Stephen Greenblatt

5 Key excerpts on "Stephen Greenblatt"

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  eBook - ePub

  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  34 Stephen Greenblatt DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-34 Introductory note Stephen Greenblatt (1943–) was, for 28 years, the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the University of Califormia at Berkekey. In 1997, he moved to take up the Harry Levin Professorship of Literature at Harvard University and then, by internal promotion, in 2000, he was named a University Professor of Humanities, a post specifically designed to allow the holder to pursue interdisciplinary work. His very influential accounts of Renaissance literary culture have been regarded as a model (for all periods) of how to reintroduce historical accounts of literary genesis that were at the same time theoretically informed. Alongside the significant contributions of Jonathan Goldberg, Louis A. Montrose, Joel Fineman and Jean Howard, his work has been termed a contribution to a ‘New Historicism’. The main difficulty in itemizing the founding principles of such an approach to literary study lies in its determination to do so much justice to the particular example. Greenblatt himself has been reticent in providing polemical introductions to an identifiable ‘school’ of criticism, and this piece is the nearest he has come to such abstract detail. In 1982 Greenblatt edited a special number of the periodical, Genre (vol. 15; 1–2 – re-issued as The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance [1982]), and in his introduction, ‘The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance’, he laid claim to an interest in a ‘New Historicism’, a label that has since gained general currency. The term was perhaps first used in a Michael McCanles essay for the journal, Diacritics 10:1 (Spring, 1980), 77–87, when, in describing ‘The Authentic Discourse of the Renaissance’, he called for renewed attention to the specific discourses and signifying codes of the Renaissance and how they emerged out of a distinct and very heterogeneous culture

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  The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics

  • Brook Thomas(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  If we want to understand why his histories are prone to attack from those hoping to establish new traditions, Greenblatt’s continued concern with canonical texts is an obvious place to start. This is not to imply that he is inattentive to questions of race, gender, and class. Quite the contrary, he is very sensitive to issues of domination and power. But precisely because those issues get played out within the sphere of the “dominant” literary tradition, Greenblatt is accused of containing the subversive force of the conflictual voices that he lets us hear. Since Greenblatt’s intent is not to contain conflict, we need to ask why his early work evokes such charges. Eventually that question will lead to his uses of Foucault. But first we need to see what sort of history Foucault helped him to overcome.

  If reconstructionists start with the desire to expand the official canon and eventually find poststructuralism of limited use in doing so, it would be more accurate to say that Greenblatt’s call for a new historicism developed more directly out of poststructuralist criticism of traditional historical criticism. Taking very seriously charges, like de Man’s, that critics too often appealed to history in order to close off readings, Greenblatt works to keep historical readings open. Thus Greenblatt contrasts the new historicism to an older one “concerned with discovering a single political vision, usually identical to that said to be held by an entire literate class or indeed the entire population.” Once discovered, that vision served as a “stable point of reference, beyond contingency, to which literary interpretation can securely refer.”21

  Although Greenblatt does not elaborate on this description, it is worth noting that there are both materialist and idealist versions of such histories. In the materialist version the political vision is determined by social and economic forces that have the status of independent variables. In contrast, literature as part of the superstructure is a dependent variable. Thus the task of the literary historian is to show how changes in literature react to a predetermined narrative about social and economic transformations. Although in this tradition literature is a dependent variable, it is often (but not always) granted a status of relatively greater independence from social and economic forces than an institution such as the law. This greater independence allows literature, or at least great literature, to occupy a position outside of social and economic forces, a position from which it offers us a privileged view of the complexities of a historical moment.

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  Stephen Greenblatt

  • Mark Robson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  what critics analyse, as well as in the conjunctions that are made between literary and non-literary materials, in the use of anecdotes, and in the privileging of those elements of cultural production that fail to cohere into a system or world-picture in order to recast the narratives of a period and its culture.

  One of the other problems that I have discovered in trying to write this section of this book – and indeed the book as a whole – is the result of a historical fact. Stephen Greenblatt is still alive. As such, any sense of what comes after Greenblatt will happily have to be suspended. But I also think that it will forever remain suspended, since it is impossible – and will remain impossible – to predict what might be made of his work by future generations. Just as Greenblatt is keenly aware of the ways in which Shakespeare’s work continually renews itself as it is brought into relation with new contexts and practices, so his own work must similarly be open to such transformations, and these cannot be fully programmed and predicted by him, or me, or you.

  There is, of course, another way of thinking about this idea of ‘After Greenblatt’, and it also stems from this notion of not knowing quite what Greenblatt’s work will turn out to have been. That is, talking of being ‘after’ Greenblatt may be taken as an implication that some people are still struggling to work out what to do with his work, they are after him, seeking him out, as the police might be said to be after a criminal. To be after someone in this sense is to want something from that person, to want to do something to them or with them. Because Greenblatt’s work has largely been concerned with Shakespeare and early modern culture, in the remainder of this chapter I will sketch out some of the ways in which critics have tried to ‘get hold of ’ Greenblatt, either to understand his work by offering a critique of it, or else by trying to discover the paths by which his work might be led into new areas and in other directions. In each case, those who come after Greenblatt both do and do not imitate him. His insistence on attending to the particularity and contingency of a text or cultural artefact means that any attempt simply to ‘do what Greenblatt would do’ to it would have missed the whole point of Greenblatt’s work. In this sense, Greenblatt should

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  The Age of the Avant-garde

  1956-1972

  • Hilton Kramer(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  During the forties the bulk of Mr. Greenberg’s criticism appeared in The Nation, a magazine he served as a regular art critic and with which he broke, eventually, for political reasons. In the fifties his articles continued to appear in Partisan Review and in the art journals. Now this highly telescoped resume of his past professional involvements is no idle biographical footnote to his development as a writer. To grasp Mr. Greenberg’s particular stance as a critic and an intellectual, it is of the essence to understand the ideological context in which his aesthetic position was formed. In approaching Art and Culture, it is no more irrelevant to mention its author’s early Trotskyism and his later connection with Commentary than it is to examine Roger Fry’s connections with Bloomsbury for an understanding of Vision and Design. Mr. Greenberg’s critical intelligence was formed in the crucible of Marxian dialectics, and long after he eschewed the illusions and commitments of Marxist ideology, his criticism continued to draw upon the dialectical practices which had already determined his attitude toward culture and his habits as a writer. Foremost among these was the assumption that critical judgments, if they are to carry the authority and force of something more than a merely personal taste, must be made in the name of history. Every critic faces the responsibility of having to discriminate between his own irrational preferences and the application of meaningful principles. Criticism may indeed properly be said to begin at a point where one recognizes the germ of a general principle amid the claims of one’s own sensibility, and it is unlikely that criticism will mean very much if it does not, sooner or later, derive from some harmonious rapprochement between personal experience and general ideas

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  Art Criticism and Modernism in the United States

  • Stephen Moonie(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Clement Greenberg: ‘A Critic on the Side of History’

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003098270-2

  Greenberg is so over-determined by the subsequent critical and scholarly analysis that it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover his criticism for the purposes of dispassionate examination (Figure 1.1). This is partially a matter of reception: Greenberg influenced a clutch of fledgling writers in the 1960s, such as Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss; he also befriended and influenced curators such as E.C. Goosen, William Rubin, and Maurice Tuchman. However, this influence is itself no simple matter, and it is apt to be overstated by art historians. On the other hand, in the 1980s, Greenberg functioned negatively as a counterpoint for post-modern articulations of the ‘anti-aesthetic.’1 This history is further complicated by disagreements over which ‘Greenberg’ is at issue. The early Greenberg was described by T.J. Clark in 1982 as an ‘Eliotic Trotskyist' who called urgently in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) for socialism to preserve the best of high culture.2 Clark's coinage is suitably paradoxical, but in retrospect Greenberg was more Eliotic than Trotskyist. In 1993, John O’Brian—a former Ph.D. student of Clark's—would describe the later Greenberg's position as ‘Kantian anti-Communism’ (CE , III, xxvii). Here, Greenberg's involvement in the American Congress for Cultural Freedom, and his writing for U.S.-funded journals such as Horizon and Commentary, placed Greenberg's calls for aesthetic autonomy within the context of a burgeoning post-war U.S. hegemony. Since then, Thierry de Duve has split Greenberg into three as ‘dogmatist,’ ‘critic,’ and ‘theorist.’3

  Figure 1.1

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