The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics
eBook - ePub

The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics

Brook Thomas

Share book
  1. 278 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics

Brook Thomas

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Brook Thomas explores the new historicism and the challenges posed to it by a postmodern world that questions the very possibility of newness. He considers new historicism's engagement with poststructuralism and locates the former within a tradition of pragmatic historiography in the United States.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics by Brook Thomas in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

_____________ CHAPTER 1 _____________
Fair Warning
AT THE 1982 Modern Language Association convention in Los Angeles I was on a panel hosted by the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society. After the talk a graduate student approached me with, “So you must be one of the new historicists?” I felt like Huckleberry Finn when late in the book he arrives at Phelps’s farm and is identified by Aunt Sally. I was so glad to find out who I was. But, as I remembered, Aunt Sally calls Huck “Tom Sawyer,” and like Huck I was not sure if I was what I was taken to be. My suspicions were especially aroused because the respondent to the panel was Roy Harvey Pearce, who in 1969 published a collection of essays entitled Historicism Once More. Pearce himself was the subject of a chapter in Wesley Morris’s Toward a New Historicism published in 1972. Since Morris ends by using Murray Krieger’s work as an example of his version of a new historicism and because the interdisciplinary work on law and literature that I was doing did not seem to resemble Krieger’s work, I remained puzzled. Thus, when I got home I was glad to find a special issue of Genre waiting for me in which Stephen Greenblatt’s introduction announced the rise of a new historicism, or what he also called a poetics of culture. Greenblatt’s description of such work seemed closer to what I thought I was doing, so I was reassured. After all, it’s always prudent to be on the cutting edge of the profession.1
Nonetheless, a nagging doubt remained. Morris had taken some time to outline the confused use of “historicism” in English, distinguishing four different uses, ranging from Karl Popper’s in The Poverty of Historicism to J. Hillis Miller’s in his introduction to The Disappearance of God. In contrast, Greenblatt made no concerted effort to define the term’s historical uses. This caused me problems. Even though I was struck by Greenblatt’s description of what the new historicism tried to do, I could not help but remember my own exposure to historicism in my freshmen Western Civilization course, which for all of its Eurocentric bias had taught me to be very suspicious of any movement calling itself a “historicism.” This suspicion resulted from the uses put to historicism by Europeans, especially Germans, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If, as I had learned, historicism had experienced a crisis, at least partially because of its political conservatism, why would a group of scholars in the United States intent on establishing a critical stance toward society want a new historicism?
Some of my difficulty resulted from the confused history of the term “historicism” in English that Morris addresses. To simplify, “historicism” can refer generally to any sort of historical method. But it can also refer to a specific brand of historiography that flourished in the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, where it was known as Historismus. Trying to guarantee precision, some translators evoke “historism” to refer to Historismus. Nonetheless, “historism” never took. Even if it had, precision would not be assured, since exactly what Historismus meant in Germany is not completely clear. For instance, Herbert Schaedelbach distinguishes between three sorts of Historismus.2
Such complications have caused Herbert Lindenberger to avoid the term “historicism” altogether.3 But not all are as restrained as Lindenberger, and it remains a historical fact that the label “new historicism” has caught on. Its popularity is somewhat embarrassing for Greenblatt, who admits that he first used it very casually and who prefers the descriptive label “cultural poetics.”4 The result is that the new historicism has general and specific meanings. The general meaning can best be described by evoking Fredric Jameson's claim that historicism refers to “our relationship to the past, and of our possibility of understanding the latter’s monuments, artifacts, and traces.”5 A new historicism in literary studies, therefore, promises a new relationship to the literary past. Specifically, the label refers to a particular brand of cultural poetics associated with work of the sort appearing in Representations, which Greenblatt helped to found. Thus the essays in a recent collection entitled The New Historicism could be divided in different ways depending upon one’s perspective. For some, all of the essays included would be examples of a “new historicism” that tries to establish new connections between literature and history. For others, only the first essays by Greenblatt, Louis A. Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, and perhaps Joel Fineman would be examples of the “new historicism” as represented by some of its well-known practitioners.6 Even more confusion results because Greenblatt himself is quite generous about what he includes under the label, more generous than those who would want to identify the new historicism with a particular method. In his latest book he explicitly states that “there can be no single method, no overall picture, no exhaustive and definitive cultural poetics.”7 There can be, in short, no representative work of the movement.
Greenblatt’s disclaimer is a cautionary response to those who would establish a set of methodological rules to govern the practice of historical criticism and those who consider the new historicism a particular practice that can be mechanically imitated. At the same time, we should not read Greenblatt’s statement too inclusively. He still implies that the goal of historical criticism is to produce a cultural poetics. It is on this point that my own complicated relationship to the new historicism becomes somewhat clearer. In the general sense, I am a new historicist. I do, nonetheless, have specific disagreements with various practices of cultural poetics.
In accepting a label that I admit causes confusion, I could be accused of a lack of precision. Indeed, my original strategy was to introduce a new term that would avoid the confusion caused by the new historicism. But that strategy would have had the opposite effect because it would ignore an insight that practitioners of cultural poetics (among others) have stressed: the power of rhetoric partially to shape history. Discontent with the label's confusion or not, I am confronted with its power. There are both historical and linguistic reasons for that power. The very sound of the label the “new historicism” serves rhetorically to displace the most influential brand of criticism that preceded it: the New Criticism. At the same time, the “new” in the label helps to distinguish it from an older historicism. Faced with the rhetorical power produced by the economy of the label, I decided that a better strategy than trying to displace it would be to appropriate it by taking more seriously than most the adjective “new.”
The starting point of my intervention into debates about the new historicism is, then, the question of newness. One consequence of that starting point is that my study will be as prescriptive as it is descriptive. Whereas the purpose of many recent books on theory has been to explain and describe a particular school of thought—a sort of professional version of Cliff Notes—my assumption is that, if the new historicism is to live up to the adjective in its label, it must always be made new. Thus, rather than assume that the new historicism consists of a given, definable body of work that we can dissect, I hope to define directions in which a new historicism will project itself.
To call attention to the prescriptive element of my study is not to deny the need to describe existing historical situations. My appropriation of the “new historicism” signals a desire to participate in its redefinition, but that redefinition would be ineffective if it did not pay attention to the ways in which the label is currently used. In the descriptive component of what follows I will use “new historicism” to refer generally to work claiming to “return to history.” Within that general field I will identify two strains: a reconstructive strain—the effort to reconstruct more inclusive literary histories—and what we could call the new historicism proper—work resembling Greenblatt’s version of a cultural poetics. The former is more explicitly concerned with how the writing of new literary histories can be put to present uses, how writing a new history can help bring about a new future. Its ways of doing so, however, rarely offer new modes of historical analysis. The latter comes much closer to presenting a new mode of analysis but seems less concerned with actively intervening into the making of a new history. My concern will be to bring the two types of newness together. In doing so I will reserve my most detailed analysis for two whose work has become representative of the latter strain—Walter Benn Michaels and Greenblatt. Their representative status is, to my mind, well-earned. Their work is important. But it is also symptomatic of problems raised by the project of a cultural poetics.
If choosing to devote detailed attention to two figures raises questions of representativeness, it should, at least partially, correct and complicate some of the generalizations that result from my too schematic—and yet enabling—division of the new historicism into two strains. The work of Greenblatt, with its own built-in self-correction and reexamination, is especially useful in pointing to moments when the boundaries that I draw between reconstructive histories and a cultural poetics need to be re-adjusted and renegotiated.8
Some new historicists would argue that, if, as I try to make it, the new historicism is a project to be pursued rather than merely an existing body of work to be identified, I should simply write a book exemplifying my practice. One reason for devoting an entire book to examining the practices of others, however, is that debates over what a label should mean (or represent) play a role in defining what directions a practice will take. To be sure, those directions will be determined by many more factors than intellectual debates. Nonetheless, when a movement promises something new, it is important to have some sense of what that newness is. Part of my contribution to the debate over the new historicism is to emphasize the importance of a historical understanding of past historicisms, an understanding surprisingly lacking in many of its advocates. I can give a sense of what I mean and also define a number of the challenges that I see facing a new historicism by responding to someone else’s description of the new historicism proper.
Explaining the new historicism to an audience interested in the history of the book, Michael Warner summarizes the recent interest in the politics of interpretation. He goes on:
The same theoretical arguments that have been associated with poststructuralism and deconstruction have also led to what is known as the New Historicism, and thus to a strong interest in the history of the book. New Historicism is a label that historians don’t like very much because they understand something different by historicism. But nobody’s asking historians; the people the New Historicists are reacting against are the New Critics, and historicism seems an important term for that purpose because it emphasizes that meaning is established in concrete historical situations, and ought not to be abstracted as though it didn’t matter who was reading or when or where or why.
So if the “Historicism” in the New Historicism is to distinguish it from the New Critics and their idea that a text means what it means regardless of what your cultural situation is, the “New” in New Historicism is to distinguish it from the somewhat dreary and encyclopedic historical work that the philologists used to do. And this latter distinction is no less important than the first. Because while critics have realized on one hand that language and the symbolic are never essential and timeless but always contingent on cultural politics, on the other hand they have realized that cultural politics is always symbolic. New Historicism has a motto: “The text is historical; and history is textual. ” The first part means that meaning does not transcend context but is produced within it; the second part means that human actions and institutions and relations, while certainly hard facts, are not hard facts as distinguished from language. They are themselves symbolic representations, though this is not to say, as many old historicists might conclude, that they are not real.9
Warner is one of our best young critics and when I first read this description, I was struck with how useful it might be as a summary of new historicist assumptions. He touches on its debt to poststructuralism, its attempt to distinguish itself from the New Criticism and an older historicism, and finally its acceptance of Louis Montrose’s chiasmatic formulation that the goal of the new historicism is to examine both the “historicity of texts and the textuality of history.”10
Reading this passage just after struggling to describe the new historicism, I found myself almost wishing that I had written it. Almost. Almost, because the very polish of its presentation is achieved at the cost of simplifying the very history that we are supposed to be returning to. Part of the simplification comes from a rhetoric too prone to slide into pronouncements about what “always” and "never” are and have been the case. But there is more to the simplification than assumptions about the eternal existence of categories like cultural politics.
Were the New Critics quite as naive as Warner makes them out to be? Did they really believe that a “text means what it means regardless of your cultural situation?” If I remember correctly, it was precisely the New Critical belief that a text’s meaning changes over time that caused E. D. Hirsch sleepless nights eventually resulting in his distinction between a text’s meaning and its significance and his attempt to anchor meaning by appealing to a historically determined authorial intention. And what about the famous debate between historians and T. S. Eliot over the meaning of “vegetable love” in Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress?” Furthermore, did not many New Critics agree with Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that the production of a new classic changed the meaning of all works that came before it? New Critics might have had a different sense of what a “cultural situation” is, and they might have felt that great works of art transcended what Warner and I would consider a cultural situation. But their aesthetic was more complicated than Warner allows.
So was that of old-fashioned historicists. Should we lump the work of Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer under Warner's label of “the somewhat dreary and encyclopedic historical work that the philologists used to do?” If I could only be so dreary. Rather than hastily consign such work to the dustbin of history, we might use it to pose challenges to our present projects. Indeed, I can cite Spitzer and Auerbach to pose two specific challenges.
In a footnote to his 1948 essay, “Linguistics and Literary History,” Spitzer speaks to the desire to expand the range of literary studies.
Under the noble pretext of introducing “history of ideas” into literary criticism, there have appeared in recent times, with the approval of the departments of literary history, academic theses with such titles as “Money in Seventeenth-Century French (English, Spanish etc.) Comedy,” “Political Tendencies in Nineteenth-Century French (English, Spanish etc.) Literature.” Thus we have come to disregard the philological character of the discipline of literary history, which is concerned with ideas couched in linguistic form, not with ideas in themselves (this is the field of history of philosophy) or with ideas as informing action (this is the field of history and the social sciences). Only in the linguistico-literary field are we philologians competent qua scholars. The type of dissertations cited above reveals an unwarranted extension of the (in itself commendable) tendency toward breaking down departmental barriers, to such a degree that literary history becomes the gay sporting ground of incompetence. Students of the department of literature come to treat the complex subjects of a philosophical, political, or economic nature with the same self-assurance that once characterized those Positivists who wrote on “The Horse in Medieval Literature.”11
Fledgling new historicists should read this note with the care that Michel Foucault clearly did when he translated the essay into French. It does more than remind us that many new historicist-sounding titles are not all that new, that the New Criticism did not have quite the hegemony in 1948 that is often attributed to it. It also forces those of us encouraging the “(in itself commendable)” move toward interdisciplinarity in literary studies to face the difficulties involved in that project by reminding us just how ambitious a cultural poetics is. Within the field of literary studies there is increasing agreement that it is impossible to “cover” all of the important works. Nevertheless, at the same time, we are being asked to expand our range of expertise to produce cultural, rather than purely literary, studies. As one encouraging such a move, I ultimately disagree with Spitzer's desire to contain us within existing disciplinary boundaries. Nonetheless, the danger that cultural studies will become the “gay sporting ground of incompetence” is great. Having struggled in my own work to gain a minimum competency in two disciplines—or more accurately, in two subfields of two disciplines (antebellum law and literature in the United States)—I marvel at the ease with which some of my colleagues can range across the entire spectrum of social practices in a particular era.
But there is more at stake than a question of competency. On the one hand, new historicists, indebted to both Clifford Geertz and the same Foucault who translated Spitzer's essay, have stressed the importance of “local knowledge,” knowledge that is culturally and historically specific.12 On the other, the goal of producing a cultural poetics encourages use of bits and pieces of local knowledge to represent a culture at large. I...

Table of contents