新历史主义必胜

暖场引入：南！太南了。难就对了！

一．背景: 流变发展线
为啥出现？（文学批评转向，物极必反）

Against： 不满足于之前新批评的拘泥于形式和文本
New criticism/reader response criticism /poststructuralist.
1. Ignore the world beyond the text and its reader
2. Ignore the historical contexts within which literature work are written and read
否定之否定，螺旋上升

受谁影响？
Influenced by P383（南大，受到后结构主义思潮和福柯的影响）
Foucault//Marxism//Feminism//Anthropology【跨学科】 (thick description) 【包含很多思想】

重要时间，人物：
时间：20 世纪 70 年代美国末期
正式命名：80 年代初

焦点是啥？（定义）【云里雾里，模糊的】
新历史主义批评是一种阐释文学文本的历史与文化内涵的特定的批评方法，又称“文化诗
学”。
兴盛于 20 世纪 80 年代，主要目的是重新描述文本与产生文本的文化体系之间的关系。
“一个没有确切指涉的词”（A phrase without adequate referent.）

二．历史观
View of history（龙儿）
1.History becomes texualized：(textual) 历史的文本性）（顺口溜蒙特罗斯；主体是历
史）
【历史没有现场直播！ no live show】
历史是叙述出来的，因此“过去历史事件”的一把手材料或者最直接的感受已经不可能
想知道只能靠文本，干巴巴记载，阐释的，不可能触及到真正的过去。

过去认为：events of the past//客观事实，实实在在发生的

telling a story about the events of the past: history is always narrated.被记载的
No presentation of dry facts but only interpretation;
the past can never be available to us in pure form.

2. 对历史看法的主观性： Historians’ study of the past is not detached and objective.

(subjective) *（海登怀特 元历史 历史揭示历史 ）
 【所有人看历史都戴着自己的有色眼镜 wear coloured glasses】
历史事件无法复现，所以只是后人的理解和猜测是一个主观构建
We cannot transcend our own historical situation.
Historians live in a particular time and place, influenced by their particular historical concerns
and their own experience within their own culture, impossibility of objective analysis
（自己以为自己）
海登怀特

3. Historical periods are not unified entities. (nonlinear)不是线性的，不是统一的

【不是统一的大写的历史 HISTORY，而是碎片的小写的历史 histories】
Have a causal relationship, A caused B, B caused C; have the spirit of the age; such as the Age
of Enlightenment; human beings are improving in the course of time, advancing in morality
and culture and technology.
No single history, only discontinuous and contradictory histories. The history is non-
progressive. The idea of uniform and harmonious culture is propagated by the ruling class in
their own interests.
（不是因果论，没有一个统一的，前后一致的，和谐连贯的，大写的“历史”或“文
化”所谓的历史其实是“断断续续充满矛盾”的历史叙述，这个“历史”是小写的，以
复数形式出现）非决定论，而是无数个偶然的小事件

三．历史与文本 [秀阳&妮妮]

1. Literary text V.S. Non-literary text（秀儿）

（格林布拉特运用自我塑造的观点，打通文学文本和非文学文本的界限，认为一切文
本或者文献都体现出文本的特性 texuality, 都是互文的关系，对文学研究都有用。P383 南
大）
Foreground//background—
no stable and fixed history which can be treated as the background against which literature can
be foregrounded.
parallel reading of literary text and non-literary text; given equal weight;
【参考】
A. 文学，文化与历史的互动观；新历史主义要打破一种将文化认为是一个严密统一的意义
系统，只有一种声音的系统的幻想，他认为不存在固定，客观统一的，一成不变的作为背
景的历史，历史不是固定的而是生成的，文学也是这种生成的一部分，一切都是前景，文
学和历史都不是固定的静止的，他们始终在相互塑造中生成着，就像作为个人的自我没有
一种超越历史和文化的本质，个人总是诞生于某种文化中，被文化所构造，同时也构造着
文化，人是文化的产物，人和文化契合为一，相互塑造与生成。

文化的产物，人的命运，不只是由内在意志力决定，文学的文本是精神的 output，
人不是由自己精神理性作理性引导的，本身是文化的产物，失去了崇高性，都是文化的产
物，社会合力作用，

自我与外力的调和的过程。
自我塑造是自我与外力复杂互动的过程，强调外力的权威性和异己性，受到福柯的影响，
福柯认为权威或权利话语的确立必须有异己的他者的存在，并对之进行有形和无形的排斥
和压抑。

B. 文学文本与非文学文本的共鸣：新历史主义，恢复历史的维度，将历史重新置于历史环
境的大背景中来理解，因此格林布拉特认为，阐释的必由之路必须先复原一种历史文化语
境，然后依此语境对文学做出阐释，这是一个解释循环，但格林布拉特意识到了这种解释
循环的困境，认为任何阐释都不可能是纯粹客观的，必须将前理解带入陈述之中，他对方
法论上有非常强烈的自觉意识。
文学批评阐释的特色在于，还原历史文化语境的理论方法是独特的，试图打通文学与非文
学文本的界限，认为传统的历史主义批评将历史理解的过于狭隘，所以他要打破人为的界
限，将各种边缘性的文化因素考虑进去，诸如绘画风俗，逸闻轶事甚至是巫术中的咒语。
病例出生死亡的记录对精神异常的描述，格林布拉特这些对研究文艺复兴的艺术和文学绝
不是无关紧要的，看似边缘性的文化因素与文学构成了一种互文和共鸣的关系，他们很有
可能体现出相同的文化兴奋和关注，通过对这些边缘化的文学因素的考察，可能捕获一些
很难为人所知的一面。

2. Louis A. Montrose: Historicity of the Texts and Textuality of histories （妮儿）

（给大家介绍一个绕口令）

• 文本的历史性：文本是一定社会历史条件下的产物，它不仅能反映历史，也能够
塑造历史。
• 历史的文本性：人们需要通过文本来了解历史（文本可以是历史学家编撰的历史
文本，也可以是作家创作的文学文本）。

New Historicism aims to unite history and literature, and new historicists regard “historicity”
and “textuality” as the starting point in their theoretical practices. And Louis Montrose gives his
definition of New Historicism which sounds much like a tongue twist. It’s “the historicity of texts
and the texurality of the histories.”
He explains in his essay New Historicism that “By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest
the historical specificity, the social and material embedding, of all modes of writing---including
not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them; thus, I also mean to
suggest the historical, social, and material embedding of all modes of reading.”
We can understand the historicity of texts from three perspectives:
①　All the texts are socially historic, because they are the products of some specific history,
economy, politics, culture and etc. The texts don’t emerge in a vacuum, so it is necessary to study
the sociality and historicity of the texts when studying literary texts.
②　Any interpretation of the text is not purely objective as it is inevitably social and
historic. My understanding is that people who interpret the texts are influenced by the specific
history, politics, culture and so on in which they live, so they bear the traces of their particular
history when interpreting texts, and thus an objective interpretation seems impossible.
③　The text is not merely the “reflection” of history, but as a historical and cultural event, it
has the power to help shape society, so it is an important part of history.
 As to the textuality of histories, he says “By the textuality of histories, I mean to suggest, in
the first place, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, to a material existence that
is unmediated by the textual traces of the society in question; and furthermore, that the survival of
those traces rather than others cannot be assumed to be merely contingent but must rather be
presumed to be at least partially consequent on subtle processes of selective preservation and
effacement---processes like those that have produced the traditional humanities curriculum. In the
second place, those victorious traces of material and ideological struggle are themselves subject to
subsequent mediations when they are construed as the “documents” on which those who profess
the humanities ground their own descriptive and interpretive texts.”
Also, we can try to understand the textuality of histories from two aspects:
①　We have to depend on the texts to know the history, otherwise we have no other way.
And the text is not an objective and passive reflection of history, it goes through the process of
selection, effacement and preservation. Just like writers, when they are writing literary works, they
select, revise the materials and finally create the works. The same is true of history.
②　The text can serve as a medium for interpretation. When historians write history, they
consult the texts that become the basis of history, the texts thus once again serve as the media of
interpretation.

The historicity of texts and the textuality of histories breaks the binary opposition between
history and literature, it stresses the interrelationship between history and literature.

[参考文献]:
Greenblatt, Gunn. Redrawing the Boundaries. New York: The Modern Language Association of
America, 1992.

张进. 新历史主义文艺思潮通论. 广州: 暨南大学出版社, 2013.

（文化，历史，文学之间循环影响的关系）
Society influences the creation of work—work is published—society digests the work and is
changed by it—altered society influences the creation of a new work

四．对格林布拉特的独家专访 （这部分仍然 on the way 哈哈）

——通过对《文化》一文的分析探究他对文学和文化关系的理解——引出新历史主义
存在的积极意义。
（长得像福尔摩斯里的华生）

The term “culture” has not always been used in literary studies, and indeed the very concept
denoted by the term is fairly recent.文化很少用于文学研究当中。
The ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive
technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire
of models to which individuals must conform. 一个既定文化中的信念和实践对个体具有控制
和限制作用。
 This is most obvious in the kinds of literature that are explicity engaged in attack and
celebration: satire and panegyric. 社会通过奖惩机制来加强文化的边界性，这在一些文学作品
中体现明显，如讽刺和赞颂。

An awareness of culture as a complex whole can help us to recover that sense by leading us
to reconstruct the boundaries upon whose existence the works were predicated. 通过重建文化的
边界意识到历史是一个复杂的整体，可以帮助我们获得感受

Eventually, a full cultural analysis will need to push beyond the boundaries of the text, to
establish links between the text and values, institutions, and practices elsewhere in the culture. 通
过询问自己问题，使我们将注意力转到我们之前没有注意到的文学作品的特点。最后一个
完整的文化分析需要越过文本的边界，在文本和文化中的价值观、实践等建立联系。

The world is full of texts, most of which are virtually incomprehensible when they are
removed from their immediate surroundings. To recover the meaning of such texts, to make any
sense of them at all, we need to reconstruct the situation in which they were produced. 世界充满
了文本，许多一旦离开他们既定的环境就变得不为人们理解。要获取文本的意义，我们需
要重建文本产生的情境。艺术作品本身直接或间接地包含了这些情境，所以在产生他们的
情境崩塌时，他们仍能生存下来。

Cultural analysis then is not by definition an extrinsic analysis, as opposed to an internal

formal analysis of works of art. 文化研究因此从定义上来说并不是与艺术作品内部研究对立
的外部研究。

cultural analysis must be opposed on principle to the rigid distinction between that which is
within a text and that which lies outside. 文化研究必须反对文本内部和外部的严格区别。

And if an exploration of a particular culture will lead to a heightened understanding of a work

of literature produced within that culture, so too a careful reading of a work of literature will lead
to a heightened understanding of the culture within which it was produced.如果探究一个特定的
文化能够加强对在其中产生的作品的理解的话，那么细读一部文学作品也能够加强对它所
处的文化的理解。

The organization of this volume makes it appear that the analysis of culture is the servant of
literary study, but in a liberal education broadly conceived it is literary study that is the servant of
cultural understanding. 这本书意在表明文化研究是为文学研究服务的，而广义的通识教育则
认为文学研究是为文化理解服务的。

Art is an important agent then in the transmission of culture. 艺术是传播文化的重要媒介。

if culture functions as a structure of limits, it also functions as the regulator and guarantor of
movement. 如果文化起到限制的作业，那么它也起到变动的调节和保证作用。事实上，如
果没有变动，这些限制就实际上就是没有意义的：只有通过即兴创作、实验和交流，才能
建立文化的边界

Obviously, among different cultures there will be a great diversity in the ratio between
mobility and constraint. 不同的文化之间移动性和限制之间的比例不同。没有哪一个文化是
绝对移动的,也没有哪一个文化是绝对限制的

In representing this adjustment as a social, emotional, and intellectual education, these novels
in effect thematize their own place in culture, for works of art are themselves educational tools. 这
些小说把这种调整表现为一种社会的、情感的和智力的教育，实际上是主题化了它们在文
化中的地位，因为艺术作品本身就是教育工具。 They do not merely passively reflect the
prevailing ratio of mobility and constraint; they help to shape, articulate, and reproduce it through
their own improvisatory intelligence.他们不仅仅是被动地反映移动性和限制之间的比例,他们
也帮助塑造、重构文化

A culture is a particular network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas,
and – through institutions like enslavement, adoption, or marriage – people.文化是一种特殊的谈
判网络，通过奴役、收养或婚嫁等制度来交换物质产品、思想。

Great writers are precisely masters of these codes, specialists in cultural exchange. The
works they create are structures for the accumulation, transformation, representation, and
communication of social energies and practices. 伟大的作家正是这些准则的大师，文化交流的
专家。他们创造的作品是社会能量和实践的积累、转化、表现和交流的结构。

In any culture there is a general symbolic economy made up of the myriad signs that excite
human desire, fear, and aggression.在任何一种文化中,总有一种象征性的经济,它是由无数激
发人们欲望、恐惧和侵略的符号组成的

The current structure of liberal arts education often places obstacles in the way of such an
analysis by separating the study of history from the study of literature, as if the two were entirely
distinct enterprises, but historians have become increasingly sensitive to the symbolic dimensions
of social practice, while literary critics have in recent years turned with growing interest to the
social and historical dimensions of symbolic practice. 当前通识艺术教育的结构将历史研究与
文学研究区分开始,视其为两个截然不同的东西,但是当历史学家对社会实践的象征性方面越
来越感兴趣时,文学批评家则最象征性实践的社会和历史方面越来越感兴趣了.

For great works of art are not neural relay stations in the circulation of cultural materials.
Something happens to objects, beliefs, and practices when they are represented, reimagined, and
performed in literary texts, something often unpredictable and disturbing. That ‘‘something’’ is the
sign both of the power of art and of the embeddedness of culture in the contingencies of history.
伟大的作品不是文化物质的神经枢纽站.当对象、信仰和实践在文学文本中重现、再次被想
象和演出时,一些不可预测和令人不安的事情就发生了.这既是艺术力量的标志,也是文化在
在历史偶然事件中嵌入的标志.