that remained deferred in the present. Cultural Materialists, by contrast, recognize that, given their concerns over subjectivity, it is Hamlet that ‘would be spoke to’. What is more, Cultural Materialists question this play directly and repeatedly; Hamlet becomes what it always promised to be within New Historicism — a central text. Explaining the presence of Hamlet at the centre of Cultural Materialist criticism is a particularly profitable way of distinguishing that critical movement from New Historicism — at least in respect of those movements' discussions of the issue of subjectivity. In examining this presence, this chapter focuses predominantly on areas which distinguish the two movements. This might give the impression that there are simple, clear-cut divisions between the two critical movements, but this is not so. They are deeply interrelated, though often antagonistic to each other — kin though less than kind.

This chapter speculates at once retrospectively and prospectively on the function of the New Historicism in the age of the database. In the New Historicism and other forms of postmodern cultural criticism, history both emerges from the buzzing, blooming swarm of events caught in the great matrix of detail and escapes in the noise of that detail. Similarly, history manifests and sublimes in databases, both emerges in the tables, records, fields, and joins that are the structure of the modern relational database (implemented in SQL, or Structured Query Language) and escapes all such holding structures. Whether in the form of the New Historicism or of a database, contemporary postmodern historicism is an escape structure. The chapter starts with a note recounted by Charles Babbage, goes on to consider the relational database, and concludes by reflecting, once again, on the New Historicism.

This epilogue presents a series of recognitions regarding how the intimate historicism practiced by the New England regionalists—their sensual history making endeavors—resonate with the historicism pursued by the generation of feminist literary scholars who brought women writers into full intellectual view. Thus, this epilogue beings rethinking the feminist era of US women's intellectual history and outlines the ways in which forms of historicism are central to queer and feminist practices.

This chapter criticizes cultural criticism in what can be called its high postmodernist forms: cultural anthropology, the New Cultural History, the New Historicism, the New Pragmatism, the new and/or post-Marxism, and, finally, that side of French theory—overlapping with post-Marxism—that may be labeled French pragmatism. These aggressively new forms of contextualism do not exhaust the field of postmodern cultural criticism, and a fuller study would need to include the different emphases of ethnic, gender, and area studies as well as of British cultural materialism. However, for now we can stay high. “High” distinguishes neither the theoretical from the practical, the high cultural from the populist, nor the neoconservative from the leftist. Rather, it indicates a shared mode of cultural engagement that undercuts all such polemics dividing the field to project an increasingly generic discourse of contextualism. This mode of engagement can be called detached immanence.

This chapter argues that the New Historicism is primarily a form of elegy. It explores the lossless assemblage universe—with the aid of Sigmund Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia”—two antithetical, contemporary understandings of that universe. The most basic task of the New Historicism as a work of mourning is simply to verify the possibility of loss in an otherwise closed, lossless, post-historical universe. Modernism is that which expresses nostalgic “melancholia” in its sublime effort to present the “unpresentable,” while postmodernism expresses “jubilation,” Jean-François Lyotard posits, but the modern versus postmodern pairing here is structural rather than diachronic: the two stances coexist in the same condition of postmodernity. Antithetically, if the major key of such maniacs of postmodernity as Lyotard is jubilation, their minor key is clearly and keenly mourning—as in the paradigm of Auschwitz on the first page of Lyotard's The Differend.

This chapter insists on the need to extend the (neo-)positivist hermeneutic paradigm in a way that would fruitfully combine the insights of New Historicism and Historical Poetics. Focusing on a specific philological problem (a possible intertextual link between Pindar’s Pythian 11 and Aeschylus’s Oresteia), Kurke reveals deep-seated divergences between the poetics of choral poetry (Pindar’s victory odes) and Attic tragedy. To achieve this major objective of a historical conceptualization of genre, she distinguishes between three kinds of historicist hermeneutics: one pertaining to the level of political histoire événementielle, another (following Veselovsky and Jameson) considering genres as socio-symbolic forms, and the third (following Tynianov) considering these genres’ different “orientations” with respect to a proximate cultural system, that of religion.

This chapter, which undertakes a salutary critique of interdisciplinarity in the humanities, probes a particular cluster of interdisciplinary works: French Revolution studies in its recent postmodern historicist inflections. This first step of criticism has a satiric edge to it congruent with that of Stanley Fish's important 1989 essay in Professions. The chapter asks whether the interdisciplinary effort can, in fact, do more than project an überdiscipline of interdisciplinarity. It reviews some of the studies of the French Revolution period published at the zenith of the New Cultural History and the New Historicism, which it presents under a metaphor that is deliberately antithetical to the interdisciplinary ethos: martial discipline. The chapter explores a parade of quotations—almost military in their basic uniformity—to mark the New Historicist vanguard of inquiry into the French Revolution.

The chapter confronts a paradox in Veselovsky’s theory of the persistence of forms, which appears to exclude the possibility of new forms arising. Juxtaposing Veselovsky’s “uncomfortably extreme view on artistic innovation” and Stephen Greenblatt’s approach to the processes of individual “self-fashioning” in the Renaissance, Somoff presents a critique of a presumption shared by the two critical paradigms that, inspired by linguistics, chose to prioritize system over individual agency. Contesting the primacy of the historical demand, Somoff argues for a need to theorize the phenomenon of “forgetting” the old form at the moment when a new form appears. From this perspective, she considers Veselovsky’s discussion of the emergence of rhyme from within syntactic parallelism and the rise of representation of consciousness as a quintessential non-referential element in Realist narration. In both cases, the oblivion of an old form and the rise of the new result from a fundamental shift in perception that occurs within the order of verbal creativity and does not lend itself to a historical-deterministic explanation.

This chapter studies João Cabral's collection Crime na Calle Relator (1987), giving particular attention to the poet's treatment of crime narratives and his use of anecdotal material. It gives particular consideration to how the collection deals with questions of culpability through a consistent disruption of rigid categorizations, particularly significant in the light of the political climate of post-dictatorial Brazil in which Cabral was writing. Borrowing critical approaches proposed by New Historicism theory, the chapter goes on to discuss Cabral's incursions into Brazilian history and the manner in which, through anecdotal narratives, official historical accounts are debunked, reflecting the poet's unwavering postcolonial perspective.

This chapter examines the construction of Emerson by Sacvan Bercovitch and the New Americanists. Focusing on the so-called subversion-containment model of the New Historicism, it reveals how Bercovitch's application of this model to Emerson grew out of his own unusual circumstances as a Canadian Jew who own gradually migrated to American Studies.

This chapter shows that mid‐ and late‐ seventeenth‐century booksellers' catalogues designate public theatrical masques, Interregnum closet pieces, and Restoration operas as “masques.” Masques were more than nonce works, instead retaining commercial appeal long past their performance dates. This chapter cross‐reads masques from different venues, contained within plays, intertextually mentioned in pageants, parodied in ballads, and recorded in gossip. Masques' habitual intertextual allusiveness contributes to the genre's self‐conscious explorations of how drama constitutes authority, their canniness contradicting New Historicist symptomatic readings. Case studies include two intertextually related masques of 1617–18 (White's Cupid's Banishment, produced by a London girls' school, and Jonson's courtly Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue); a cluster of 1630s masques of temperance (Milton's Ludlow masque Comus, Davenant's courtly Luminalia, Thomas Nabbes's public theatrical masque Microcosmus, Thomas Heywood's Lord Mayor's show Porta Pietatis); and Shirley's spectacular 1634 Triumph of Peace.

The debate within Hamlet, involving as it does the presentation of competing conceptions of the nature of subjectivity, parallels at many points the controversies of self. One might say that the controversies of self are internal to Hamlet. Yet this debate over the nature of subjectivity is given no role within either New Historicist or Cultural Materialist discussions of the nature of English Renaissance subjectivity. The result of (or perhaps the reason for) this omission is to see Hamlet, as well as other plays, as static, unthinking objects that must demonstrate a certain, set, and single view of subjectivity. Under such a view, the play is rendered subject, its voices silent under the discourse of the critic. However, the play is in this respect, as in others, a voluble argument, an argument held both within itself and with its culture. It is this argument that generates the dynamic contingency between the play and its culture, a contingency which New Historicists and Cultural Materialists claim to value highly. It is also this argument which ensures that the play eludes causal historical explanation, another linchpin of New Historicists' and Cultural Materialists' stated approaches. The play of this book (in three acts, not five) draws to a close by listening to this argument in another way. As is fitting, perhaps, the protagonist is called forward to deliver a brief epilogue. However, as he does so, that protagonist is seen to be double; for when Prince Hamlet steps forward, it becomes clear that there is not one Prince Hamlet, but two. There are two Princes Hamlet because the verbal variants between the Q2 and Folio texts of Hamlet create two versions of the Prince, each with a different sense of self. This chapter argues that not only Hamlet but also Shakespeare can be seen debating the controversies of self. Shakespeare can be seen, in the Quarto-Folio variants, creating different senses of self for his Princes Hamlet.

This essay argues that William Godwin's theory of historical romance may be placed in productive dialogue with Michel Foucault's influential preference for Nietzschean 'genealogy' over conventional history. For both, a narrative capable of unfolding the motive forces of history will necessarily be dispersed, contingent and fragmentary. This line of genealogical Gothic is traceable from Godwin through Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in England, and through Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville in America. In genealogical Gothic, history is expressed as trauma, as an originating event that leads to haunting and repetition experienced by the sufferer as (to use Melville's term) 'tranced grief'. These narratives may be contrasted with Walter Scott's versions of the historical romance, which look to narrate some kind of historical resolution to the conflicts of the past. In this respect, genealogical Gothic relates to Scott as New Historicism does to grand narratives.

This interchapter continues the discussion of reading, focusing on the ways that contemporary literary critics' treatments of texts differ so radically from the way readers not disciplined by graduate training read. It engages one variant of professional literary reading/writing—which is sometimes called New Historicism, sometimes called discourse analysis—in order to explore some of the problems that arise when even expert readers try to use the textual interpretations such theoretically sophisticated practices yield to generate historical narratives.