New Historicism

 The Beginnings of New Historicism: The eighties witnessed the emergence of a new movement in Anglo-American literary scholarship which, in methodological sophistication, theoretical all-inclusiveness, and classroom appeal, bid fair to rival anything from Germany and France. The moment was ripe for such a homegrown movement to appear. For several years, many scholars in English and American universities–ranging from Frederick Crews, George Watson, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr., on one end of the scale to Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and Frank Lentricchia on the other–had been raising a clamor for a return to historical scholarship in the academic study of literature. The historical nature of literary works, it was said, had been badly neglected over the past half century of Anglo-American criticism. The time had come to move beyond the narrowly “formalistic” or “text-centered” approach to literature. A new historical approach was needed and, in the course of events, a new movement arose to meet the demand.

In the introduction to The New Historicism (Routledge, 1989), editor H. Aram Veeser outlines five key assumptions that connect both practitioners and critics:

1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices; 

2. that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes; 

3. that literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably; 

4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalter-able human nature; 

5. that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.

The New Historicists combat empty formalism by pullinsg historical considerations to the center stage of literary analysis. Following Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and other cultural anthropologists, New Historicists have evolved a method of describing culture in action. Taking their cue from Geertz’s method of “thick description,” they seize upon an event or anecdote . . . and re-read it in such a way as to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the behavioural codes, logics, and motive forces controlling a whole society.

Let us look at some of the basic ideas of Stephen Greenblatt in reference to his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. In this book Greenblatt uses the figures of More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare to trace how self-fashioning in the period was thought about and employed. The introduction to the book is nice because it both spends considerable time on Greenblatt’s methodology and assumptions – in essence, parsing out “a poetics of culture”– as well as the specific argument about self-fashioning. For the poetics of culture, Greenblatt argues that literature functions in three interlocking ways: “as a manifestation of the concrete behaviour of its particular author, as the expression of the codes by which behaviour is shaped, and as a reflection upon those codes.”

For the specific argument of the book, Greenblatt argues that in the Renaissance, there was both “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” even as “Christianity brought a growing suspicion of man’s power to shape identity”. In particular, he argues that “self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an authority [God, a sacred book, an institution such as church, court, etc.] and an alien [something that threatens the order of the authority, such as a heretic, savage, witch, traitor, Antichrist, etc.]”. The product of this encounter “partakes of both the authority and the alien that is marked for attack, and hence any achieved identity always contains within itself the signs of its own subversion or loss”. In other words, self-fashioning is always fraught with doubt and weaknesses that are the very product of trying to construct one’s own self. Ultimately, there is an illusion of autonomy in the creation of the self, when really the self is constructed by and in relation to social and cultural forces.

Greenblatt argues that Thomas More’s writings demonstrate both self-conscious self-fashioning, as well as a desire for “self-cancellation”: “the crafting of a public role and the profound desire to escape from the identity so crafted”. The public persona that is pragmatic, responding to political realities as a character in a play. One of the confusing parts of this chapter is that while at times Greenblatt frames More as both self-fashioning and desiring self-cancellation, at other times he frames More as having two separate identities – one public, one private: “the private life made possible the public by making it morally bearable; the public life defined the private by giving it a reason to exist”. In any case, More’s identity, especially at the point of conflict between his public and private personas, was created by the conflict between the authority of the visible Church and those who rejected the church in favour of the “the book, “ and who became for More the demonic (or mad) other.’ 

Greenblatt in the later part of the book focuses on Shakespeare, primarily Othello. Greenblatt focuses on what he calls the “improvisational construction of identity” and here we return to More, for improvisation depends on “the ability and willingness to play a role, to transform oneself, if only for a brief period and with mental reservations, into another”. This is, of course, what completely defines Iago. Improvisation can either be used “to deceive its original object”– in this case, Othello and the other characters in the play. Iago’s project, according to Greenblatt, is “to play upon Othello’s buried perception of his own sexual relations with Desdemona as adulterous.”

What are the principles–or what Greenblatt calls the “enabling presumptions”– behind the New Historicist method? The movement establishes itself upon four main contentions:

1. Literature is historical, which means (in this exhibition) 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. 

2. Literature, then, is not a distinct category of human activity. It must be assimilated to history, which means a particular vision of history. 

3. 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. 

4. As a consequence, 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. Given this fact, the best a modern historicist approach to literature can hope to accomplish, according to Catherine Belsey, is “to use the text as a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology.” 

Such an approach stands traditional historical scholarship on its head. The first principle of traditional scholarship – its generally agreed-upon point of departure – was that the recovery of the original meaning of a literary text is the whole aim of critical interpretation. But the New Historicism premises that recovery of meaning is impossible, to attempt it naive. What practitioners of the new method are concerned with, by contrast, is the recovery of the original ideology which gave birth to the text, and which the text in turn helped to disseminate throughout a culture. This dimension of critical interpretation has been neglected by traditional scholars not merely because the required concept, the “enabling presump-tion” of ideology, was unavailable to them until recently; in the New Historicist view, it had never been widely attempted because literary texts themselves suppress the means by which they construct ideology.

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