New Historicism

NewHistoricism/Cultural Poetics/Cultural Studies
•Foucault, all selections in NATC (1615-70)
•Greenblatt, excerpt in NATC (2250-2254)
•Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (NATC, 1895-1910)

New Historicism has been defined as “the history of the text and the textuality of history.” Coined by Stephen Greenblatt around 1980, practitioners began utilizing this method (such as J.W. Lever and Jonathan Dollimore) to parallel the reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same time period. This method refuses to privilege literary text.

Using the New Historicism method, Greenblatt suggested that historical anecdotes are given within the text which can then be related to the time. This places the literary text within the frame of a non-literary text, allowing literature and history to occupy the same weight of emphasis of literary interpretation.

So what does Greenblatt mean when he uses the term “enabling presumptions”? The movement establishes itself upon four main arguments. The first is that literature is historical. Essentially
this means “that a literary work is not primarily the record of one mind’s attempt to solve certain formal problems and the need to find something to say; it is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness.” The proper way to understand it, therefore, is through the culture and society that produced it. The second argument then is that literature is not a distinct category of human activity. “It must be assimilated to history, which means a particular vision of history.”

The third dispute suggests that “like works of literature, man himself is a social construct, the sloppy composition of social and political forces”—there is no such thing as a human nature that
transcends history. Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievably to the Renaissance. There is no continuity between him and us; history is a series of "ruptures" between ages and men. Consequently, and lastly, the historian/ critic is trapped in his own "historicity." No one can
rise above his own social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the past on its terms. A modern reader can never experience a text as its contemporaries experienced it. It becomes a parallel reading rather than a hierarchy. Given this fact, the best a modern historicist approach to
literature can hope to accomplish, according to Greenblatt, is "to use the
text as a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology."