CHAPTER IV

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THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION IN NEW HISTORICISM

Stephen Jay Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943) is a

literary critic, theorist and scholar. He was born in Boston and

raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After graduating from

Newton High School, he was educated at Yale University (B.A.

1964, M.Phil 1968, Ph.D. 1969 and Pembroke College,

Cambridge (B.A. 1966, M.A. 1968). Greenblatt taught at

University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University.

Greenblatt was class of 1932 Professor at Berkeley (he became a

full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking

a position at Harvard University where in 1997 he became the

Harry Levin Professor of Literature; he was named John Cogan

University Professor of the Humanities in 2000.

Greenblatt is regarded by many one of the founders of New

Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as

‘cultural poetics’. His works have been influential since the early

1980s when he introduced the term. Indeed, his influence meant

that ‘New Historicism’ first gained popularity among Renaissance

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scholars many of whom were directly inspired by Greenblatt's

ideas and anecdotal approach.

‘Historicism’ is a theory as per which events are

determined or influenced by conditions and inherent processes

beyond the control of humans. It is a theory that stresses the

significant influence of history as a criterion of value. In Art &

Architecture historicism is the deliberate use or revival of

historical styles in contemporary works.

Historicism refers to philosophical theories that include

one or both of two claims:

1. that there is an organic succession of developments, a

notion also known as historism.

2. that local conditions and peculiarities influence the results

in a decisive way.

The theological use of the word denotes the interpretation

of biblical prophecy as being related to church history. The term

has developed different and divergent, though loosely related,

meanings. Elements of ‘historicism’ appear in the writings of the

philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, influential in the 19th-century

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Europe as well as in those of Karl Marx whom he influenced.

Post-structuralism uses the term New Historicism, which has

some connections with both ‘anthropology’ and ‘Hegelianism.’

In ‘archaeology’, Historicism is defined as a general and

increasingly ambiguous term meaning a number of different

things to different people. At its heart, however, is the idea that a

society and its culture exist mainly in their dynamic and

developmental character. In this way it gives emphasis on non-

rational behaviour, all-round creativity, and doubts many of the

beliefs inherent to a progressive view of change.

In Christianity, the term Historicism refers to the

confessional Protestant form of prophetical interpretation which

holds that the fulfilment of biblical prophecy has taken place

throughout history and continues to take place today, as opposed

to other methods which limit the time-frame of prophecy-

fulfilment to the past or to the future.

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 Karl Popper uses the term, ‘Historicism’ in his influential

book The Poverty of Historicism to mean:

an approach to the social sciences which assumes that

historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes

that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the

'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution

.
of history. (1)

The Poverty of Historicism is a devastating criticism of the

belief in the laws of history, social development, and progress.

Karl Popper wrote with reference to Hegel's theory of history

which he criticized extensively. However, there is a wide dispute

whether Popper's description of "historicism" is an accurate

description of Hegel or more a reflection of his own philosophical

antagonists including Marxist-Leninist thought, then widely held

as posing a challenge to the philosophical basis of the West as

well as theories which drew predictions about the future course of

events from the past.

The historicist position is that there is no objective way to

determine which of the various competing theories on a subject is

correct. In science, philosophy, or any other discipline, there are

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only the facts about who has believed what, and when they

believed it.

In literary criticism, history plays a vital role. Literary

historians wrote history of literature from various perspectives.

Literature is not only criticized but also understood in relation to

the past. Thus, the concepts such as tradition, modernity, age,

genre and trends are frequently used by critics in literary

criticism. An artist and a critic are always found themselves at

crossroads between tradition and modernity. They deny the

tradition or become part of it. Orhan Pamuk, the winner of the

Nobel Prize of 2006 in literature, says in an interview at British

Council, Mumbai on 5th March, 2009 that his novels are an

attempt to reconstruct the past with reference to the present. He

adds an artist is pulled by the forces of tradition and modernity.

(He is from Istambul.)

Traditional Historicism uses historical context to explain

and understand a literary text. It assumes that to know a text one

need understand its insertion in a particular moment of time as an

expression of a writer influenced by his/her times. History

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consists in part of consistent world views that are reflected in art.

This type of historical criticism takes into consideration an

author's biographical data as well as historical works from the

time in order to show how the text reflects its time: ideology,

social, political, economic beliefs and trends, etc. It has a very

simplistic view of history but history is more complicated

involving a swirl of conflicting attitudes. History is always

understood from a set of beliefs, values, etc., rooted in one’s time.

One looks at the past from the present. So the present decides the

meaning of past. Past is not one and the same all the times, it gets

revalued, reshaped and reconstructed every time.

Since the 1950's, when Lacan and Foucault argued that

each epoch has its own knowledge system, which individuals are

inexorably entangled with, many post-structuralists have used

historicism to describe the view that all questions must be settled

within the cultural and social context that they are raised in the

answers cannot be found by appeal to an external truth, but only

within the confines of the norms and forms that phrase the

question. This version of historicism holds that there are only the

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raw texts, markings and artifacts that exist in the present, and the

conventions used to decode them.

‘New Historicism’ tries to establish a strong strategy to

criticise literature with the help of post-modernist critique of

history, particularly that of Foucault. Greenblatt defines it as a

method of literary criticism that emphasizes the historicity of a

text by relating it to the configurations of power, society, or

ideology in a given time.

Major articles on this topic by renaissance scholars were

published in New Historicism edited by Aram Veeser in which he

gives the basic tenets of this ‘school’:

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 a prey to the practice it

exposes.

3. That literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably.

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4. That no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives an access to

unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature.

5. Finally, that a critical method and language adequate to

describe culture under capitalism participating in the economy

they describe.

There are a number of similarities between ‘New

Historicism’ and ‘Cultural Materialism’. Both New Historicists

and Cultural Materialists are interested in recovering lost histories

and in exploring mechanisms of repression and subjugation. The

major difference is that the New Historicists tend to concentrate

on those at the top of the social hierarchy (i.e. the church, the

monarchy, the upper-classes) while Cultural Materialists tend to

concentrate on those at the bottom of the social hierarchy (the

lower-classes, women, and other marginalized people). New

Historicists tend to draw on the disciplines of Political Science

and Anthropology given their interest in governments,

institutions, and culture, while Cultural Materialists tend to rely

on Economics and Sociology given their interest in class,

economics, and commodification.

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 Robert Young in White Mythologies, gives a difference

between the New Historicism and Cultural Studies:

The former is identified closely with Foucault, while

the latter owes its allegiance to Raymond Williams and

really only amounts to a way of describing British ex-

(2)
Marxists.

New Historicists are interested in the questions of

circulation, negotiation, profit and exchange, i.e. how activities

that purport to be above the market (including literature) are in

fact informed by the values of that market.New Historicists take

this position further by claiming that all cultural activities may be

considered as equally important texts for historical analysis:

contemporary trials of hermaphrodites or the intricacies of map-

making may inform a Shakespearean play as much as, say,

Shakespeare's literary precursors.

In the earlier historical-biographical criticism, literature

was seen as a reflection of the historical world in which it was

produced. Further, history was viewed as stable, linear, and

recoverable--a narrative of the fact. In contrast, New Historicism

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views history skeptically (historical narrative is inherently

subjective), also, more broadly; history includes all of the

cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in

any given age, and these various "texts" are unranked - any text

may yield information valuable in understanding a particular

milieu. Rather than forming a backdrop, the many discourses at

work at any given time affect both an author and his/her text; both

are inescapably part of a social construct.

New Historicists want to understand the complex set of

connections that intersect a text at the time of its production. They

reject the idea that there is a single, monolithic ideology, attitude,

set of beliefs, or way of using language. Instead, they want to

examine and understand the relationship among political,

economic, social, and aesthetic concerns which constantly overlap

each other. They want to describe the way a specific form of

power works within a specific historical moment.

Greenblatt notes, ‘the new historicism erodes the firm

ground of both criticism and literature. It tends to ask questions

about its own methodological assumptions and those of others.’

New Historicists read literary texts but they read them along side

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historical ‘texts’ (documents, events, actions, etc.). There is a

levelling of texts in that the literary text does not explain the

historical context and the historical text does not explain the

literary text: they are intertwined, like two sides of a sheet of

paper. So, there is a great deal of New Historicists who focus on

Shakespeare-

Con-texts with a hyphen, to signify a break from the

inequality of the usual text/context relationship. Con-texts are

themselves texts and must be read with: they do not simply

(3)
make up a background.

Michael Ryan summarizes the task of ‘New Historicism’

by saying, ‘there is no single historical discourse of a period;

instead, the critic must trace out the multiple and complexly

interconnected histories that make up an age.’ In other words,

there are multiple ‘discourses’ operating at the same time. For

example, there are such things as ‘legal discourse,’ ‘military

discourse,’ ‘patriarchal discourse,’ ‘religious discourse,’ ‘sports

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discourse,’ ‘academic discourse,’ ‘patriotic discourse,’ ‘Marxist

discourse,’ ‘medical discourse,’ and so on, for one could argue

that there is a discourse that belongs to any identifiable group of

people. By ‘discourse,’ one means not only the way one uses a

language but also the assumptions, attitudes, values, beliefs, and

hierarchies that are attached to the way the language is used. The

task is to show how a text functions within a discourse or show

how a text attempts to negotiate with competing discourses.

‘Discourse’ is defined by Michel Foucault as ‘language

practice’; that is, language as it is used by various constituencies

(the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do

with power relationships between people.

New historicists typically examine the functions and

representations of power and focus on the ways in which power

containes any potential subversion. New Historicists usually agree

with the Foucouldian notion that the author and the living person

who write a book each should not be equated. New Historicists

are mainly concerned with the extent to which literary texts lay

bare the existing power relations of which they are themselves a

product. Where a cultural materialist prefers to make clear the

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way in which these same texts may serve as sites of subversion

and dissidence, as places, to use Alan Sinfield’s description, a

culture exposes its own faultiness.

The New Historicists try to establish the interconnections

between literature and the general culture of a period. The post-

structuralist intellectual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s

challenges the older historicism on several grounds and

establishes a new set of assumptions.

There are two meanings of the word ‘history’: a) ‘the events

of the past.’ and b) ‘Telling a story about the events of the past.’

The Post-Structuralist thought makes it clear that history is

always ‘narrated’ therefore, the first sense is problematic. The

past can never be available to one in its pure form but always in

the form of ‘representations’. History itself is a text. Historical

periods are not unified entities. There is no single ‘history’ but

only discontinuous and contradictory ‘histories’. The idea of a

uniform and harmonious culture is a myth imposed on history and

propagated by the ruling classes in their own interests.

Historians can no longer claim that their study of the past is

detached and objective. One cannot transcend one’s own

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historical situation. The past is not something which confronts

one as if it were a physical object but is something one constructs

from already written texts of all kinds which one construes in the

line of one’s particular historical concerns. The relations between

literature and history must be rethought. There is no stable and

fixed ‘history’ which can be treated as the ‘background’ against

which literature can be foregrounded. All history is ‘foreground’.

‘History’ is always a matter of telling a story about the past, using

other texts as one’s intertext. ‘Non-literary’ texts produced by

lawyers, popular writers, theologians, scientists and historians

should not be treated as belonging to a different order of

textuality. Literary works should not be regarded as sublime and

transcendent expressions of the ‘human spirit’ but as texts among

other texts. In this way, New Historicism demystifies the so

called canon of great writers.

New Historicists are influenced by Michel Foucault’s

understanding of discourses, or discursive formations as rooted in

social institutions and as playing a key role in relations to power.

New Historicism seeks a ‘touch of the real’ learned from the

anthropologist Clifford Geertz, to extend literary critical strategies

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to the discussion of hitherto unregarded cultural texts. Foucault

has emphasized how social and political power works through the

discursive regions by which social institutions maintain

themselves. Discourses are produced in which concepts of

madness, criminality, sexual abnormality, and so on are defined in

relation to concepts of sanity justice and sexual normality.

New Historicists explore the ways in which Elizabethan

literary texts, especially drama, masque (pastoral) act out the

concerns of the Tudor monarchy, reproducing and renewing the

powerful discourses which sustain the system. They see the

monarchy as the central axis governing the power structure.

Greenblatt says in his ‘Epilogue’ to Renaissance Self

Fashioning, ‘In all my texts and documents, there were, so far as

I could tell, no moments of pure, unfettered subjectivity; indeed,

the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the

ideological product of the relations of power in a particular

society.’

The New Historicists re-situate texts in the complex

discursive frame of their originating period by way of a detailed

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allusive reading of them in their intertextual relations with other

contemporary political, cultural and ‘popular’ discourses.

Peter Barry defines ‘New Historicism’ in his famous book

Beginning Theory as:

A simple definition of the new historicism is that it is a

method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-

literary texts, usually of the same historical period. A new

historical essay will place the literary text within the ‘frame’

of a non-literary text. Thus, Greenblatt’s main innovation,

from the viewpoint of literary, study was to juxtapose the

plays of the Renaissance period with ‘the horrifying colonist

policies pursued by all the major European powers of the

era”. He draws attention to “the marginalization’ and

dehumanizing with an analysis of a contemporary historical

document which overlaps in some way with the subject matter

of the play. (4)

The New Historicists read literature without a consideration

of other commentaries on it. We may call it ‘a fresh look’ at texts.

Shakespeare has been considered as a product of his age so that

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his work is not an outcome of genius aloof from society but very

much part of ‘social energy’:

Where (earlier) criticism had mystified Shakespeare as an

incarnation of spoken English it (new historicism) found the

plays embedded in other written texts, such as penal, medical

and colonial documents. Read within this archival continuum,

what they represented was not harmony but the violence of

the puritan attack on carnival, the imposition of slavery the

rise of patriarchy, the bounding of deviance, and the crashing

of prison gates during what Foucault called the Age of

(5)
confinement’ at the down of carceral society’

For the new historicist, the events and attitudes of the past

exist solely as writing of the kind of a close analysis formerly

reserved for literary texts. New historicism accepts Derrida’s view

that there is nothing outside the text in the special sense that

everything about the past is only available to one in a textualised

form: it is ‘thrice-processed’, first through the ideology or

outlook, or discursive practices of its own time, then through

those of ours, and finally through the distorting web of language

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itself. Whatever is represented in a text is thereby re-made. The

New historicist essays always constitute themselves another

remaking, another permutation of the past, as the play or poem

under discussion is juxtaposed with a chosen document so that the

document selected may not really be ‘relevant’ to the play, is

disarmed, for the aim is not to represent the past as it really was,

but to present a new reality by re-situating it.

The new historicists juxtapose literary and non- literary

texts reading the former in the light of the latter. They try thereby

to ‘defamiliarise’ the canonical literary text detaching it from the

accumulated weight or previous literary scholarship and seeing

it as a new one. They focus attention (within both text and co-

text) on the issues of State power and how it is maintained on

patriarchal structures and their perpetuation, and on the process of

colonization with its accompanying ‘mind-set’.

The ‘New Historicism’ is indeed a historicist rather than a

historical movement. That is, it is interested in history as

represented and recorded in written documents, in history-as-text.

Historical events as such, it would argue, are irrecoverably lost.

For the new historicist, the events and attitudes of the past now

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exist solely as writing. New historicism accepts Derrida’s view

that there is nothing outside the text, in the special sense that

everything about past is only available to us in textualised form; it

is ’thrice-processed’, first through the ideology, or outlook, or

discursive practices of its own time, then through those of ours

and finally through the distorting web of language itself.

New historicism is resolutely anti-establishment, always

implicitly on the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom and

accepting and celebrating all forms of difference and

‘deviance’. At the same time, though it seems simultaneously

to despair of the survival of these in the face of the power of

the repressive state, which it constantly reveals as able to

penetrate and taint the most intimate areas of personal life.

This notion of the state as all powerful and all seeing stems

from the post-structuralist cultural historian Michel Foucault

whose pervasive image of the state is that of ‘panoptic’

(meaning ‘all seeing’) surveillance. ……The panoptic state,

maintains its surveillance not by physical force and

intimidation, but by the power of its ‘discursive practices’

which circulates its ideology throughout the body politic. (6)

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 The rhetoric of ‘New Historicism’ uses the terms such as

network, embeddedness and issues such as non-

linerality/recursiveness and mutability of language and truth.

History/tradition/authority: all three entities are deeply connected

to each other as well as to the issues of space and voice. New

Historicism concerns itself with interconnectedness, network of

materials and the interplay of literary and non-literary texts.

Greenblatt asserts the importance and necessity of the past

saying ‘no individual, not even the most brilliant, seemed

complete unto himself’. It sounds exactly like Eliot who says ‘no

poet no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone.’

Greenblatt has a desire to speak with dead. He is ready by

‘simulation’ to recreate ‘conversation’ with them. He stresses that

the dead are ‘alive’ in textual traces.

It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own

voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead, for the dead had

contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces

make themselves heard in the voices of the living (7)

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 Greenblatt tries to find out the causes and reasons behind

Shakespeare’s master works. The artist and the milieu are in

continuous, ‘dialogue’ or to use Greenblatt’s term ‘confrontation.’

For him, textual analysis is important but like practical critics and

he focuses on margins of the text to find out ‘the half-hidden

cultural transaction through which great works of art are

empowered. The ‘supreme’ authority of the author is questioned

by Greenblatt which is praised in traditional literary criticism

where artist is a ‘monarch’, specially gifted and different from all

other ordinary people.

Theatre is a group activity: ‘The moment of inscription is a

social moment. Even Shakespeare acknowledges the indebtness

of literary raw material he has ‘cooked’ and has been serving

generations with ‘delicious dishe’. It is interesting to ponder over

theatre and audience in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages.

Theatre is a mass phenomenon. It is a ritual. The demarcation line

was thin between theatre stage and audience literarily and

figuratively. For example, it has been said that witches in

Macbeth come on the stage ‘through’ audience. The audience is

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very close to the action, moreover part of action. When Brutus

addresses people of Rome in funeral speech, he says ‘Romans,

countrymen, and lovers’ and Antonio says, ‘Friends, Romans and

Countrymen’. The three nouns are not uttered to stress anything

but they address to three divisions of the audience. The audience

used to sit to the right, to the centre and to the left of the stage.

And the actor enacting Brutus or Antonio says that these

attributes are dedicated to the people of left, centre and right.

Greenblatt calls his ‘enterprise’ of finding the traces of

social circulation of cultural practices as ‘cultural poetics.’

I want to know how cultural objects, expressions and

practices here principally, plays by Shakespeare and the stage

on which they first appeared-acquired compelling force. (8)

Much of the philosophy that literary criticism deals with is

the relationship between the past and the present, their analysis

and interpretation.

Greenblatt speaks about ‘link’ between the present and

past. He says:

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 That there is no direct, unmediated link between ourselves

and Shakespeare’s plays does not mean that there is no link at

all. The ‘Life’ that literary works seems to possess long after

both the death of the author and the death of the culture for

which the author wrote is the historical consequence, however

transformed and be fashioned, of the social energy initially

encoded in those works. (9)

Greenblatt gives the characteristics of literature and the

way it comes into existence:

1. There can be no appeals to genius as the sole origin

of the energies of great art.

2. There can be no motiveless creation.

3. There can be no transcendent or timeless or

unchanging representation.

4. There can be no autonomous artifacts.

5. There can be no expression without an origin and an

object ‘a from’ and ‘a for’.

6. There can be no art without social energy.

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 7. There can be no spontaneous generation of social

energy.

The exchange between the stage and society is a reversible

process i.e. give and take and again give. The theatre and social

are involved in a continuous fruitful dialogue. Literature and

History make each other, if literature is ‘the child of history’.

History is also ‘a child of literature’. There is not only one

discourse but there are discourses simultaneously active so we

can’t have unified system of their analysis.

Greenblatt is interested in the diversity and oddity of

historical forces. Eagleton describes him as a “warm-blooded

scholar.’ In the words of New York Times critic Rachel Donodio,

‘done well, a new historicist analysis can illuminate dimensions

of a work of literature difficult for the untrained eye to see, done

badly, it can be rather like looking at marginalia through a

magnifying glass while ignoring the main text.’

Shakespeare has been a key topic in Greenblatt’s work.

Three of his books, ‘Renaissance self Fashioning’; ‘From More

to Shakespeare’ in 1980 (University of Chicago Press),

‘Shakespearean Negotiations: The circulation of social energy in

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Renaissance England’ in 1988 (University of California Press)

and Hamlet in purgatory in 20001 (Princeton University Press)

applied his theories to Shakespeare’s work. In Hamlet in

Purgatory, for instance, Greenblatt examines Shakespeare’s most

famous play in the light of the pitched battle over the existence of

purgatory between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th century.

The Catholics saw purgatory as a spiritual state of suffering where

imperfect souls were purified before ascending to heaven but

Protestants saw a scam that was both contrary to Scripture and the

occasion of clerical corruption. ‘New Historicism’ tries to bring

back from the past a supposedly repressed or forgotten context

that would help explain a contemporary cultural moment. Croce

says “all history is contemporary history”. Bakhtin is the figure

Greenblatt has in mind when he claims, ‘Mainstream literary

history tends to be monological’

New Historicists see everything as a ‘text’ and go ‘outside

the canon’ of tradition of literary studies, examining for instance,

private letters, obscure public documents and forgotten/minor

literary texts and even, and almost especially, public spectacles

and displays in their analysis of the working of social power.

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‘New Historicism’ is interested in the circulation of social energy,

the exchange of political power and negotiation of self-

fashioning forces.

History can be understood as a set of representatives which

are always open to reinterpretation, mediation, and

recontextualisation. Text and context are mutually constitutive.

Literary texts shape and are in turn shaped by historical contexts.

There is no history in the traditional sense; there are only

representations of history. For Greenblatt New Historicism is a

practice not a doctrine and literary text is one social discourse

which is analysed in relation to other discourses.

All history is the narrative written according to the point of

view held by the historians. Historians are not aware of their

leanings and do often think that their history is objective. New

Historicism deconstructs the traditional distinction between

history (thought to be factual) and literature (thought to be

fictional). History is another text even as literature is; Literature is

another cultural artifact even as history is.

New Historicism deconstructs the dominant and oppressive

narratives. It questions master or grand narratives. In this way,

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histories of the marginalised groups assume some importance

because of the plurality of historical voices. All critics are

historicists up to a point. For New Historicist literary effect is an

entirely historical phenomenon. ‘Historicism’ is the assertion that

the fundamental distinction between philosophical and historical

questions cannot in the last analysis be maintained.

New historicism's claim that historical analysis is

unavoidably subjective is not an attempt to legitimize a self-

indulgent,an 'anything goes' attitude towards the writing of

history. Rather, the inevitability of personal bias makes it

imperative that new historicists be aware of and as forthright as

possible about their own psychological and ideological positions

relative to the material they analyze so that their readers can have

some idea of the human 'lens' through which they view the

historical issues at hand.

Greenblatt says “My deep, ongoing interest is in the

relation between literature and history, the process through which

certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly

specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am

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constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem

addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written

by people who crumbled to dust long ago".

His work on Shakespeare has addressed such topics as

ghosts, purgatory, anxiety, exorcists and revenge. Greenblatt’s

work in Renaissance studies includes Renaissance Self-

Fashioning (1980) which “had a transformative impact on

Renaissance studies”

Shakespearean Negotiations argues that works of art,

however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private

obsessions of individuals, are the products of collective

negotiation and exchange This book investigates how complex

events influenced the works of Shakespeare and how he

chronicled them. It takes the form of five essays discussing theory

or events of the time and relating them to the plays of

Shakespeare.

For its eighth edition, Greenblatt replaced M. H. Abrams as

the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature

(2005). Abrams was the general editor from the first edition

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(1962) to the seventh (2000). Greenblatt is also co-editor of the

anthology's section on Renaissance literature. Greenblatt stated,

“as Abrams said in the introduction to the first edition, the literary

tradition is always on the move, it's constantly changing. That

doesn't mean that the old gets chucked out, but the canon has to

be reshaped.”

The concept of tradition of Eliot and Leavis has been

enlarged at the hands of Greenblatt by using Foucault’s power

analysis and discourse analysis as ‘tools’ to interpret literature.

The monolithic idea of ‘canon’ gets changed and thus minor

works, neglected, marginalisd, suppressed texts, diaries and

pamphlets come to the forefront for a serious consideration.

For Stephen Greenblatt, cultures are inherently unstable,

mediatory modes of fashioning experience and it is only through

experience and only through the imaginary order of exclusion that

a culture can be simulated as a stable entity. Greenblatt stresses

the importance of culture for the study of literature and wrote

many articles and books on this topic. Tradition is one of the

integral parts of a culture. By analysing his essay on culture and

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his ‘strategy’ of reading literary works in a novel way,

Greenblatt’s concept of tradition will be understood.

Greenblatt begins his essay on culture by quoting Edward

B. Tylor who defines culture as ‘that complex whole which

includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any

other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of

society’-

Culture" is a term that is repeatedly used without meaning

much of anything at all, a vague gesture toward a dimly

perceived ethos: aristocratic culture, youth culture, human

(10)
culture

The term ‘culture’ commonly refers to a society’s beliefs,

customs, morals, art and laws. However, according to Stephen

Greenblatt, the term is used so frequently that it often does not

mean much pointing only vaguely to a variety of ‘capabilities and

habits’ adopted by human beings. However Greenblatt says ‘the

concept can be still useful to students of literature if defined and

applied more carefully’. In his essay ‘culture,’ Greenblatt

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redefines the concept of culture in a fashion he believes can do

more work for the literary scholar. This refined understanding of

the concept he believes must begin with the acknowledgement

that culture ironically ‘gestures toward what appear to be opposite

things: constraint and mobility.’

In asserting that culture signifies or indicates social forces

of constraint, Greenblatt points out that every culture is formed on

“ensemble of beliefs and practices”. These beliefs act as a

pervasive technology of control to structure and delimit the

behavior of the members of a society. For example, such

standards may articulate certain ideas of appearance or behaviour

in public.

If people do something unacceptable, something counter to

these ideals, then they consequences; everything from stars,

sarcasm, contempt or laughter to legal sanctions like

imprisonment. The beliefs and values of a culture discourage

people from going outside what is “appropriate” for that society.

They are constrained by society’s expectations. At the same time,

‘a culture’s boundaries are enforced more positively as well’.

People are rewarded for confirming constraints of culture with

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praise from others, an admiring look, a pat on the back, a

promotion, etc. Refining a consciousness of culture on these

forces of constraint can assist in understanding the cultural

significance of a piece of literature. Greenblatt notes two genres

of literature ‘satire’ and ‘panegyric’ as obvious examples

demonstrating the constraints of a culture. A satire shows

explicitly the reaction to someone who does not conform while a

panegyric praises someone who does.

However satires or panegyrics written years ago do not

have the same power or emphasis today because the cultural

customs, values, and beliefs upon which they were based are no

longer in force for modern readers. As a result, the only way to

fully appreciate these works is to examine the culture that they

reflect and are embedded in. An important task of literary

criticism then, is ‘to reconstruct the boundaries upon whose

existence the works were predicated.’ But for Greenblatt,

understanding ‘culture as a complex whole’ and illuminating the

cultural significance of literature involves more than

reconstructing the boundaries. Culturere may be web of

constraint, but at the same time it ‘functions as the regulator and

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guarantor of movement’. Although limitations must be present in

a culture, these must also have enough elasticity. Furthermore

cultures survive only because of the experimentation and in

provision of societies. A society must tolerate and even encourage

mobility to determine what attitudes, activities and aspirations

fulfil its needs and foster its success. For instance, a culture may

need to experiment with tyranny to realize that it needs

democracy. A culture may need to improvise and mediate or

modify its constraints to accommodate the diversity of people

needed for its work. The cultural mobility of Greenblatt speaks of

is not random, nor is it a conscious exploration and pursuit of a

social destiny. Rather, it is an expression of a crucial social

process that Greenblatt terms ‘exchange’. Culture acts as a

‘network of negotiations’ for the exchange of goods, ideas,

attitudes and even of people.

In the negotiations of this exchange, the direction and

destiny of a society emerge its conflicts and its goals. Cultural

exchange also permits concepts to be traded and shared by

different societies. From this one society can adopt and apply

ideas from other societies. Through its cultural forces of

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constraint, a society seeks to preserve itself but through the

cultural mobility of exchange, a society moves to modify itself.

Just as literature reflects cultural forces of constraint, it reflects

the cultural exchange that fosters mobility. For Greenblatt, ‘a

culture’s narratives are crucial indicators of the prevailing codes

governing human mobility and constraint.’ Great writers are

‘masters of these codes’ consciously or unconsciously they are

‘specialists in cultural exchange’

Their writing captures not just one aspect of a particular

culture or one over-riding system of constraint, rather it captures

the many divisions within a society that contributes to its cultural

exchange. A Society is both articulated and transformed by

literary texts. The study of literature, then, should focus on

discovering in the text ‘structures for the accumulation,

transformation, representation and communication of social

energies and practices’. Thus the cultural exchange of literature

is not limited to the record of exchanges that have taken place in

the represented culture, for there is also an exchange that takes

place between the reader and the text.

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 This exchange between the reader and the text can invoke

an even deeper level to culture. In order to deal with the

vagueness of the word, ‘culture’, it is necessary to use other

words to make it more specific. All by its lonesome, the word

‘culture’ means very little. So, Greenblatt concludes that the

awareness of culture as a complex whole can help us recover a

sense of the stakes that once gave readers pleasure and pain by

leading us to reconstruct the boundaries upon whose existence the

works were predicated. To do this Greenblatt suggests we ask

certain questions such as:

1. What kinds of behaviour, what models of practice, does this

work seem to enforce?

2. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work

compelling?

3. Are there differences between one’s values and the values

implicit in the work one reads?

4. Upon what social understanding does the work depend?

5. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained

implicitly or explicitly by this work?

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6. What are the larger social structures with which these particular

acts of praise or blame might be connected?

Greenblatt says that these questions are meant to heighten

one’s attention to features of the literary work that one might not

have noticed as well as to connections among elements within the

work. He is sure to emphasize that a cultural examination does

require the use of resources outside the text that these resources

do not replace the need for a close examination of the text itself.

Greenblatt asserts that learning about the culture from

which they came is a way to learn about the works as much as

those works are a reference to help one learn about that cultural

world from which they came as an absorption of the boundaries

and limits that once existed. Therefore, if the exploration of a

culture leads to greater understanding of the work, then the

exploration of the literature leads to a greater understanding of the

culture. As an example, Greenblatt references Shakespeare's As

You Like It and talks about its commentary on manners and the

ideas of proper ‘cultivation,’ both making a fun of the customs of

the day, as well as participating in it because

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 for even as his plays represent characters engaged in

negotiating the boundaries of their culture, the plays also help

to establish and maintain those boundaries for their audiences

(11)

Greenblatt emphasizes the usefulness of literature to affect

culture:

In any culture there is a general symbolic economy made up

of the myriad signs that excite human desire, fear, and

aggression. Through their ability to construct resonant stories,

their command of effective imagery, and all above their

sensitivity to the greatest collective creation of culture--

language-- literary artists are skilled at manipulating this

economy (12)

Greenblatt sees literature as a signifier for culture as well as

intertextual. He states:

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 A culture is a particular network of negotiations for the

exchange of material goods, ideas, and ...people (13)

The idea of mobility of culture and the role literature plays

in it is the main concern of Greenblatt. The constraints mean

nothing without the implication of movement because everything

was still, one would not need boundaries. But, Greenblatt argues

that the authors-

take symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and

move them to another, augmenting their emotional force,

altering their significance, linking them with other materials

taken from a different zone, changing their place in a larger

social design (14)

For Greenblatt culture plays both the roles of limit and

movement-

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 If culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as

the regulator and guarantor of movement. Indeed the limits

are virtually meaningless without movement; it is only

through improvisation, experiment, and exchange that cultural

(15)
boundaries can be established.

Referring to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Greenblatt advances in

stating:

If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of

Prospero, it is also its task to hear the accents of Caliban. (16)

The critic's job is to notice that contradictory elements of

the author's world are being juxtaposed in the author's work to

bring to light significant conflict and make statements about the

world. In this kind of reading, Prospero represents the imperialism

of European exploration of the New World and Caliban, the right

of the people of the New World to self-determination:

Self-fashioning occurs at the point of encounter between an

authority and an alien [and] what is produced in this

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 encounter partakes of both ... and hence ... any achieved

identity always contains within itself the signs of its own

(17)
subversion or loss.

Every age interprets literature in a different way. Culture is

not static or rigid, but is continuously reshaped and changed as

Eliot says about tradition.

A play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its

production - to the economic and political system of

Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to the particular

institutions of cultural production (the court, patronage,

theatre, education, the church). Moreover, the relevant history

is not just that of four hundred years ago, for culture is made

continuously and Shakespeare's text is reconstructed,

reappraised, reassigned all the time through diverse

institutions in specific contexts (18)

Greenblatt is against the literary criticism in which history

is considered as a mere background and literature foreground.

This biased view is criticized by the new historicists. For

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Greenblatt, there is interaction, ‘give-and-take’ relationship

between history and literature. The boundaries between the text

and context are so permeable that context becomes co-text. It is

worth enough to fully quote Greenblatt from Shakespeare and the

Exorcists:

As a free-standing, self-sufficient disinterested art-work

produced by a solitary genius, King Lear has only an

accidental relation to its sources: they provide a glimpse of

the 'raw material' that the artist fashioned. In so far as this

'material' is taken seriously at all, it is as part of the work's

'historical background', a phrase that reduces history to a

decorative setting or a convenient, well-lighted pigeonhole.

But once the differentiations upon which this model is based

begin to crumble, then source study is compelled to change its

character: history cannot simply be set against literary texts as

either stable antithesis or stable background, and the

protective isolation of those texts gives way to a sense of their

interaction with other texts and hence to the permeability of

their boundaries. 'When I play with my cat', writes

Montaigne, 'who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than

she is to me?' When Shakespeare borrows from Harsnett, who

knows if Harsnett has not already, in a deep sense, borrowed

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 from Shakespeare's theatre what Shakespeare borrows back?

Whose interests are served by the borrowing? And is there a

(19)
larger cultural text produced by the exchange?

Peter Barry summarises new historicist method as follows:

1. They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the

former in the light of the latter

2. They try thereby to 'defamiliarise' the canonical literary text,

detaching it from the accumulated weight of previous literary

scholarship and seeing it as if new

3. They focus attention (within both text and co-text) on the issues

of State power and how it is maintained, on patriarchal structures

and their perpetuation, and on the process of colonisation with its

accompanying 'mind-set'

Louis Montrose another new historicist is tries to locate

himself at the right position by searching specific culture of the

text under consideration and at the same time concentrating on

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textuality of history. History is available to us only in the form of

text.

By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural

specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing -

not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which

we study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest,

firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past,

a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving

textual traces of the society in question - traces whose

survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must

rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon

complex and subtle social processes of preservation and

effacement; and secondly, that those textual traces are

themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when

they are construed as the 'documents' upon which historians

ground their own texts, called 'histories'.(20)

Fredric Jameson, like Montrose, feels the necessity of

rewriting a literary text so that historical conditions will be

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revived as sub-text. History is always in a textual form so it is

recreated and then analysed.

The type of interpretation here proposed is more satisfactorily

grasped as the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that

the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration

of a prior historical or ideological subtext, it being always

understood that the 'subtext' is not immediately present as

such, so some common-sense external reality, nor even the

conventional narratives of history manuals, but rather must

itself always be (re)constructed after the fact ... The whole

paradox of what we have here called the subtext may be

summed up in this, that the literary work or cultural object, as

though for the first time, brings into being that very situation

of which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction ...

History is inaccessible to us except in textual form ... It can be

approached only by way of prior (re)textualization. (21)

For the new historicist, the analysis of literature is not

confined to literature but it is directed to the conditions

responsible for literature. What is said is there in the text but what

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is unsaid is needed to be decoded. Prospero is heard but necessity

is to listen to Caliban’s silence.

In fact, a true analysis does not remain within its object,

paraphrasing what has already been said; analysis confronts

the silences, the denials and the resistance in the object - not

that compliant implied discourse which offers itself to

discovery, but that condition which makes the work possible,

which precedes the work so absolutely that it cannot be found

in the work. (22)

New Historicists point to the culturally specific nature of

texts as products of particular periods and discursive formations,

while viewing reality-history-as itself mediated by linguistic

codes which it is impossible for the critic/historian to bypass in

the recuperation of the past cultures. The characteristics of New

Historicism's conceptualization of the text-context conundrum

are statements such as Montrose's claim that New Historicists are

concerned with ‘the Historicity of Texts and the Textuality of

History’ and Stephen Greenblatt's program ‘to examine the

relation between the discourse of art and the circumambient

discourses of society.’ What such statements intend is the

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elaboration of a ‘cultural poetics,’ as Greenblatt calls it, in which

a wide variety of social, institutional, and political practices are

submitted to the same interpretive procedures as other, more

recognizably discursive artifacts such as literary or non-literary

texts. Just as cultural history tacitly reinscribes society as ‘social

text,’ so New Historicism treat political, institutional, and social

practices as ‘cultural scripts.’ And thus enlarges thescope of

tradition as well as culture:

The debt here to Foucault is clear, and as with Foucault, the

goal of New Historicist criticism is to demonstrate the power

of discourse in shaping the ways in which the dominant

ideology of a period creates both institutional and textual

embodiments of the cultural constructs governing mental and

social life. What perhaps differentiates the New Historicists

from the practice of cultural historians with whom they are

otherwise so closely allied is their skillful employment of the

poststructuralist belief in the heterogeneous, contradictory,

fragmented, and discontinuous nature of textuality, to which

"social texts" are likewise assimilated. In this vein, New

Historicism refuses unproblematical distinctions between

"literature" and "history," "text" and "context," and

emphasizes, instead, "the dynamic, unstable, and reciprocal

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 relationship between the discursive and material domains."
(23)

Stephen Greenblatt begins his most theoretical statement about

New Historicism, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture,’ by stating that

his methodology is, at best a ‘practice’ rather than a ‘doctrine’.

So I shall try if not to define the new historicism, at least to

situate it as a practice - a practice rather than a doctrine, since

as far as I can tell (and I should be the one to know) it's no

doctrine at all. (24)

Greenblatt argues that both Jameson and Lyotard employ

‘history’ in an effort to support one theoretical viewpoint that in

turn leads to their monolithic and contradictory versions of

capitalism: The difference between Jameson's capitalism, the

perpetrator of separate discursive domains, the agent of privacy,

psychology, and the individual, and Lyotard's capitalism, the

enemy of such domains and the destroyer of privacy, psychology,

and the individual, may in part be traced to a difference between

Marxist and Post-Structuralist projects. Jameson, seeking to

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expose the fallaciousness of a separate artistic sphere and to

celebrate the materialist integration of all discourses, finds

capitalism at the root of the false differentiation; Lyotard, seeking

to celebrate the differentiation of all discourses and to expose the

fallaciousness of monological unity, finds capitalism at the root of

the false integration. History functions in both cases as a

convenient anecdotal ornament upon a theoretical structure, and

capitalism appears not as a complex social and economic

development in the West but as a malign philosophical principle.

The results of such attunement to the contradictions of any

given historical moment lead Greenblatt and other New

Historicists to a number of basic premises:

1) One should begin with specific details, anecdotes, and

examples in order to avoid a totalizing version of history;

2) One should proceed from such details to illustrate how they are

tied up with larger contradictory forces in a given time period, no

matter how apparently innocuous the detail may seem at first;

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3) One should remain self-conscious about one's methodologies,

thus resisting "a historicism based upon faith in the transparency

of signs and interpretative procedures";

4) One should be suspicious of liberatory narratives: everything

is, on some level, caught up in the circulations of power in a given

time period; and

5) All cultural products, whether they are high art, political

documents, personal letters, or trash, are a part of larger

discursive structures and, so, can offer clues to the ideological

contradictions of a given time period.

New Historicism school is particularly heterogeneous, with

many different critics interpreting terms in their own way. New

Historicists argue that all levels of society share in the circulation

of power through the production and distribution of the most

elementary cultural and social ‘texts.’ Power does not reside

somehow "above," with lawyers, politicians, and the police, but

rather follows a principle of circulation, whereby everyone

participates in the maintenance of existing power structures.

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 New Historicists tend to concern themselves with forces of

containment and the ways hegemonic forces consolidate the status

quo. New Historicists look at the moments of rupture to examine

how forces of rebellion are still able to be co-opted by the powers

in its main stream. New Historicists reject the New Critical

precept that texts are autonomous units that should be examined

without bringing in what New Critics termed the ‘intentional

fallacy’ (i.e. biographical criticism) or the ‘historical fallacy.’

New Historicists, by contrast, argue that texts are always

intimately connected to their historical and social context,

especially, perhaps, when texts attempt to repress that context. To

put it otherwise, history serves as the repressed unconscious of

literature.

New Historicists reject the Western tendency to write

history from the top down (e.g. political history) or in grand

narrative strokes. They are instead more concerned with what

Lyotard terms petits récits, particularly how such "little

narratives" participate in the consolidation and maintenance of the

status quo.

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 New Historicists tend to follow the post-Lacanian and post-

Marxist view of ideology; rather than see ideology as false

consciousness, as something that obscures one's perception of the

truth, New Historicists argue that to recognize one’s own

ideology is like pushing the bus one is riding on, since it is so

much a part of the way one perceives the world and its workings.

According to New Historicism, all texts may be examined for

their historicity, just as any historical phenomenon, no matter how

apparently trivial or unimportant (e.g. Madonna videos or

Renaissance miniature portraiture), can be analysed much as one

would analyse a literary text.

Foucault argues that power is not merely a physical force but

a pervasive human dynamic determining our relationships with

others. (One need only think of how one acts differently the

moment someone enters a room in which one had previously been

alone). Power is also not necessarily ‘bad,’ since it can also be

productive. We could also say that power is essential to a just

society; all people exert certain power over others insofar as the

latter defer to their needs and desires. The moment one ceases to

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acknowledge this power others have over one, and then one

denies other's humanity (his/her human rights.) As Foucault puts

it, ‘slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains’.

However, power also refers to the ways in which a dominant

group exerts its influence over others. Though this hegemonic

power may (at some end point) rely on the threat of punishment, it

does not necessarily rely on actual physical enforcement on a day-

to-day basis.

Nietzsche was among those the first to integrate ‘power’

into the concept of a soulless, godless universe of pure physics.

To Nietzsche, the universe is nothing but power. Staying true to

his physical, materialist view of things, Nietzsche opposed the

hypostization of ‘power’ as well as a too static view of it by

conceiving the interactions of powers to be the essential condition

for the existence of what he calls: ‘Will to Power’. The world is

‘power(s)’ in motion. This network of contending forces is what

Nietzsche calls life. The will to power, i.e., the will to participate

in the process of life, is the basic will, the fundamental drive all

organisms, cellular micro-organisms as well as social macro-

organisms, have in common. This vital will to power is also the

209
prerequisite for the existence of all kinds of change. The will to

power has its object in obtaining as much life, i.e. power, as

possible. The more life there is, the more pleasure can be enjoyed.

The struggle for power is really a struggle for pleasure; it is

hedonism.

Since every power, i.e., every living organism, tries to obtain

maximum pleasure, there is a constant fight going on among

them. Every single living being must decide constantly whether it

is preferable to fight against or to contain or to withdraw from

contending forces. In this constant contest of powers, transient

dominant powers arise. These dominant forces manage to lead

and direct the weaker ones. The rigidity of their dominance

depends on their amount of power. Usually, living organisms tend

to specialize in one form of the will to power. One of these forms

is the will to lead others politically.

Most commentators of new historicism agree upon the fact

that Foucault had a major impact on the theory of new historicism

in general and on new historicism’s concept of power in

particular. It was by Nietzsche, namely by his mature work, that

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Foucault was considerably influenced in his thoughts on power

and knowledge. In the following a few aspects of power as

outlined by Nietzsche in his posthumously published ‘Will to

Power’ are discussed (1906) which can be considered to be some

kind of a forerunner to much of Foucault’s and also Greenblatt’s

and Montrose’s findings.

The concept of power in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Greenblatt

is worth to consider and thus their linking together thematically

form the tradition. Nietzsche employs power to understand how

the cosmos works. Foucault understands power in the form of a

network of relations and how power-relations condition society,

government, discourse, and the way we look at things. New

historicism’s concept of power is useful for the understanding of

the relation between society and works of art and for the

interpretation of literary and historical texts.

Greenblatt and his fellow new historicists aggressively try

to insert works of literature, like that Shakespeare play, back into

the historical contexts from whence they came. They try -- in a

provocative, post-modern way, of course -- to get a sense of the

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political and social atmosphere the playwright himself might have

been breathing as he put quill to paper. When Greenblatt reads

The Tempest, a play about Europeans shipwrecked on a primitive

island, he wants to know about attitudes toward colonialism in

Shakespeare's time.

Early on in The Taming of the Shrew, Kate, the shrew in

question, is introduced to Petruchio, her prospective husband --

the shrew tamer. ‘There is a stage convention that she falls in love

the moment she sets eyes on him,’ Greenblatt told his students

that he believes this staging to be entirely wrong. Marriages often

were treated as business transactions in Renaissance England.

Love often was beside the point. In Greenblatt's view, The

Taming of the Shrew is anything but a love story. Instead, he sees

it as being about the creation of a type of femininity. Kate, an

outspoken, if unpleasant, individual, is essentially broken by

Petruchio, transformed into a timid, obedient, "womanly"

creature, who says things like, ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life,

thy keeper.’

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 Greenblatt argues that one’s attitudes toward basic matters

such as sexual identity and love are not given but are ‘learned.’

Indeed, this provocative and post-modern idea is central to his

new historicism. Central, too, is the liberal, even left -- staunchly

pro-feminist -- stance that appeared to underlie Greenblatt's

reading.

Greenblatt uses obscure writings of all sorts from the

periods in which he was interested and sometimes from other

periods – ‘literary traces,’ as bridges to build his criticism.. This is

the method behind the new historicism. It is based on the

realization, as Greenblatt puts it, ‘that language does not stop at

the border of literature.’

And then there's The Tempest, George Will's example. Here

the goal was to determine the extent to which Shakespeare might

have been concerned with the morality of colonialism as he wrote

about those shipwrecked Europeans, who eventually enslave the

‘savage’ they find. So Greenblatt uncovered a diverse collection

of writings from Shakespeare's time on the subject. They range

from essays by Montaigne to a few lines from a little-known

213
Elizabethan poet named Samuel Dennis. Together, these writings

suggest that Shakespeare could not have escaped the debate on

colonialism even if he had wanted to.

‘It is very difficult to argue that The Tempest is not about

imperialism,’ Greenblatt wrote in response to Will's attack.

Greenblatt believes it is possible to find great works like these

both aesthetically brilliant and ethically disturbing. ‘What is most

powerful about art,’ he suggests, ‘is not necessarily the same as

what one wants to affirm about life.’

It is those who ‘attempt to save the notion of Shakespeare as

an ethical hero" by overlooking The Tempest's relationship to

imperialism, or by pretending that Kate's transformation in The

Taming of the Shrew is a miracle wrought by eyelash-batting love,

who are enforcing, in Greenblatt's view, a type of ‘political

correctness’ -- on Shakespeare!

‘Resonance’ is Greenblatt's term for the connections he seeks

-- the resonance of works of literature with other writings and

events. But he pairs it, when describing his method, with another

214
term: ‘wonder’ -- the wonder he feels at the beauty of those

works.

Shakespeare's work, Greenblatt perpetually argues, was and

is entangled with Western culture, with all its moral strengths and

weaknesses. One has to understand this, face this. Still, he

acknowledges that Shakespeare's art -- in wonderful, majestic

moments -- is capable of soaring above those tangles.

People have not always had the same attitudes toward

madness, to use one of Foucault's examples, or toward a woman

to use one of Greenblatt's. Foucault taught Greenblatt that the

attitudes are the products of culture. ‘This just seemed

fantastically exciting to me,’ Greenblatt recalled, ‘because it

meant that things that just seem given are not given, that they're

made up. And if they're made up that means they can be

changed.’

This post-modern perspective now underlies the new

historicism. In great works of literature, in his, ‘literary traces,’ in

his anecdotes, Greenblatt seems to besearching for evidence of

215
the processes through which our attitudes -- toward women,

toward colonialism, toward love -- are ‘made up.’

Greenblatt concludes by suggesting that literary criticism

needs to take such cultural circulations into account, and to take

into account the cultural position as well as the thought processes

of the person doing the literary criticism. Such a practice pulls

away from a stable, mimetic theory of art and attempts to

construct in its stead an interpretative model that will more

adequately account for the unsettling circulation of materials and

discourses that is, the heart of modern aesthetic practice. It is in

response to this practice that contemporary theory must situate

itself not outside interpretation but in the hidden places of

negotiation and exchange.

New Historicism is a strategy of interpretation and not the

methodology so one can’t distill its tenets in concrete a

terminology. New Historicism seeks to breathe new life into texts

by relating them to non-literary texts and social practices of their

day. Greenblatt takes help of Foucault in order to understand the

past, the history or, more correctly, histories and power relations

216
of particular time. He carries the sense of tradition as voiced by

Eliot in his famous essay, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’.

The relationship of literature and milieu is of prime

importance for the new historicists. The socio-cultural ethos is

recreated in order to understand valuable negotiation among

literature and culture. Literature is culture. For new historicists,

all cultural activities are texts so can they be interpreted. The

demarcation line between literature and history is very thin so not

a single entity can be superior or better than other-

The focus of such work has been upon a refiguring of the

socio-cultural field within which canonical renaissance

literary and dramatic works were originally produced; upon

resituating them not only in relationship to other genres and

modes of discourse but also in relationship to

contemporaneous social institutions and non-discursive

practices….. The newer historical criticism is new in its

refusal of unproblematical distinctions between "literature"

and "history," between "text" and "context"; new in resisting a

prevalent tendency to posit and privilege a unified and

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 autonomous individual - whether an Author or a Work - to be

set against a social or literary background. (25)

The new historicists are well aware of their own historicity

that is why they never claim that theirs only is valid criticism.

‘Others’ commentaries do exit at the same time. They know that

their re-construction of history is subjective. The past and present

are always engaged in conversation with each other and

continuously reshaping each other:

Integral to such a collective project of historical criticism

must be a realization and acknowledgment that our analyses

and our understandings necessarily proceed from our own

historically, socially and institutionally shaped vantage points;

that the histories we reconstruct are the textual constructs of

critics who are, ourselves, historical subjects……It also

necessitates efforts to historicize the present as well as the

past, and to historicize the dialectic between them - those

reciprocal historical pressures by which the past has shaped

the present and the present reshapes the past. (26)

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 Louis Montrose argues that ‘historical criticism recognizes

that not only the artist but also the critic exists in history, that the

texts of each are inscriptions of history; and that one’s

comprehension, representation, interpretation of the texts of the

past always proceeds by a mixture of estrangement and

appropriation, as a reciprocal conditioning of the Renaissance text

and one’s text of Renaissance. Such a critical practice constitutes

a continuous dialogue between a poetics and a politics of culture’.

Much of Greenblatt's work is anti-historicist at least in the

sense that it is both anti-totalizing and anti-imperialist. Like

"Invisible Bullets," most of the essays in both Learning to Curse

and Marvelous Possessions open onto the terrain of cultural

conflict and genocide that constitutes early American history. If

Greenblatt's work can be taken as paradigmatic of the New

Historicism as a whole, then that movement is partly an attack on

the logocentric, ethnocentric tales called national histories that the

European victors have told themselves throughout centuries of

imperial domination of the rest of the world.

219
 Lacking the explanatory power, that referring cultural

phenomena to the material or economic base and once seemed to

afford, ‘cultural poetics’- appears to grant its practitioners a

complete licence to reconstruct and retell any story about the past

that they choose. Arbitrariness has been a charge levelled against

the New Historicism from the beginning. Greenblatt himself is the

first to concede that the New Historicism is not ‘systematic.’ As

Catherine Gallagher also says, ‘The new historicist, unlike the

Marxist, is under no nominal compulsion to achieve consistency’.

But if that is the case, then the New Historicism must either come

to look very much like the old historicism, in the sense of liberal

historiography and literary history, or else it must, through

adopting Foucault's genealogical procedures and philosophical

nominalism, reject historicism altogether. The New Historicism

seeks to evade this theoretical problem in part by stressing the

contingent in history, and, therefore, the very impossibility of

systematizing it.

Cultural poetics would recognize the complexity or

contradictoriness of capitalism as a world-historical process.

Capitalism must be viewed, says Greenblatt, ‘not as a unitary

220
demonic principle but as a complex historical movement in a

world without paradisal origins....’ In particular, in understanding

the relationship between art and society, ‘complexity’ must be an

operative word, and in Greenblatt's essays the nature of that

complexity is conveyed especially by quasi-economic terms such

as ‘negotiation’ and ‘circulation’: ‘the work of art is the product

of a negotiation between a creator or class of creators...and the

institutions and practices of society. In order to achieve the

negotiation, artists need to create a currency that is valid for a

meaningful, mutually profitable exchange’. Greenblatt does not

privilege the economic as a final cause or outer limit, as in all

variants of the Marxist base-superstructure paradigm but rather’

treats it merely as the source of metaphors by which ‘exchanges’

take place between a society's institutions and its artistic creators.

These exchanges can be described on a case-by-case (anecdotal)

basis, like Clifford Geertz's ‘thick description,’ and they can also

be ascribed to the vast and vague set of economic developments

and processes.

A similar rejection of ‘theory’ occurs in a different way in the

last essay of Greenblatt in Learning to Curse, "Resonance and

221
Wonder." Here Greenblatt cites one of the definitions of

‘historicism’ given by the American Heritage Dictionary: ‘The

belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little

to alter.’ Greenblatt responds:

New historicism, by contrast, eschews the use of the term

'man'; interest lies not in the abstract universal but in

particular, contingent cases, the selves fashioned and acting

according to the generative rules and conflicts of a given

culture. And these selves, conditioned by the expectations of

their class, gender, religion, race and national identity, are

constantly effecting changes in the course of history.(27)

That is to say, individuals may be ‘conditioned’ by

circumstances, but they have just as much to do with the making

of the circumstances as vice-versa. This tautological proposition

leads Greenblatt next to assert ‘the new historicism's insistence on

the pervasiveness of agency’. The idea here appears to be that,

everywhere one looks in history; there are people -- selves or

individual ‘agents’ -- doing things that affect the course of

history. This idea, in turn, seems to be a variant of Foucault's

222
famous proposition that ‘power breeds resistance,’ which means,

of course, that there is ‘power’ everywhere in society -- it's just

that some ‘agents’ have more of it than others. According to

Althusser, for instance, an Ideological State Apparatus is an

‘agency’ for self-fashioning that the selves fashioned have little or

no control over.

The New Historicism, according to Thomas, takes its place

alongside other manifestations of neo-pragmatism in the U.S., and

thereby:

reaffirms the liberal tradition of American progressivism and

its sense of temporality (28)

Despite its challenges to ‘narratives of progressive

emergence’, it thus reaffirms that tradition's sense of individual

agency -- exactly the antithesis of Foucault's position with regard

to the pervasiveness, at least in modern and now postmodern

social formations, of deindividualized ‘power’ –‘discipline,’ the

tyranny of ‘the Norm,’ etc. Rather than echoing Foucault's

insistence upon the impending dissolution of that modern

abstraction, ‘man,’ the New Historicism resuscitates that humanist

abstraction through ‘self-fashioning.’

223
References:

1) Popper, Karl. The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul. 1986. p.3

2) Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the

West London and New York: Routledge, 1990. p.88

3) Barker, Francis and Peter Hulme, 'Nymphs and Reapers

Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest', in

John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeare London; Methuen,

1985. p. 236.

4) Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory Manchester: Manchester

University Press. 1995.p. 173

5) Wilson, Richard and Dutton, Richard (eds). New historicism

and Renaissance Drama London and New York: Longman,

1992.p.8

6) Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1995. pp 175-176

7) Lodge, David and Wood, Nigel eds. Modern Criticism and

Theory: A Reader Longman 2nd edn1999. p. 496

224
8) ibid. p.499

9) ibid.p.499

10) Payne, Michael Ed. The Greenblatt Reader, Malden, U S A

Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p.11.

11) ibid.p.14

12) ibid.p.15

13) ibid.p.15

14) ibid.p.15

15) ibid.p.14

16) ) ibid.p.17

17) Greenblatt, Stephen .Renaissance Self-Fashioning , from

More to Shakespeare, Chicago iii University of Chicago Press,

1980. , p. 9

18) Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan, eds, Introduction,

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism

Manchester: Manchester University press 2nd edn, 1994 p. viii

225
19), Greenblatt, Stephen 'Shakespeare and the Exorcists'

20) Montrose, Louis, "The Poetics and Politics of Culture" in H.

Aram Vesser (Ed) The New Historicism, , London and New York:

Routledge. 1989.p. 242

21) Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious 1980, p. 81-2

22) Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production

23) Gabrielle Spiegel: "History, historicism and the social logic of

the text in the Middle Ages," in The Postmodern History Reader,

ed. K. Jenkins. London: Routledge, 1997, 1996), pp. 191-92.

24) (Greenblatt 18: 1990, 2005)

25) Montrose, Louis, "The Poetics and Politics of Culture" in H.

Aram Vesser (Ed) The New Historicism, London and New York:

Routledge. 1989.p. 243

26) ibid.p. 243

27) Collier, Peter and Helga Geyer-Ryan ed. Literary Theory

Today, New York, Cornell University Press. 1990.p. 74

226
28) Thomas, Brook. The New Historicism and Other Old-

Fashioned Topics Princeton: Princeton University Press.1991.

p.197.

227