New Historicism free essay sample

The New Historicism [March 31, 2009] Chapter 1. Origins of New Historicism [00:00:00] Professor Paul Fry: So today we turn to a mode of doing literary criticism which was extraordinarily widespread beginning in the late seventies and into the eighties, called the New Historicism. It was definable in ways that Ill turn to in a minute and, as I say, prevalent to a remarkable degree everywhere. It began probably at the University of California at Berkeley under the auspices, in part, of Stephen Greenblatt, whose brief essay youve read for today. Greenblatt and others founded a journal, still one of the most important and influential journals in the field of literary study, calledRepresentationsalways has been and still is an organ for New Historicist thought. Its a movement which began primarily preoccupied with the Early Modern period, the so-called Renaissance. The New Historicism is, in effect, responsible for the replacement of the term Renaissance with the term Early Modern. We will write a custom essay sample on New Historicism or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Its influence, however, quickly did extend to other fields, some fields perhaps more than others. It would be, I think, probably worth a lecture that Im not going to give to explain why certain fields somehow or another seem to lend themselves more readily to New Historicist approaches than others. I think its fair to say that in addition to the early modern period, the three fields that have been most influenced by the New Historicism are the eighteenth century, British Romanticism, and Americanist studies from the late colonial through the republican period. That agethe emergence of print culture, the emergence of the public sphere as a medium of influence, and the distribution of knowledge in the United Stateshas been very fruitfully studied from New Historicist points of view. So those are the fields that are most directly influenced by this approach. When we discuss Jerome McGanns essay, youll see how it influences Romantic studies. Now the New Historicism wasand this probably accounts for its remarkable popularity and influence in the period roughly from the late seventies through the early ninetieswas a response to an increasing sense of ethical ailure in the isolation of the text as it was allegedly practiced in certain forms of literary study. Beginning with the New Criticism through the period of deconstruction, and the recondite discourse of Lacan and others in psychoanalysis, there was a feeling widespread among scholars, especially younger scholars, that somehow or another, especially in response to pressing concerns-post-Vietnam, concerns with globalization, concerns with the distribution of power and global capitalall of these concerns nspired what one can only call a guilt complex in academic literary scholarship and led to a return to history. It was felt that a kind of ethical tipping point had been arrived at and that the modes of analysis that had been flourishing needed to be superseded by modes of analysis in which history and the political implications of what one was doing became prominent and central. I have to say that in debates of this kind theres always a considerable amount of hot air, perhaps on both sides. In many ways its not the case that the so-called isolated approaches really were isolated. Deconstruction in its second generation wrote perpetually about history and undertook to orient the techniques of deconstruction to an understanding of history, just to give one example. The New Historicism, on the other hand, evinced a preoccupation with issues of form and textual integrity that certainly followed from the disciplines, the approaches, that preceded them. Also to a large degreeand 1 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? PRINT Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 this is, of course, true of a good many other approaches that were about to investigate, approaches based in questions of identity alsoto a large degree, appropriated the language of the generation of the deconstructionists and, to a certain extent, certain underlying structuralist ideas having to do with the binary relationship between self nd other, and binary relationships among social entities, as opposed to linguistic entities; but still, as I say, essentially inheriting the structure of thought of preceding approaches. So, as I say, it was in a polemical atmosphere and at a moment of widespread self-doubt in the academic literary profession that the New Historicism came into its owna response, as I say, to the isolation of the text by certain techniques and approaches to it. Chapter 2. The New Historicist Method and Foucault [00:06:16] Now very quickly: the method of New Historical analysis fell into a pattern, a very engaging one, one thats wonderfully exemplified by the brief introduction of Greenblatt that I have asked you to read: a pattern of beginning with an anecdote, often rather far afield, at least apparently rather far afield, from the literary issues that are eventually turned to in the argument of a given essay. For example: a dusty miller was walking down the road, thinking about nothing in particular, when he encountered a bailiff, then certain legal issues arise, and somehow or another the next thing you know were talking about King Lear. This rather marvelous, oblique way into literary topics was owing to the brilliance in handling it of Greenblatt, in particular, and Louis Montrose and some of his colleagues. This technique became a kind of a hallmark of the New Historicism. In the long run, of course, it was easy enough to parody it. It has been subjected to parody and, in a certain sense, has been modified and chastened by the prevalence of parody; but it nevertheless, I think, shows you something about the way New Historicist thinking works. The New Historicism is interested, following Foucaultand Foucault is the primary influence on the New Historicism. I wont say as much about this today as I might feel obliged to say if I werent soon be going to return to Foucault in the context of gender studies, when we take up Foucault and Judith Butler togetherbut I will say briefly that Foucaults writing, especially his later writing, is about the pervasiveness, the circulation through social orders, of what he calls power. Now power is not justor, in many cases in Foucault, not even primarily the power of vested authorities, the power of violence, or the power of tyranny from above. Power in Foucaultthough it can be those things and frequently isis much more pervasively and also insidiously the way in which knowledge circulates in a culture: that is to say, the way in which what we think, what we think that it is appropriate to thinkacceptable thinkingis distributed by largely unseen forces in a social network or a social system. Power, in other words, in Foucault is in a certain sense knowledge, or to put it another way, it is the explanation of how certain forms of knowledge come to existknowledge, by the way, not necessarily of something thats true. Certain forms of knowledge come to exist in certain places. So all of this is central to the work of Foucault and is carried over by the New Historicists; hence the interest for them of the anecdotes. Start as far afield as you can imaginably start from what you will finally be talking about, which is probably some textual or thematic issue in Shakespeare or in the Elizabethan masque or whatever the case may be. Start as far afield as you possibly can from that, precisely in order to show the pervasiveness of a certain kind of thinking, the pervasiveness of a certain social constraint or limitation on freedom. If you can show how pervasive it is, you reinforce and justify the Foucauldian idea that power is, as Ive said, an insidious and ubiquitous mode of circulating knowledge. All of this is implicit, sometimes explicit, in New Historicist approaches to what they do. 2 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 Chapter 3. The Reciprocal Relationship Between History and Discourse [00:10:56] So as I said, Foucault is the crucial antecedent and of course, when its a question of Foucault, literature as we want to conceive of itperhaps generically or as a particular kind of utterance as opposed to other kindsdoes tend to collapse back into the broader or more general notion of discourse, because its by means of discourse that power circulates knowledge. Once again, despite the fact that New Historicism wants to return us to the real world, it nevertheless acknowledges that that return is language bound. It is by means of language that the real world shapes itself. Thats why for the New Historicistand by this means, Ill turn in a moment to the marvelous anecdote with which Greenblatt begins the brief essay that Ive asked you to readthats why the New Historicist lays such intense emphasis on the idea that the relationship between discoursecall it literature if you like, you ight as welland history is reciprocal. Yes, history conditions what literature can say in a given epoch. History is an important way of understanding the valency of certain kinds of utterance at certain times. In other words, history isas its traditionally thought to be by the Old Historicism, and Ill get to that in a minutehistory is a background to discourse or literature. But by the same token there is an agency, that is to say a capacity, to circulate power in discourse in turn. Call it literature: I am Richard II, know you not that? says Queen Elizabeth when at the time of the threatened Essex Uprising she gets wind of the fact that Shakespeares Richard II is being performed, as she believes, in the public streets and in private houses. In other words, wherever there is sedition, wherever there are people who want to overthrow her and replace her with the Earl of Essex, the pretender to the throne, Richard II is being performed. Well, now this is terrifying to Queen Elizabeth because she knowsshes a supporter of the theatershe knows that Richard II is about a king who has many virtues but a certain weakness, a political weakness and also a weakness of temperamentthe kind of weakness that makes him sit upon the ground and tell sad tales about the death of kings, that kind of weakness, who is then usurped by Bolingbroke who became Henry IV, introducing a whole new dynasty and focus of the royal family in England. Queen Elizabeth says, Theyre staging this play because theyre trying to compare me with Richard II in preparation for deposing me, and who knows what else they might do to me? This is a matter of great concern. In other words, literatureFredric Jameson says history hurtsliterature hurts, too. [laughs] Literature, in other words, has a discursive agency that affects history every bit as much as history affects literature: literature out there, and theaterespecially if it escapes the confines of the playhouse because, as Greenblatt argues, the playhouse has a certain mediatory effect which defuses the possibilities of sedition. One views literary representation in the playhouse with a certain objectivity, perhaps, that is absent altogether when interested parties take up the same text and stage it precisely for the purpose of fomenting rebellion. Literature, especially when escaped from its conventional confines, becomes a very, very dangerous or positive influence, depending on your point of view on the course of history. So the relationship between history and discourse is reciprocal. Greenblatt wants to argue with a tremendous amount of stress and, I think, effectiveness that the New Historicism differs from the Old Historicism. This is on page 1443 in the right-hand column. John Dover Wilson, a traditional Shakespeare scholar and a very important one, is the spokesperson in Greenblatts scenario for the Old Historicism. The view Im about to quote is that of John Dover Wilson, a kind of consensus about the relationship between literature and history: Modern historical scholarship [meaning Old Historicism] has assured Elizabeth [laughs] that she had [this is the right-hand column about two thirds of the way down] [laughs] nothing to worry 3 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 about: Richard II is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor order. The play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion, regards the deposition of the legitimate king as a sacrilegious act that drags the country down into the abyss of chaos; that Shakespeare and his audience regarded Bolingbroke as a usurper, declares J. Dover Wilson, is incontestable. But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure†¦ Greenblatt wins. Its a wonderful example. Its the genius of Greenblatt to choose examples that are so telling and so incontrovertible. We know Queen Elizabeth was scared [laughs] on this occasion, which makes it quite simply the case that John Dover Wilson was wrong to suppose that Richard II was no threat to her. Its not at all the point that a broad, ideological view of Richard II was any different from what Wilson said; that was perfectly true. Bolingbroke wasconsidered a usurper. It was considered tragic that Richard II was deposed; but that doesnt mean that the text cant be taken over, commandeered and made subversive. Wilson doesnt acknowledge this because his view of the relationship between history and literature is only that history influences literature, not that the influence can be reciprocal. You see, thats how it is that the New Historicism wants to define itself over and against the Old Historicism. If there is a political or ideological consensus about the legitimacy of monarchy, the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of succession under the sanction of the Church of England and all the rest of itall of which is anachronistic when youre thinking about these history playsif there is this broad consensus, thats it, thats what the play means according to the Old Historicism, even though plainly you can take the plot of the play and completely invert those values, which is what the Essex faction does in staging it in those places where Queen Elizabeth suspects that its being staged. Chapter 4. The Historian and Subjectivity [00:19:24] Okay. Now another way in which the Old Historicism and the New Historicism differcorrectly, I think according to Greenblatt is that in the Old Historicism there is no questionIm looking at page 1444, the right-hand column about a third of the way downof the role of the historians own subjectivity. It is not thought, says Greenblatt, to be the product of the historians interpretation†¦ History is just what is. One views it objectively and thats that. Now notice here that were back with Gadamer. Remember that this was Gadamers accusation of historicism, the belief of historicismwhat Greenblatt calls the Old Historicismthat we can bracket out our own historical horizon and that we can eliminate all of our own historical prejudices in order to understand the past objectively in and for itself. This is not the case, said Gadamer, remember. Gadamer said that interpretation must necessarily involve the merger of horizons, the horizon of the other and my own horizon as an interpreter. I cannot bracket out my own subjectivity. Okay. If thats the case, then Gadamer anticipates Greenblatt in saying that the naivete of the Old Historicism is its supposition that it has no vested interest in what its talking aboutthat is to say, its supposition that it wants history to accord in one way or another with its own preconceptions, but isnt aware of it. The anecdoteagain, wonderfully placed in the polemical argumentthat after all, John Dover Wilson delivered himself of these opinions about Richard II before a group of scholars in Germany in 1939 is, after all, ather interesting. Hitler is about to be the Bolingbroke of Germany. John Dover Wilson wants his audience to say, Hey, wait a minute. Stick with vested authority. [laughs] You have a weak democracy, but it is a democracy. Dont let it get away from you. And so he is speaking, the horse already having escaped from the barn, in this reassuring way about German politics as a means of sort of reinforcing his own view of the politics of Elizabethan England. of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 But this, Greenblatt supposes, is something about which he has very little self-consciousness. That is to say, his own interest, as of course it should be on this occasion, is in the preservation of vested authority, and his own interest then folds back into his understanding of Elizabethan ideology in such a way that it can conform to that interest. He has, in other words, as we say today, a hidden agenda and is very little aware of it, unlike the New Historicist who, following Gadamer in this respect, is fully cognizant of the subjective investment that leads to a choice of interest in materials, a way of thinking about those materials, and a means of bringing them to life for us today and into focus. In other words, its okay for Greenblatt, as it was for Gadamermuch to the horror of E. D. Hirschto find the significance of a text, as opposed to the meaning of a text. The significance of the text is that it has certain kinds of power invested in it. Those kinds of power are still of interest to us today, still of relevance to whats going on in our own world. All of this is taken up openly as a matter of self-consciousness by the New Historicists in ways that, according to Greenblatt and his colleagues, were not available consciously in the older Historicism. Now the world as the New Historicism sees itand after Ive said this, Ill turn to McGannis essentially a dynamic interplay of power, networks of power, and subversion: that is to say, modes of challenging those networks even within the authoritative texts that generate positions of power. The Elizabethan masque, for example, which stages the relation of court to courtier, to visitor, to hanger-on in wonderfully orchestrated ways, is a meansbecause its kind of poly-vocalof containing within its structure elements of subversion, according to the argument thats made about these things: the same with court ritual itself, the same with the happenstance that takes place once a year in early modern England, in which the Lord of Misrule is so denominated and ordinary authority is turned on its ear for one day. Queen for a day, as it were, is something that is available to any citizen once a year. These are all ways of defusing what they, in fact, bring into visibility and consciousnessmainly the existence, perhaps the inevitable existence, of subversion with respect to structures and circulatory systems of power. Its t Chapter 5. Jerome McGann and Bakhtin [00:26:12] his relationship between power and subversion that the New Historicism, especially in taking up issues of the Early Modern period, tends to focus on and to specialize in. Now its not wholly clear that Jerome McGann has ever really thought of himself as a New Historicist. He has been so designated by others, but I think there is one rather important difference in emphasis, at least between what hes doing and what Greenblatt and his colleagues do in the Early Modern period. McGann doesnt really so much stress the reciprocity of history and discourse. He is interested in the presence of history, the presence of immediate social and also personal circumstances in the history of a text. His primary concern is withat least in this essaytextual scholarship. He himself is the editor of the new standard works of Byron. He has also done a standard works of Swinburne, and he has been a vocal and colorful spokesperson of a certain point of view within the recondite debates of textual scholarship: whether textual scholarship ought to produce a text thats an amalgam of a variety of available manuscripts and printed texts; whether the text it produces ought to be the last and best thoughts of the authorthats the position that McGann seems to be taking in this essayor whether the text, on the contrary, ought to be the first burst of inspiration of the author. All the people who prefer the earliest versions of Wordsworths Prelude, for example, would favor that last point of view. In 5 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 other words, McGann is making a contribution here not least to the debates surrounding editing and the production of authoritative scholarly texts. Its in that context that the remarks hes making about Keats have to be understood. I think the primary influence on McGann is not so much Foucault, then, with the sense of the circulation of power back and forth between history and literary discourse, as it is Bakhtin, whom he quotes on pages eighteen and nineteen; or whose influence he cites, I should say rather, in a way that, I think, does pervade what you encounter in reading what he then goes on to say at the bottom of page eighteen in the copy center reader: What follows [says McGann] is a summary and extrapolation of certain key ideas set forth by the so-called Bakhtin School of criticism, a small group of Marxist critics from the Soviet Union who made an early attack upon formalist approaches to poetry [just as he, McGann, is, and as the New Historicists are themselves, in their turn, doing]. The Bakhtin Schools socio-historical method approaches all language utterancesincluding poemsas phenomena marked with their concrete origins and history. That is to say, phenomena voiced by the material circumstances that produce them or phenomena, in other words, in which the voice of the Romantic solitary individual is not really that voice at all, but is rather the polyglossal infusion of a variety of perspectives, including ideological perspectives, shaping that particular utterance and also, in the case of the textual scholar, shaping which of a variety of manuscripts will be chosen for publication and for central attention in the tradition of the reception of a given text. So all of this McGann takes to be derived from Bakhtin rather than from Foucault. I do think thats a significant difference between our two authors. Chapter 6. McGann on Keats [00:30:28] Now McGanns most important contribution to the return to history of the seventies and eighties is a short book calledThe Romantic Ideology, and this bookwell, what it is is an attack on Romanticism. At least its an attack on certain widely understood and received ideas about Romanticismideas ith which, by the way, I dont agree, but this course isnt about me. The Romantic Ideology is an amalgam of two titles. One of them is the important early critique of Romanticism by the German poet and sometime Romantic Heinrich Heine called Die romantische Schule, or The Romantic School, in which the subjectivity, even solipsism, and the isolation from social concern and from unfolding historical processes of the Romantic poets is emphasized and criticized. In addition to thatthats where the word Romantic comes from in the title The Romantic Ideologythe other title that it amalgamates is Marxs book The German Ideology, which is about many things but is in particular about Lumpenproletariat intellectuals who think with Hegel still following Hegel despite believing themselves to be progressivewho think with Hegel that thought produces material circumstances rather than the other way around: in other words people, in short, who are idealists and therefore, under this indictment, also Romantic. McGanns title, as I say, cleverly amalgamates these two other titles and sets the agenda for this short book, which is an attack not just on Romanticism but on what he believes to be our continued tendency still to be in Romanticism, still to be Romantic. There his particular object of attack is the so-called Yale school, which is still under attack in the essay that youve read for today. Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartmans well-known essay on Keatss To Autumn are singled out for particular scorn and dispraise, all sort of on the grounds that yes, its all very well to read Romanticism, to come to understand it, and even to be fascinated by it; but we cant be Romantic. In other words, our reading of Romanticismif we are to be social animals, politically engaged, and invested in the world as a social communitymust 6 of 10 03/24/2012 11:47 ?.? Open Yale Courses http://oyc. yale. edu/transcript/469/engl-300 necessarily be an anti-Romantic critique. This is, as I say, still essentially the position taken up by McGann. All right. So Ive explained the ways in which he differs from Greenblatt in leaning more toward Bakhtin than toward Foucault. I have explained that McGann is engaged primarily in talking about issues of textual scholarship in this particular essay, that he defends Keatss last deliberate choices, that he believes the so-called indicator text of 1820 of La Belle Dame Sans Merci is Keatss last deliberate choice, as opposed to the 1848 text published by Monckton Milnes in the edition of Keatss poems that he brought out at that time. Now I think that in the time remaining to sort of linger over McGann, I do want to say a few things about what he says about Keats. I want to emphasize that his general pronouncements about the historicity of texts, about the permeation of texts by the circumstances of their production, their conditioning by ideological factors, is unimpeachable. It seems to me that this is a necessary approach at least to have in mind if not, perhaps, necessarily to emphasize in ones own work of literary scholarship. The idea that a text just falls from a treeif anybody ever had that idea, by the way [laughs] is plainly not a tenable one, and the opposite idea that a text emerges from a complex matrix of social and historical circumstances is certainly a good one. So if one is to criticize, again its not a question of criticizing his basic pronouncements. It seems to me nothing could be said really against them. The trouble is that in the case of McGannwho is a terrific, prominent Romantic scholar with whom one, I suppose, hesitates to disagreeeverything he says about the text that he isolates for attention in this essay is simply, consistently, wrong. Its almost as if by compulsion that he says things that are wrong about these texts, and the reason I asked you in my e-mail last night to take a look at them, if you get a chance, is so that these few remarks that I make now might have some substance. Take for example La Belle Dame Sans Merci. In the first place, who says we only read the 1848 text? A scholarly editionand his main object of attack is Jack Stillingers scholarly edition of Keatsgives you basically a variorum apparatus. Yeah, maybe it gives you a particular text in bold print, but it gives you the variant text in smaller print in a footnote. It doesnt withhold the variant text from you. It says, No, look, theres this too. Take your choice. Really the atmosphere of a variorum scholarly edition is an atmosphere of take your choice, not a kind of tyrannical imposition on the public of a particular version of the text. Everybody knows the 1820 Indicator text. What can ail thee, wretched wight? is at least as familiar to me, as a Romanticist, as What can ail thee, knight at arms? the way in which the 1848 text begins; and frankly how many people who arent Romanticists know anything about either text? What are we talking about here? [laughter] [laughs] The Romanticists know whats going on. Theyre not in any way hornswoggled by this historical conspiracy against the 1820 indicator text, and people who arent Romanticists dont care.