New Historicism

英国的文化唯物论（cultural materialism）和美国的新历史主义（new historicism） 1980s

 英国的文化唯物论始终是一个处在边缘的学术话语，而美国的新历史主义正在成为新
的学术正统，与其说它是一种批评不如说它是受意识形态支配的主体。——Lousis
Montrose
 英国的文化唯物论强调文化中的政治作用和社会阶级关系的阐释力量，属于西方马克
思主义批评的一部分。美国的新历史主义则更重视分析文化中的语言叙述或表达，而
且已经成为一个有影响力的批评运动，渗透所有文学研究的领域

相同之处：都承认文学对统治性权力结构兼具同化与颠覆作用。
不同之处：新历史主义更重同化方面，对颠覆的可能性持悲观态度；而文化唯物主义更强
调文学的颠覆和反抗功能，显示出更激进的政治色彩和更乐观的姿态。

 Cultural materialism --- Raymond Williams

 Mario Klarer, An Introduction to Literary Studies, P95

新历史主义：兴起于 20 世纪 80 年代的美国。
It builds on post-structuralism and deconstruction, with their focus on text and discourse, but adds
a historical dimension to the discussion of literary texts.
History, therefore, is not regarded as isolated from the literary text in the sense of a “historical
background” but rather as a textual phenomenon.
历史不再是与文学文本孤立的“历史背景”，而是一种文本现象。

代表人物：
 Stephen Greenblatt 文艺复兴的自我塑造
 Lousis Montrose 历史与文本 （“文本的历史性”和“历史的文本性”）

“我用‘文本的历史性’指所有的书写形式——包括批评家所研究的文本和我们处身其中
研究其他文本的文本的历史具体性和社会物质性内容；因此，我也指所有阅读形式的历史
社会和物质内容。‘历史的文本性’首先是指，不以我们所研究的社会的文本踪迹为媒介
我们就没有任何途径去接近一个完整的、真正的过去和一个物质性的存在。而且，那些踪迹
不能被视为仅仅偶然形成的，而应被设定为至少是部分必然地源自选择性保存和涂抹的微
妙过程——就像那些生产出传统人文学科规划的过程一样。其次，那些在物质及意识形态
斗争中获胜的文本踪迹，当其转化成‘档案’，并成为人们将人文学科阵地宣称为他们自
己的描述 和解释性文本的基础时，它们自身也充当后人的阐释媒介。”
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. 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.

“文本的历史性”有三层含义：
一是指一切文本（包括社会大文本）都具有社会历史性，是特定的历史、文化、社会、政治、
体制、阶级对立的产物。
二是指任何一种对文本的解读活动都不是纯粹客观的，而是不可避免地带有其社会历史性
不仅在历史中发生，而且只有通过历史才能发生。
三是指任何一个文本都不仅仅是一种对历史的“反映”或“表达”，文本本身即是一种历
史文化“事件”，它是塑造历史的能动力量，文本本身是历史的一个重要组成部分。

“历史的文本性”有两层含义：
一是指只有凭借保存下来的文本，人来才有可能了解过去。文本并不是客观而被动地反映
历史的外在现实，而是通过保存和涂抹的选择过程对历史进行文本建构，这个过程受权力
关系和意识形态的制约，因而并非随意的。
二是指当文本转化成文献并成为历史学家撰写历史的依据时，它再次充当阐释的媒介。文
本充当阐释媒介的无限过程赋予文本以某种能动性和创造性，从而将阐释者与文本之间的
关系转换为一种双向对话的互动关系。

 Hayden White 元历史理论

 Jonathan Dollimore 文学与历史

新历史主义批评起源于对文艺复兴研究中形式主义的不满，因为人们往往以为莎士比亚剧
作并非特定时代的产物，而是一切时代所共有的作品和“永恒的”传世之作，这样就把莎
士比亚从他所处的历史具体性中抽离出来而陷入一种实足的形式主义研究。

1. “权利关系”
张立国，新历史主义批评研究
新历史主义：重视文学文本，也重视非文学文本，把文学文本与非文学文本联系起来。认
为文学和历史具有同样的地位，文学也参与了历史的塑造，历史在叙事上也采用了虚构的
方式。

新历史主义产生的背景：
1　动荡的社会环境滋生了许多带有新观点和反叛思想的理论流派，如女权主义批评、
后殖民主义等
2　旧历史主义的弊端，如强调历史对文学的决定作用，将文学看作是对历史的反映。
旧历史主义的特点： “客观性、侧重于过去的思维朝向、背景观、大历史观”。
 客观性：把历史研究作为科学的实证研究，过于追求真实，忽略了人的主观性。
 侧重于过去的思维朝向：完全以过去所处的时代看问题，忽视了主体会受到所处时代
的影响。
 背景观：历史是静态的，历史背景决定事件的发展和人物的命运，忽略了历史的动态
性。
 大历史观：强调历史的整体发展，历史中的重大事件和人物，忽略了次要人物的作用。
3　二十世纪文学批评理论的社会转向：从非历史倾向（如从新批评到结构主义再到结
构主义）转为历史倾向的研究

新历史主义的理论来源：
(1) 西方马克思主义理论 （阿尔都塞的意识形态论、本雅明的历史哲学思想，历史的客观
性）
 阿尔都塞的意识形态论：文本本身同意识形态一样，也是积极的，生产性的能量，文
本并不是被动地对语境的“表现”或“反映”。新历史主义认为文本阅读是一种生产
活动，它也参与了文化生产和意识形态生产。
 本雅明的历史哲学思想：传统历史是统治阶级书写的历史，在一定程度上掩盖了血腥
和残暴。因此打破历史的连续性可以揭露历史背后的血腥和残暴。
(2) 福柯的理论 （话语理论、权力理论）
 话语理论：话语是一定数量的陈述实践，会受到社会性控制力量的制约，因此对文本
（由话语构成）的内部研究就转为外在的历史文化研究。
 权力理论：权力无处不在，文学文本受时代的影响，也参与了知识和权力的游戏。
(3) 文化人类学 （厚描法）
 格尔兹的“厚描”法：对人类行为的详尽描述不仅解释行为本身，还解释其背景，从
而使这种行为对局外人来说变得有意义。厚描法通过对野史、轶闻的研究，从而展现出
宏大的民族文化背景。

新历史主义的理论内涵：
(1) 历史观：
1 新历史主义批评者所认为的“历史”不是单数大写的历史（历史具有内在一致性，
按一定的方向前进），而是复数小写的历史（历史没有内在的一致性，不会按一
定的方向前进）。
2 新历史主义批评者所认为历史不是完整、连续、统一的，而是破裂、片段、无序的，
这样，历史变成了开放的对话的历史。
3 新历史主义批评者所认为“历史”是偶然性的、即兴式的历史。
(2) 新历史主义与文学：
打破了文学与历史（前景与背景）的二元对立，文学与历史是相互促进的，它们始终
在相互塑造中生成着。
格林布拉特以文艺复兴时期的作家“自我”塑造为例：“自我塑造”是自我与外力的
复杂互动的过程，是一种相互塑造的关系。一方面，作家作为个体来说，无法超出自己所
处的时代；另一方面，作家创作的作品在读者的阅读过程中发挥了作品的价值，为他人和
社会提供精神能量。

(3) 历史与文本：
蒙特罗斯：“文本的历史性(historicity of texts)和历史的文本性(textuality of history)”
• 文本的历史性：一切文本都具有历时性和社会性。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）。（1）没有保存下来的历史文本，就无法了解真正
的，完整的过去。（2）这些文本在转变成“文献”，即成为史学家撰写历史的材料时，它
们会本身再次成为对其他文本进行阐释的中介。

(4) 文学与权力政治
新历史主义者的研究领域虽各不相同，但都涉及到了权力和政治。

新历史主义的策略方法：
1　重视轶闻轶事
2　边缘化
3　跨文本批评

新历史主义的局限性：
1) 缺乏代表性人物所表述的权威性、独创性的理论话语。
2) 回归历史的同时造成历史的沉沦。
3) 造成了大历史和小历史的二元对立。

 斯蒂芬·葛林伯雷（Stephen Greenblatt）——通向一种文化诗学 Towards a Poetics of

Culture

 在为《文类》（Genre）编写的文艺复兴研究的专刊写导言时，提到了“新历史主义”
这个词。
 将新历史主义界定为一种实践，而不是一种教义。
New Historicism is situated as a practice rather than a doctrine.
 特点：与文学理论的关系上的无法定论
It has been unresolved and disingenuous about the relation to literary theory.
1　一方面，新历史主义与 20 世纪初实证论历史研究的区别，在于它对过去几年的理
论热持一种开放的态度。Greenblatt 的文学批评实践的形成受米歇尔·福柯、欧洲（尤其是法
国）人类学和社会理论家们的影响。
An openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years is precisely what distinguishes the
new historicism from the positivist historical scholarship of the early twentieth century.

2　另一方面，历史主义的批评家一般都不愿意加入到某个居主导地位的理论阵营。
The historicist critics have on the whole been unwilling to enroll themselves in one or the other of
the dominant theoretical camps.

1. Denies stability of social world.

2. Cultural poetics---sees texts in relation to other texts and cultures
3. Claims we should not expect cultural/historical moment to be unified

 Stephen Greenblatt & Catherine Gallagher —— Practicing New Historicism

New historicism has always been more a passionately engaged practice of questioning and
analysis than an abstract theory.

 Recurrent use of anecdotes

 Preoccupation with the nature of representations
 Fascination with the history of the body
 Sharp focus on neglected details
 Skeptical analysis of ideology

New historicism resisted systematization 新历史主义拒绝系统化

Never formulated a set of theoretical propositions or articulated a program 从未提出一套理论命
题或阐述一个程序
The notion of authenticity seemed and continues to seem misplaced, for new historicism is not a
coherent, close-knit school in which one might be enrolled or from which one might be expelled
新历史主义不是一个连贯的、组织严密的流派，所以真实性的概念似乎是放错了地方
"new historicism" at first signified an impatience with American New Criticism, an unsettling of
established norms and procedures, a mingling of dissent and restless curiosity. 新历史主义首先指
对美国新批评的厌倦，一种对既定规范和程序的动摇，一种对不同意见与永无厌足的好奇
心的整合

The simultaneous fascination with theory and resistance to it that has shaped from the start our
whole attempt to rethink the practice of literary and cultural studies 对理论痴迷的同时又抵抗理
论

It turned out to be important that the participants in these bracingly frank discussions were not
only theoretically diverse but also came from a range of disciplines, since it quickly became
apparent that positions that served as stable footing in one disciplinary inquiry were shifting sands
in another. 各个参与者的理论不同，且来自不同领域，因此在一个领域内站得住脚的理论在
另一个领域里却行不通。—— 跨学科性&否定社会世界的稳定性
There was no requirement, of course, that we all find common ground; the historical evolution of
the disciplines made and continues to make such uniformity inherently unlikely. 并不要求彼此之
间有共同之处，学科历史的演变使统一性在本质上是不可能的——我们不应期待文化、历
史时刻是统一的
There was, interdisciplinary studies, a tendency to invoke, in support of one’s own positions,
arguments from other disciplines that sophisticated thinkers in those other disciplines has in fact
been calling into question. 存在跨学科研究，有引发争论的倾向
(They, therefore, are resistant to disciplinary hegemony, finding in interdisciplinarity an
important means of generating new knowledge.)

创办了杂志 Representations,目的是为了扩展此类讨论的存在；此杂志没有编辑短语，因为
各成员之间不能达成一致意见。

The task of understanding then depends not on the extraction of an abstract set of principle, and
still less on the application of a theoretical model, but rather on an encounter with the singular, the
specific, and the individual. 理解的任务不在于对抽象的原则的提取，更不在于理论模型的运
用，而在于与个别的、具体的以及独特的事物接触。
Much of' this resonates in powerful ways with the impulses and perceptions that lay behind the
journal Representations: the fascination with the particular, the wide-ranging curiosity, the refusal
of universal aesthetic norms, and the resistance to formulating' an overarching theoretical
program.
Representations 杂志对特殊事物的迷恋、广泛的好奇心、对普遍审美标准的拒绝，以及对形
成一个包罗万象的理论方案的抵制。

The deepest source of art lie not in the skill of the individual maker but in the inner resources of a
people in a particular place and time.艺术的最深层来源不在于个体创造者的技巧，而在于特
定时间、特定地点的某个人的内在的才力

Herder’s brilliant vision of the mutual embeddedness of art and history underlies our fascination
with the possibility of treating all of the written and visual traces of a particular culture as a
mutually intelligible network of signs. Herder 对于艺术和历史相互嵌入的独特见解，使我们
着迷于把一种特定文化的所有文字和视觉痕迹都视为一种相互理解的符号网络。
(New historicists think of culture as a semiotic system, as a network of signs.)

Where traditional “close reading” tended to build toward an intensified sense of wondering
admiration, linked to the celebration of genius, new historicist readings are more often skeptical,
wary, demystifying, critical, and even adversarial. 传统的“精读”倾向于建立一种奇怪的崇拜
感，与庆祝天才联系在一起，而新历史主义阅读往往是更加怀疑的、谨慎的、去神秘化的、
批判的，甚至是对抗性的。

Our project has never been about diminishing or belittling the power of artistic representations,
even those with the most problematic entailments, but we never believe that our appreciation of
this power necessitates either ignoring the cultural matrix out of which the representations emerge
or uncritically endorsing the fantasies that the representations articulate. 我们的计划从来不是减
少或贬低艺术表达的能力，甚至那些最成问题的驳论，但是我们从不相信我们欣赏这种能
力需要忽视产生其艺术表达的文化矩阵，或者不加批判地支持这些表达所表明的幻想。

The notion of culture as text has a further major attraction: it vastly expands the range of objects
available to be read and interpreted. Major works of art remain centrally important, but they are
jostled now by an array of other texts and images. Some of these alternative objects of attention
are literary works regarded as too minor to deserve sustained interest and hence marginalized or
excluded entirely from the canon. Others are texts that have been regarded as altogether
nonliterary, that is, as lacking the aesthetic polish, the self-conscious use of rhetorical figures, the
aura of distance from the everyday world, the marked status as fiction that separately or together
characterize belles lettres. There has been in effect a social rebellion in the study of culture, so '
that figures hitherto kept outside the proper circles of interest——a rabble of half-crazed religious
visionaries, semiliterate political agitators, coarse-faced peasants in hobnailed boots, dandies
whose writings had been discarded as ephemera, imperial bureaucrats, freed slaves, women
novelists dismissed as impudent scribblers, learned women excluded from easy access to the
materials of scholarship, scandalmongers, provincial politicians, charlatans, and forgotten
academics-have now forced their way in, or rather have been invited in by our generation of
critics.
将文化视为文本的概念有一个很大的吸引力：它扩大了可供阅读和解释对象的范围。将边
缘化的文学作品，和非文学化的作品引入到研究当中。

But the new historicist project is not about “demoting” art or discrediting aesthetic pleasure; rather
it is concerned with finding the creative power that shapes literary works outside the narrow
boundaries in which it had hitherto been located, as well as within those boundaries. 但是新历史
主义并不是贬低艺术，也不是诋毁审美乐趣；相反，它关注的是在文学作品所处的狭窄边
界之外，以及在这些边界之内，寻找塑造文学作品的创造力。

While we frequently explore other kinds of texts, they urge that literary language uniquely exposes
to scrutiny a textuality that operates everywhere and throughout history. Hence, in addition to
skipping the levels of analysis that interest us most——the culturally and historically specific-
deconstructionism also seems to reerect the hierarchical privileges of the literary.
当我们频繁地探索其他类型的文本时，他们强烈要求文学语言独特地暴露于审视一种无处
不在、贯穿历史的文本性。因此，除了跳过这些级别之外。在我们最感兴趣的分析中，文化
和历史上的特定解构主义似乎也重新确立了文学的等级特权。

If a whole culture is regarded as a text---if all the textual traces of an era “count” as both
representation and event---then it is increasingly difficult to invoke “history” as censor. That is, for
new historicism, history cannot easily exercise that stabilizing and silencing function it possessed
in analyses that sought to declare the limits of the sayable and thinkable. 如果整个文化被视为一
种文本——如果一个时代的所有文本痕迹都被视为表征和事件——那么，援引历史作为审
查者就变得越来越困难。换句话说，对于新历史主义来说，历史不可能轻易地行使它在分
析中的稳定和沉默的功能，这些分析试图宣布可言说和可思想的界限。
Against the determinism that attempts to insist that certain things in a given period were beyond
conception or articulation, new historicism invokes the vastness of the textual archive, and with
that vastness an aesthetic appreciation of the individual instance.
决定论试图坚持特定时期的某些事物超越了概念或表述，新历史主义反对决定论，它唤起
了文本档案的浩瀚，并以这种浩瀚对个别实例的审美欣赏。

Because of this very lack of a given set of objects, new historicism becomes a history of
possibilities: while deeply interested in the collective, it remains committed to the value of the
single voice, the isolated scandal, the idiosyncratic vision, the transient sketch.
由于缺乏一套既定的对象，新历史主义变成了一部充满可能性的历史:尽管它对集体极感兴
趣，但它仍然致力于单一声音、孤立的丑闻、独特的视角、短暂的素描的价值。
From the beginning we thought it was crucially important to have it both ways: we wanted to
delve as deeply as possible into the creative matrices of particular historical cultures and at the
same time we wanted to understand how certain products of these cultures could seem to possess a
certain independence. In our scholarship, the relative positions of text and context often shift, so
that what has been the mere background makes a claim for the attention that has hitherto been give
only to the foregrounded and privileged work of art, yet we wish to know how the foregrounding
came about.
从一开始，我们就认为两者兼得至关重要：我们想要尽可能深入地研究特定历史文化的创
作矩阵，同时我们想要了解这些文化的某些产品是如何具有某种独立性的。在我们的学术
研究中，文本和背景的相对位置经常发生变化，因此，仅仅是背景就要求我们关注迄今为
止只关注有前景的和有特权的艺术作品，但我们希望知道前景是如何产生的。

We never feel that we can simply put off all our historically conditioned longings, fears, doubts,
and dreams, along with our accumulated knowledge of the world, and enter into another
conceptual universe. But at the same time we do not experience works of art---or indeed any
significant textual trace of the past---as confirmation of what we already know. In a meaningful
encounter with a text that reaches us powerfully, we feel at once pulled out of our own world and
plunged back with redoubled force into it.我们从不认为我们可以简单地把我们所有的历史条
件的渴望、恐惧、怀疑和梦想，以及我们对世界积累的知识抛到一边，进入另一个概念宇宙。
但与此同时，我们对艺术作品的体验——或者对过去任何重要的文字痕迹的体验——并不
是对我们已知的东西的确认。当我们与一篇强有力的文本进行一次有意义的接触时，我们
立刻感到自己被拉出了自己的世界，并以加倍的力量重新投入其中。

When we began to try to impose some order on the tangled effects that new historicism has had on
the practice of literary history, we designated four specific transformations that it helped to bring
about:当我们试图对新历史主义对文学史实践所产生的错综复杂的影响施加一些秩序时，我
们指定了它所带来的四个具体的转变:
(1) The recasting of discussions about “art” into discussions of “representations”将对艺术的探
讨重新转换为对表象的探讨
(2) The shift from materialist explanations of historical phenomena to investigations of the
history of the human body and the human subject 从对历史现象的唯物主义解释转向对人
体和人主体历史的考察
(3) The discovery of unexpected discursive contexts for literary works by pursuing their
“supplements” rather than their overt thematics 通过对文学作品的补充而不是对其明显的
主题的追求，发现了意想不到的话语语境
(4) The gradual replacement of “ideology critique” with discourse analysis 以话语分析逐步取
代意识形态批评

本书的章节内容：
1. The Touch of the Real(Greenblatt): describing the influence of two writers who use
anecdotes or fragments to produce the effect of a historical real.通过描述两位作家，他们使
用轶事或片段来产生历史真实的效果。
2. Counterhistory and the Anecdote(Gallagher): placing the new historicist anecdote inside the
historiographical context of other contemporary counterhistorical methods.将新历史主义奇
闻置于当代其他反历史方法的史学语境中。
→ Both chapters try to explain what had emerged as our most consistent commitment: a
commitment to particularity, and explore the new historicist attraction to the anecdote.两章
都试图解释新历史主义者对独特性的奉献，以及探索新历史主义者对轶事的吸引。

In chapters 3 through 6 we are true, in our fashion, to our original fourfold scheme of new
historicist transformations. 新历史主义转变的四部分
3. The Wound in the Wall(Greenblatt): examines the implicit assumptions about representation
embedded in works of art and links these assumptions to institutional strategies. It explains
how two Renaissance paintings both bear and efface the marks of the eucharistic doctrine of
the Real Presence, especially its anti-representationalism. 检视了艺术作品中隐含的关于表
象的假设，并将这些假设与制度策略联系起来。它解释了两幅文艺复兴时期的画作是
如何同时承载和抹去圣体教义中关于真实存在的标记，尤其是其反表现主义。
4. The Potato in the Materialist Imagination(Gallagher): jumps forward three and a half
centuries to encounter an equally unsettled relation between "the real" and its licensed
representations inside nineteenth-century materialism; along the way, it explicates the
similarities and differences between historical materialism and the body history that has been
new historicism’s close intellectua1 kin.向前跳跃了三个半世纪，在 19 世纪唯物质主义的
“真实”和它所许可的代表之间遇到了同样悬而未决的关系；同时它也阐述了唯物史
观与身体史观之间的异同，这是新历史主义的思想血脉。
→Chapters 3 and 4 make a contrasting pair that examines how cultures erect collapsible
distinctions between representations and what they wish to consider ultimate realities. 第三
章和第四章做了一组对比，考察了文化如何在表象和他们希望认为的最终现实之间建立可
折叠的区别。

5. The Mousetrap(Greenblatt): illustrates the historical use of supplementarity, since it gets

from Hamlet to its unacknowledged “context” (the murderous disputes over eucharistic
doctrine in England) by tracing God’s body through the entrails of a mouse. 说明了补充规
则的历史用途，因为它通过从一只老鼠的内脏追踪上帝的身体，从哈姆雷特发展到其
未被承认的“背景”（关于英格兰圣体教义的致命争议）。
6. The Novel and Other Discourses of Suspended Disbelief(Gallagher): fast-forwards into the
nineteenth century both to encounter literature’s role in normalizing disbelief and to explore
the origins and limits of the concept of “ideology”.快进到 19 世纪，既遇到了文学在规范
怀疑方面的作用，也探索了意识形态概念的起源和局限。
→Chapters 5 and 6 form another pair, which juxtaposes two works of literature, Hamlet and
Great Expectations, as well as the pressures to believe or disbelieve that shaped the.第五章和
第六章形成了另一个对比，将《哈姆雷特》和《远大前程》两部作品并置，以及塑造他们的信
或不信的压力。

1. The Touch of the Real:

 Clifford Geertz:
an anecdote links the distinction between “thin description” and “thick description” to
something “more empirical”.
The anecdote is, as Geertz puts it, "quoted raw, a note in a bottle." As such, it is meant not
only to convey the idea of the "empirical" (as distinct from the philosopher's "artificial" stories)
but also to arouse the bafflement, the intense curiosity and interest, that necessitates the
interpretation of cultures.

 Gilbert Ryle:
Thick description, as Ryle uses the term in his essays on thinking, entails an accourit of the
intentions, expectations, circumstances, settings, and purposes that give actions their meanings.
A thin description of what you are doing would be an account of a series of repetitive
physical motions that produce a certain effect; a thick description of those same motions would
involve a fuller sense of the significance of what you are doing.
Thick description involves two major features: intention-parasitism( 意 图 寄 生 ), and
circumstance-detachment(环境分离).

2. Counterhistory and the Anecdote：

“反历史”：人们通过轶事而追求的小写历史，在一定程度上实现了批评家反历史的愿望
反历史意味着与官方历史的对抗和主导叙事的对立，而且与人们观念中的历史事实相违背。

对于绝大多数的实证主义者和历史学家来说，轶闻是不登大雅之堂的，因为它名分不正没
有合法的地位。
But to most mainstream historians, anecdotes are non-account items: tolerable, perhaps, as
rhetorical embellishments, illustrations, or moments of relief from analytical generalizations, but
methodological nugatory.

 H·Aram·Vesser 维瑟——The New Historicism

新历史主成员共同恪守的“五个假设”：
1　Every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices; 每一个陈述行为都
植根于物质实践的网络
2　Every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks
falling prey to the practice it exposes; 我们揭露、批判和树立对立面时所采用的方法往往都是
采用对方的手段，因此有可能沦陷为自己所揭露的实践的牺牲品
3　Literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably; 文学与非文学“文本”之间没有
界限，彼此不间断地流通往来
4　No discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor express
inalterable human nature; 没有任何话语可以引导我们走向固定不变的真理，也没有任何话语
可以表达无可更改的人之本质
5　A critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate
in economy they describe. 恰当描述资本主义文化的批评方法和语言都参与到它们描述的经
济之中

 Stephen Greenblatt——Readers

While keeping in mind that new historicism is a collection of practices rather than a
school or a method, it may be useful to attempt a list of its distinguishing characteristics:

“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.

1 New historicists think of culture as a semiotic system, as a network of signs.

新历史主义受文化人类学者克里福德·格尔兹的影响，格尔兹认为，文化是一个巨大的
象征符号系统，而人是深陷其中的文化造物。

新历史主义者认为，在任何文化中都存在一个普遍的象征体系，它是由无数能够激起
人们的欲望、恐惧和敌意的符号组成。

2 They, therefore, are resistant to disciplinary hegemony, finding in interdisciplinarity an

important means of generating new knowledge.

3 They are persistently aware that history is both what happened in the past (a set of events)
and an account of those events (a story); historical truth arises from a critical reflection on the
adequacy of the story that is told.

4 History is, therefore, initially a kind of discourse, which is not a denial that there are real
events.

5 A typical new historicist procedure is to begin with a striking event or anecdote, which has
the effect of arousing skepticism about grand historical narratives or essentializing descriptions of
a historical period such as the Renaissance. Anecdotes also arrest attention and provide what
Greenblatt calls “the touch of the real”.

6 New historicists are determinedly suspicious of unified, monolithic depictions of cultures

or historical periods, insisting that there were countless Elizabethan world views but not a
monolithic Elizabethan world picture. Typically such unified myths are created to serve a
particular interest in the present, such as the longing for a golden past that Nietzsche calls
“antiquarian history”.

7 Because it is not possible to transcend one’s own historical moment, all histories are
themselves historically contingent on the present in which they are constructed.
 8 New historicism is implicitly a critique of literary formalism (or “The New Criticism”)
that treated literary objects as ahistorical icons. The reexamination of the relationship between
literature and history is a high priority for new historicists.

9 Just as it is no longer tenable to think of a literary text as a detached object that is

independent of its author and readers, so also is it no longer possible to think of the past as an
object that is detachable from its textual reconstruction.

10 It is also no longer tenable for students of literature to think of history as some sort of
detachable background to iconic works of verbal (or other kinds of) art. History and literature
are mutually imbricated.

Part Ⅰ Culture and New Criticism

1. Culture

2. Towards a Poetics of Culture

 在为《文类》（Genre）编写的文艺复兴研究的专刊写导言时，提到了“新历史主义”
这个词。将新历史主义界定为一种实践，而不是一种教义。
New Historicism is situated as a practice rather than a doctrine.
 新历史主义特点：与文学理论的关系上的无法定论
It has been unresolved and disingenuous about the relation to literary theory.
1　一方面，新历史主义与 20 世纪初实证论历史研究的区别，在于它对过去几年的理
论热持一种开放的态度。
An openness to the theoretical ferment of the last few years is precisely what distinguishes the
new historicism from the positivist historical scholarship of the early twentieth century.

Greenblatt 的文学批评实践的形成受米歇尔·福柯、欧洲（尤其是法国）人类学和社会理论家
们的影响。
Certainly, the presence of Michel Foucault on the Berkeley campus for extended visits during the
last five or six years of his life, and more generally the influence in America of European (and
especially French) anthropological and social theorists, has helped to shape my own literary
critical practice.

2　另一方面，历史主义的批评家一般都不愿意加入到某个居主导地位的理论阵营。
The historicist critics have on the whole been unwilling to enroll themselves in one or the other of
the dominant theoretical camps.

马克思主义对新历史主义批评的影响：
Now it’s true that I tended to like those Marxist figures who were troubled in relation to Marxism
– Walter Benjamin, the early rather than the later Lukacs, and so forth.

After that I started to teach courses with names like “Cultural Poetics.” It’s true that I’m still more
uneasy with a politics and a literary perspective that is untouched by Marxist thought, but that
doesn’t lead me to endorse propositions or embrace a particular philosophy, politics or rhetoric,
faute de mieux.

詹姆斯《政治潜意识》：艺术性的文化话语与社会性或政治性的文化话语之间的区别在于资
本主义所产生的私有化。政治和诗学原本是一回事，资本主义的兴起击碎了这个整体性。

后结构主义
利欧塔：福利森事件是资本主义敌对姓名的案例

 新历史主义特点：跨学科界限
在本文中，格林布拉特使用了许多带有资本主义经济色彩的词汇如
“circulation”，“negotiation”，“exchange”等，表明格林布拉特已经开始探索打破边界。
“My use of the term circulation here is influenced by the work of Derrida, but sensitivity to
the practical strategies of negotiation and exchange depends less upon poststructuralist theory than
upon the circulatory rhythms of American politics. And the crucial point is that it is not politics
alone but the whole structure of production and consumption – the systematic organization of
ordinary life and consciousness – that generates the pattern of boundary making and breaking,
the oscillation between demarcated objects and monological totality, that I have sketched.”
格林布拉特以 Mailer 的作品为例，表明审美话语与社会话语之间的界限已经不明确了。
“Rather the work of art is itself the product of a set of manipulations, some of them our own
many others undertaken in the construction of the original work. That is, the work of art is the
product of a negotiation between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex,
communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society.”

3. The Touch of the Real

格林布拉特——文艺复兴时期作家的自我塑造

自我塑造指的是作者可以在激烈的社会矛盾及历史背景下通过文学创作的方式对自己的身
份及作品中的角色进行不断塑造的方法。

格林布拉特研究文艺复兴“自我塑造”的出发点在于，他认为 16 世纪的英国不但产生了自
我（selves），而且这种自我是能够塑造成型的意识。

“my starting point is quite simply that in sixteenth-century England there were both
selves and a sense that they could be fashioned.”