Unit 2: Introduction to New Historicism

HAYDEN WHITE, STEPHEN GREENBLAT

LITERARY TEXT: “12 O’CLOCK NEWS”

1.- CONTEXT

The author of the poem is Elisabeth Bishop (1911-1979). She was an American poet
and short-story writer. She is considered one of the finest poets of the 20th century.
Bishop’s life spanned both the Postmodern and Contemporary literary periods as well as
the Confessional poetry movement.

The tittle “Twelve o’clock news” refers to the fact that the reality of the war was
mediated by television news.

The poem was published in the collection Geography III in 1976, during the Vietnam
War, at a time when the USA had a conservative government and mass media heavily
affected public opinion. It’s inspired by war and its consequences

2.- FORM AND CONTENT

The poem belongs to the genre of poetry, and it’s commonly referred as a prose poem.
• PROSE POEM: a piece of writing that is written on the page like prose, but has
rhythm, images, and patterns of sounds like a poem.
The poetic voice is that of a first-person narrator, a reporter perhaps, who describes
what they are seeing. The author creates a ventriloquized voice to establish distance
between the reader and the ideology present in the poem.

• VENTRILOQUIZED VOICE: imitation of a voice that does not correspond with

the ideas, belief... of the author, to produce a specific effect

2.3.1.- FORM OF THE POEM

The poem has an unusual form
• it’s arranged in paragraphs, not stanzas or verses
• It has italicised words in the margins
• It’s structured into two columns: a list of common items related to writing on
the left and their highly figurative description on the right.
• Bishop’s poem looks like a news bulletin
2.3.2.- DEFAMILIARIZATION
Description of familiar objects, person or situation in an unusual way, to draw
the attention of the reader to language itself.

 Words (left) are familiar objects typically used by a journalist: personifications,

metaphors
 The paragraphs (right) are metaphorical or figurative descriptions of these
objects
 ANALOGY (similarity) between what a journalist can do with words and what she
(a poet) can do with words too: represent reality with false words.
The objects evoke landscapes and people of Vietnam during the War
2.3.3.- METAPOETRY or METADISCOURSE
Bishop, names elements that make the poem talk about poetry itself and language or
discourse about itself.
Example: self-references, self-irony (to make sure that the text is interpreted as irony):
on describing the typewriter “particularly shaped terraces” on which “the welfare of this
tiny principality depends” suggests:
• The rice terraces that feed Vietnamese
• The journalist´s welfare: to whom earn a living depends on writing
• Bishop´s welfare: also writing to earn a living
She shows how writing is affected by material and social factors.

2.3.4.- VISUAL PARALELLS

Bishop makes connections between objects and paragraphs by using visual parallels.

• GOOSNECK LAMP: “The full moon” and the light shed by both = poor light
(Shed: to shed light physically / to clarify)
• TYPEWRITER: “Shaped terraces” (an urban object – a rural and timeless activity)
 • PILE OF MSS: “White, calcareous and shaly soil”. Shaly: consolidated mud, like
the image of paper piled
• TYPED SHEETS (hojas): “field... it is dark –speckled”, like papers covered in
typed words
• ENVELOPES: signboards (panel publicitario) “on a truly gigantic scale”
suggesting Communist propaganda in North Vietnam
• INK- BOTTLE: the “mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure”
• TYPEWRITER ERASER: unicycle used by the “unicyclist courier”
• ASHTRAY (full of cigarettes): the “nest of soldiers” lying “heaped together” and
“in hideously contorted positions, all dead”
2.2.5.- OTHER RECOURSES
• ALLITERATION: repetition of sounds = making the text more musical
• ONOMATOPAEYA: imitation of natural sounds using phonemes = sounds
related to the elements of the description (Ex. sounds imitating sound of a
typewriter)
• PERSONIFICATION: Butts (colillas) = death bodies
• The poem ends with an image of death... message: war kills

• The poem is made in two parts: the left one is composed by words related to
the world of journalism and the right one is a description of an Asian, agrarian
country in war.
• The shape of the poem itself suggests division and conflict: the items listed on
the left are western, industrialized, modern, while the scenes and events
described on the right are non-western, rural, backward (according to the
speaker).

• Armed aggression of war and its human consequences

• The effects of war

3.- INTERRELATION FORM-CONTENT

The lamp connects to the full moon and the light shed by both. The moon
sheds/provides ‘little’ or ‘poor’ light, suggesting the lamp also gives off weak illumination.
In English, the expression ‘to shed light’ has a literal and a metaphoric sense,
meaning both to shed physical light in darkened surroundings and ‘to clarify or illuminate’
a situation or mystery. Bishop compares the dim light her reading lamp gives to the
light emitted by the moon. The reporter suggests that the moon where she is “could
be dead”, reinforcing the contrast between being in the light and knowing, and being in
the dark and not knowing.

The typewriter rows of keys anticipate the image of “those small, peculiarly shaped
terraces”, connecting a contemporary (and urban?) object to a timeless (“What endless
labor…”) and rural activity.

If we assume manuscripts to be white in colour, then this would connect to the image of
the “white, calcareous, and shaly” soil. The last adjective refers to “soft finely stratified
rock […] consisting of consolidated mud or clay” and reinforces the image of sheets of
paper piled on top of one another.

This reaches out to the image of “a large rectangular ‘field’. It is dark-speckled”,

which recalls a sheet of paper covered in typed words resembling “dark-speckled” marks.
The image parallel is somewhat less obvious here, though references to
‘communications’, ‘industrialization’ and ‘sign-boards’ suggest a continued attempt to
connect the practice of written communication to the environment or world
represented in the right-hand text.

The “mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure” echoes the shape of the ink-bottle. I
imagine the speaker to have on his/her desk or at least within his/her field of vision as
h/she writes the “12 o’clock news”. The blackness of the ink picks up the ‘little light’ and
‘poor visibility’ of the first paragraph. Here we are told that the moonlight is ‘feeble’. The
absence of proper illumination seems to suggest an inability to understand or
relate to the events the speaker is describing.

The imagistic or visual connections here are elusive. The presence of an eraser seems
to anticipate the ‘erasure’ of the life of the unicyclist-courier. Death is expressed
through the past, modal and conditional forms of the verb, rather than the simple present
or a declarative statement. The typewriter eraser belongs to the left-hand margin, the
space most closely associated with the western speaker of the poem. Is the speaker
suggesting that the west is responsible for the death of the cyclist yet, using the
conditional tense, refusing to accept responsibility?
The “‘nest’ of soldiers” lying “heaped together” and “in hideously contorted positions, all
dead” vividly mirrors the image of an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes or
cigarette butts (colillas). Is the speaker saying that the dead war victims have no more
significance for the west than cigarettes in an ashtray? Or is there another (implicit)
attempt to implicate the west in the horrors of the war that it is perpetrating on “the elusive
natives”? The poem ends here with a clear image of death, a theme which has only been
suggested in previous ‘paragraphs’. It’s almost as if “12 O’Clock News” has been building
up to this final moment to give us the message: war kills.

4.- SUMMARY
“12 O'Clock News” is an avant-garde lyrical construction made in two parts. The left one
is composed by words related to the world of journalism and the right one is a description
of an Asian, agrarian country in war.
The ‘binary opposition’ is subverted by the seeming connections between the two
halves of the poem. The them/us binary suggested by the imperialist, condescending
tone of the speaker and the dual texts, is undermined by the poem’s strategy to make
connections between its left and right hand.
Bishop gives symbolic value on the seven objects in “12 o’Clock News”. From the
mechanics of the lamp and typewriter grows the pile of manuscripts that, in turn,
brings about the typed sheets and envelopes. The objects combine to create a
landscape as well as a sense of writerly progression. Her typewriter is the very thing
that her welfare, as the “tiny principality”, depends upon; her manuscripts form a
landslide whose soil is of poor quality. Each typed sheet is either an airstrip or a
cemetery, and envelopes, are crude forms of communication.
The ink bottle takes on indescribable religious power. The idea of it as a saviour, to the
poet, as the “last hop e of rescue” from her “grave difficulties” is literal and figurative.
Bishop is living of her writing, but also the act of writing is mysterious and only meaningful
if illuminated in some way, if understood. The “ashtray” stanza shows several “soldiers”
in a heap, “all dead”. They’re ineffective and there is little in the way of sorrow at their
deaths. We’ve been set up not to empathize with the people in this foreign place.
 5.- THEORY AND CRITICISM
While “12 o’Clock News” doesn’t specifically state a time and place, of we consider
the period in which it was written and published, we can infer that it is linked to the
Vietnam War.
The official ideology and prevailing rhetorical strategy in the USA during the war was I’d
pro-war propaganda, made possible through the appearance of mass media and their
support of the picture that must be painted for the public.
Bishop’s poem reacts to this prevalent discourse by describing, in an ironic manner,
another side of the war that was rarely shown to Americans at the time. The title implies
that the reality of the war was mediated through the news. Families sat down to
watch the “12 o’Clock News” and accepted that the information they were being given
was true, when the war was actually very different to what was being broadcast on
television and radios.
Using defamiliarization, Bishop urges the reader to reflect upon the language used and
become wary of the ways words can distort reality.
Bishop presents us with items and a description of those items that allows for more than
one reading she shows both their proximity and distance. But she is as cool and
calculating in describing these objects as a reporter would be showing war. In doing so,
Bishop makes the news media culpable and the act of writing and thus the poet herself.

CO-TEXT: MARY MCCARTHY’S "REPORT FROM VIETNAM II: THE

PROBLEMS OF SUCCESS", THE NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 4, 1967

1.- ABOUT THE CO-TEXT

The co-text represents a specific place at a specific moment –Saigon, during Vietnam
War, being bombed by the US Air Force– while the speaker in the text avoids naming
either the place or the time being alluded to.
 2.- CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE CO-TEXT AND THE TEXT
• Acconection: can be similarity or a contrast, a parallel or a difference, a
presence or an absence.

3.- INTER-CONNECTIONS

3.1.1.- Different
no title title
prose (seeming) prose
paragraphs (seeming) paragraphs
standard format non-standard (2 columns)
single typography double typography (2 typefaces)
lone Vietnamese on a bicycle unicyclist-courier
Vietnam is identified no country identified
historical period interfered no historical period interfered
America criticized America not mentioned
explicitly anti-war anti-war sentiment implied
reportage / report mock reportage / report
press simulated radio / tv news

3.1.2.- Similar
• War as a theme • Aerial/ superior viewpoint
• Death as a theme • Detailed description
• 1st person narrator / speaker • Use of irony
• Use of pronouns

THEORY AND CRITICISM: NEW HISTORICISM AND CULTURAL

MATERIALISM
1.- NEW HISTORICISM
The term “new historicism” was coined by the American critic Stephen Greenblatt,
whose book 'Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1980) is usually
regarded as its beginning. However, similar tendencies can be identified in work by
various critics published during the 1970s, a good example being J.W. Lever’s ‘The
Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama’. This brief and epoch-making book
challenged conservative critical views about Jacobean theatre and liked the plays
much more closely with the political events of their era than previous critics had done.
A simple definition of the new historicism is that is a method based on the parallel
reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period. New
historicism refuses to ‘privilege’ the literary text: instead of a literary ‘foreground’ and
a historical ‘background’, it envisages and practises a mode of study in which literary and
non-literary text are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other.
This ‘equal weighting’ is suggested in the definition of new historicism offered by the
American critic Louis Montrose: he defines it as a combined interest in “the textuality of
history, the historicity of texts”. It involves “an intensified willingness to read all of the
textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts”.
So new historicism embodies a paradox; it is an approach to literature in which there
is no privileging of the literary.
Greenblatt’s main innovation, from the POV of literary study, was to juxtapose the plays
of the Renaissance period with “the horrifying colonialist policies pursued by all the major
European powers of the era”. He draws attention to “the marginalization and
dehumanizing of suppressed Others”, usually by starting an essay with an analysis of
a contemporary historical document which overlaps in some wat with the subject matter
of the play. Greenblatt himself refers to the appropriated historical document as the
‘anecdote’, and the typical new historicist essay omits the customary academic
preliminaries about previously published interpretations of the paly in question and
begins with a powerful and dramatic anecdote. Since these historical documents are
analysed, we should call them “co-texts”. The text and the co-text used will be
expressions of the same historical ‘moment’ and interpreted accordingly.

2.- NEW AND OLD HISTORICISM – SOME DIFFERENCES

When we say that new historicism involves the parallel study of literary and non-
literary texts, the word ‘parallel’ encapsulates the essential difference between this and
earlier approached to literature which had made some use of historical data. These
earlier approached made a hierarchical separation between the literary text (object
of value), and the historical ‘background’ (the setting).
The practice of giving ‘equal weighting’ to literary and non-literary material is the first
and major difference between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ historicism. As representative of
‘old’ historicism we could cite E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (1943)
and Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944), books against which new historicism
frequently defines itself. These books described the set of conservative mental attitudes
which Tillyard saw as typifying the Elizabethan outlook and as reflected in Shakespeare’s
plays. The ‘traditional’ approach to Shakespeare was characterised by the combination
of this historical framework with the practice of ‘close reading’ and the analysis of
‘patterns of imagery’.
A 2nd important difference is encapsulated in the word ‘archival’ in the phrase “the
archival continuum”, for that word indicates that 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 are
irrecoverably lost. The emphasis bears the influence of the long-familiar views in literary
studies that the actual thoughts, or feelings, or intentions of a writer can never be
recovered or reconstructed, so the real living individual is now entirely superseded by
the literary text which has come down to us. As it were, the word of the past replaces the
world of the past.
Incorporated into this preference for the textual record of the past is the influence of
deconstruction. 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 us
in textualized form: it is ‘thrice-processed’, first through the ideology, or outlook, or
discursive practices of its own time, the through those of ours, and finally through the
distorting web of language itself. Whatever is represented in a text is thereby remade.
New historicist essays always themselves constitute another remaking, another
permutation of the past, as the play or the poem under discussion is juxtaposed with a
chosen document, so that a new entity is formed. In this sense, the objection that the
documents 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.
 3.- NEW HISTORICISM AND FOUCAULT
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’. It seems simultaneously to despair of the survival of theses 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’ surveillance. The Panopticon was a
design for a circular prison: the design consisted of tiered ranks of cells which could
all be surveyed by a single warder positioned at the centre of the circle. The panoptic
state maintains its surveillance by the power of its ‘discursive practices’ which circulates
its ideology throughout the body politic.
Discourse is not just a way of speaking or writing, but the whole ‘mental set’ and
ideology which encloses the thinking of all members of a given society. There is always
a multiplicity of discourses – so that the operation of power structures is a significant a
fact in the family as in layers of government.
NH seems to emphasise the extent of this kind of ‘thought control’ with the implication
that ‘deviant’ thinking may become literally ‘unthinkable’, so the state is seen as a
monolithic structure and change becomes almost impossible. Foucault’s work looks at
the institutions which enable this power to be maintained, such as state punishment,
prisons, the medical profession, and legislation about sexuality. Foucault makes a less
rigid distinction than is found in Althusser between ‘repressive structures’ and
‘ideological structures’. There is a clear affinity between Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’,
Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ and Foucault’s ‘discursive practices’, since all of these
concerns the way power is internalised by those whom it disempowers, so it doesn’t have
to be constantly enforced externally.
NH represents a significant extension of the empire of literary studies, for it entails
intensive ‘close reading’, in the literary-critical manner, of non-literary texts. Documents
are seldom offered entire: instead and extract is made which is then subjected to
intensive scrutiny. Little attention is paid to previous writing about the same text, as
if the advent of new historicism has wiped the academic slate clean. This is a true ‘words
on the page’ approach in which context is dispensed with and the material then studied.
Thus, a single historical text is sometimes the sole witness, a claimed change in
attitude towards some aspects of sexuality. The interpretative weight thus placed upon
a single document is often very great. So, we should not expect to find the methods of
new historicism greatly valued or admired by historians. It’s a way of ‘doing’ history
which has a strong appeal for non-historians.

4.- ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF NEW HISTORICISM

The appeal of new historicism is undoubtedly great, for a variety of reasons.
1. Although is founded upon post-structuralist thinking, it is written in a far
more accessible way, for the most part avoiding post-structuralism’s
characteristically dense style and vocabulary. It presents its data and draws its
conclusions, and it is sometimes easy to challenge the way the data is
interpreted, since the interpretation rests in an empirical foundation which is
openly available for scrutiny.
2. The material is often fascinating and is wholly distinctive in the context of
literary studies. These essays look and feel different from those produced
by any other critical approach and immediately give the literary student the
 feeling that new territory is being entered. Particularly, the ‘uncluttered’, ‘pared-
down’ feel of the essays, gives them a stark and dramatic air.
3. The political edge of NH writing is always sharp, but it avoids the problems
frequently encountered in ‘straight’ Marxist criticism: it seems less overtly
polemical and more willing to allow the historical evidence its own voice.

5.- WHAT NEW HISTORICISTS DO

1) They juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the former in the light
of the latter.
2) They try thereby to ‘defamiliarize’ the canonical literary text, detaching it from
the accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it as if new.
3) They focus attention on 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’.
4) They make use of aspects of the post-structuralist outlook, especially
Derrida’s notion that every facet of reality is textualized and Foucault’s idea of
social structures as determined by dominant ‘discursive practices’

6.- CULTURAL MATERALISM

The critic Graham Holderness described cultural materialism as “a politicised form of
historiography”. We can explain this as meaning the study of historical material within
a politicised framework, this framework including the present which those literary texts
have in some way helped to shape. The term ‘cultural materialism’ was made current
in 1985 when it was used by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield as the subtitle of
their edited collection of essays Political Shakespeare. They define the terming in a
foreword as designating a critical method which has four characteristics: it combines
an attention to:
• Historical context
• Theoretical method
• Political commitment
• Textual analysis

1. The emphasis on historical context “undermines the transcendent significance

traditionally accorded to the literary text”. Here the word ‘transcendent’ roughly
means ‘timeless’. The aim of this aspect is to allow the literary text to ‘recover its
histories’ which previous kinds of study have often ignored.
2. The emphasis on theoretical method signifies a break with liberal humanism
and absorbing the lessons of structuralism, post-structuralism, and other
approached which have been come prominent since the 1970s.
3. The emphasis on political commitment signifies the influence of Marxist and
feminist perspectives and breaks form the conservative-Christian framework.
4. The stress on textual analysis: there is a commitment to making theory of an
abstract kind, and to practising it on canonical texts which continue to be the focus
of massive amounts of academic and professional attention, and which are
prominent national and cultural icons.
The two words in the term ‘cultural materialism’ are further defined:
 • Culture will include all forms of culture. The approach doesn’t limit itself to ‘high’
cultural forms.
• Materialism signifies the opposite of ‘idealism’; the ‘materialist’ belief is that
culture cannot “transcend the material forces and relations of production.
Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor
can it be independent of it”.
These comments on materialism represent the standard beliefs of Marist criticism,
and they do perhaps pint to the difficulty of making a useful distinction between a ‘straight’
Marxist criticism and cultural materialism. However, it’s added that the relevant
history is not just that of 400 years ago, but that of the times in which Shakespeare is
produced and reproduced. Thus, in cultural materialism there is an emphasis on
the functioning of the institutions through which Shakespeare is now brought to us.
Cultural materialism takes a good deal of its outlook from Raymond Williams. Instead
of Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, Williams invented the term ‘structures of feeling’:
these are concerned with “meanings and values as they are lives and felt”. Structures of
feeling are often antagonist ideologist within a society. They are characteristically found
in literature, and they oppose the status quo. The result is that cultural materialism is
much more optimistic about the possibility of change and is willing at times to see
literatures as a source of oppositional values. Cultural materialism particularly, involves
using the past to ‘read’ the present, revealing the politics of our own society by what
we choose to emphasise or suppress of the past.

7.- HOW IS CULTURAL MATERIALISM DIFFERENT FROM NEW

HISTORICISM?
• Cultural Materialism = British; New Historicism = American
• CM tends to focus on the interventions whereby human beings make their own
history.
• NH tends to focus on the power of social and ideological structures
• CM is more political optimistic than NH
• NH inherits post-structuralist scepticism about the possibility of attaining
secure knowledge.
• NH claims that Foucault. They know the risks and dangers involved in claiming
to establish truth
• NH locates the literary text in the political situation of its own day, whereas
the CM locates it within that of ours
• Same political differences

8.- WHAT CULTURAL MATERALIST CRITICS DO

• They read the literary text in a such way as to enable us to ‘recover its histories’
(the context of exploitation from which it emerged)
• They foreground those elements in the work’s present transmission and
contextualizing which caused those histories to be lost in the first place.
• They use a combination of Marxist and feminist approaches to the text,
especially to do the first of these and to fracture the previous dominance of
conservative social, political, and religious assumptions in Shakespeare
criticism.
 • They use the technique of close textual analysis, but often employ
structuralist and post-structuralist techniques, especially to mark a break with
the inherited tradition of close textual analysis within the framework of
conservative cultural and social assumptions.
• At the same time, they work mainly within traditional notions of the canon,
claiming writing about more obscure texts hardly ever constitutes an effective
political intervention.
CRITICAL AUTHORS
1.- HAYDEN WHITE, “THE HISTORICAL TEXT AS LITEARY ARTIFACT”

• NARRATIVE: A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of

events, recounted by a narrator to a narrate.
❖ It should be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or
situations, and from dramatic enactments of events.
❖ A set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or
discourse).
• STORY: a narrative or tale recounting a series of events. In the modern
distinction between story and plot:
❖ Story: the full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred
in their likely order, duration, and frequency
❖ Plot: a selection and (re-)ordering of these.
• ROMANCE: a fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable
adventures of idealized characters in some remote enchanted setting; or a
tendency in fiction opposite to realism.
• TRAGEDY: a serious play (or a novel) representing the disastrous downfall of
a central character, the protagonist.
• COMEDY: a play (or other literary composition) written chiefly to amuse its
audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over the characters
depicted (described, represented) normally closer to the representation of
everyday life, rather than tragedy, and explore common human failings rather
than tragedy´s disastrous crimes. Happy ending for the leading characters.
• SATIRE: it exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to ridicule
and scorn (reject).
• EPIC: long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds (hazañas) of one or
more heroes

• VERBAL FICTIONS (paragraph 1): a construct which is made of words and

based on invention rather than reality.
• VALUE-NEUTRAL (par. 2): he says that historical events acquire narrative value
only after the historian organizes them into a specific plot type (as “a story that is
tragic, comic, romantic”). Before that, their narrative value is potential and neutral.
• EMPLOTED (par. 3): organized into a plot.
 • FICTION MAKING (par. 4): the historian bestows (give) a significance upon
certain historical events and then matches them up with a precise type of plot.
This is what is involved when we make fiction, he says.
• TAILORING (par. 7): adapting the facts to a story form

1. [H]istorical narratives are not only models of past events and processes,
but also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude
between such events and processes and the story types that we
conventionally use to endow (dotar de) the events of our lives with
culturally sanctioned (approved, agreed) meanings (par. 6).

Historical narratives do not only arrange past events in a particular way,

according to certain fiction making conventions; they are also metaphors which
propose a similarity between those events and certain story models. These story
models are meaningful to us in culturally accepted ways.

2. When a given concourse of events is emplotted as a “tragedy,” this simply

means that the historian has so described the events as to remind us of
that form of fiction which we associate with the concept “tragic” (par. 8).

He associates literary or narrative terms (emplotted, tragedy, fiction) with how a

historian identifies certain historical events. That identification adopts the name
of a narrative genre such as “tragedy” (or comedy, epic...)

3. The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is

conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the
representation of the actual, must give place to the recognition that we
can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to the
imaginable (par. 10).
We can use deconstructive or poststructuralist terms to explain his methodology.
He challenges standard or established binaries such as history/fiction and
actual/imaginable to argue that the actual is “like” the imaginable...by analogy,
history is “like” fiction.

2.- STEPHEN GREENBLATT: “INTRODUCTION TO THE POWER OF FORMS

IN THE ENGLISH RENNAISSANCE”
Clearly it is not the text alone […] that bears the full significance of
Shakespeare’s play, […] [but] rather the story’s full situation – the genre
it is thought to embody, the circumstances of its performance, the
imaginings of its audience – that governs its shifting meanings.
Greenblatt argues that the meanings (which are not fixed but ‘shifting’) of Shakespeare’s
play, Richard II, are not determined only by the text of the ‘story’ but its ‘full situation’
(which includes its genre, the conditions of when it was performed, the audience’s
thoughts and expectations...)

→ “DISCREPANCY” (paragraph 4) refers to:

The critic John Dover Wilson (1881-1969) interpreted Richard II as expressing loyalty to
the monarchy and portrays (represent) the overthrow (removal, defeat) of the legitimate
king as “sacrilegious”. However, Queen Elizabeth I’s anxiety over the play’s possible
message led her to identify with the deposed (removed) king of Shakespeare’s play and
to claim that it had been performed “40tie times in open streets”. It is this interpretative
discrepancy Greenblatt notes and wishes to analyze.

→ “MAINSTREAM LITERARY HISTORY” (Greenblatt) = OLD HISTORICISM

(Barry)
The text contains some words and phrases associated with this concept (par. 5):
 dominant historical scholarship
 earlier historicism
 monological
 a single political vision
 identical [with] the entire literate class
 internally coherent and consistent
 the status of historical fact
 a stable point of reference
WHAT THE “NEW HISTORICISM” DO (par. 6):
New Historicism undermines fixity in critical and literary practice. New historicism is self-
interrogating, and it interrogates others; he encourages an investigation into the belief
system underpinning (supporting) Richard II and that of John Dover Wilson’s
interpretation of Richard II