3. New Historicist Theorists and Concepts:
3.1. Stephen Greenblatt: The Originator of New
Historicism:
The American literary critic and scholar Stephen Greenblatt is
widely known as the theorist who coined the term "New Historicism". However, as
Jurgen Pieters asserts in his book Moments of Negotiation: The New
Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (2001), preceding Greenblatt, Wesley
Morris used this term in his book Towards a New Historicism (1972) in
reference to Murray Krieger's study of the New Critics contextualization (267).
Greenblatt is associated with his multiple definitions of New Historicism,
foregrounding its assumptions and general tenets. In his introduction to
The Forms of Power and Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
(1982), he defines new historicism in comparison with John Dover Wilson's
old historical criticism. He states that
[It] erodes the firm ground of both criticism and literature. It
tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions and those of
others. [...]. The critical practice [...] challenges the assumptions that
guarantee a secure distinction between "literary foreground" and "political
background" or more
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generally between artistic production and other kinds of
social production [...]. (The Greenblatt Reader 2)
Accordingly, Greenblatt deals with literary texts as a product of
a particular epoch shaping the history through linguistic signs. Thus, he
situates new historicism between textual and contextual spheres of the process
of interpretation. Greenblatt finds in Renaissance literature and distinctly
the Shakespearian history plays a fertile ground to show that literary texts
are not a set of fixed, lifeless historical facts but rather an active form of
art that necessitates a reference to its social, historical and cultural
contexts in order to grasp its meaning. Thus, the relationship between
literature and history is autonomous and reciprocal. In his collection The
Greenblatt Reader (2005), Greenblatt states that he refuses to consider
new historicism as a theory insisting that it is "a collection of practices
rather than a school or a method" ("Introduction: Greenblatt and New
Historicism" 3). He sets a list of its main assumptions regarding the new
historicist view of culture and history and their priority to "re-examine" the
relationship between literature and history focusing on their mutual
overlapping. He also develops in one issue of the journal Genre the
essence of new historicism that literature is a historical construct and that
in order to understand a particular literature, we should understand the
context in which it flourished. He further accentuated this idea in his essay
"Towards a Poetics of Culture", stating that the literary text is "a product of
a set of manipulations" and "a product of a negotiation between the creator or
class of creators, equipped with complex, communally shared repertoire of
conventions and institutions and practices of society" (13). For instance,
Edgar Allan Poe offers an image of the reconstructed history of the cultural,
social and religious ideologies of the 19th C America through the
motif of taphephobia. Poe used his personal repertoire of religious doctrines
and myths and beliefs to build a general conception of the permanent fear of
premature burial that overwhelmed American social and political life, becoming
an enduring obsession. He starts from his social
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context to reach an overall visualization of the current
psychological state of the American citizens during the 19th C
through a detailed description of fictitious characters who suffer from this
widespread obsession. The reader can notice the parallelism between Poe's own
biography as a man who suffered from claustrophobia and the detailed
description of the narrator of "The Premature Burial" stuck in a dark, narrow
space. Understanding Poe's use of taphephobia as a recurrent motif in six tales
necessitates a reference to the medical documents of that era that describe
some unknown hysterical trances (catalepsy) that misguide people and lead
actually to the phenomenon of premature internment. Hence, the reference to
other non-literary documents is a way that helps the reader or the critic to be
deeply involved in the process of interpretation.
Another hallmark of new historicism, presented and discussed by
Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher in their book Practicing New Historicism
(2000), is the concept of anecdote. Greenblatt builds
his own conception of anecdote upon his study of Joel Fineman's essay
"The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction". In their book
Practicing New Historicism, Greenblatt and Gallagher define this
concept like the literary texts, being "fictions in the sense of things made,
both are shaped by the imagination and by the available resources of narration
and description [...]"(31). In his book Learning to Curse (2007),
Greenblatt further develops the definition of anecdote, stating that
it presents a mélange of literariness and historicity since it "has at
once something that exceeds the literary, a narrative form and a pointed,
referential access to what lies beyond or beneath that form" (7). Greenblatt
asserts that his method starts with an example or anecdote to show that history
is also a narrative discourse and not a number of fixed events. His
concentration on anecdote as a method underscores, as Claire Colebrook
explains in her book New Literary Histories: New Historicism and
Contemporary Criticism (1997), "the difference and contingency at
work in the stories which circulate at any historical moment" (216). In the
second chapter of his book
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Practicing New Historicism, Greenblatt concludes that
the use of anecdotes as a first step of his analytic method presents "an escape
from conventional canonicity and a revival of the canon, both a transgression
against the domestic and a safe return to it" (47). In simpler terms,
anecdote presents a midway between the fictitious dimension of
literature and the "touch of the real"1. It helps the author to
liberate himself from the strict aestheticism through studying freely and
directly the different historical and social issues that were not examined by
the canonic classical literature. In his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning
(1980), Greenblatt starts with the concept of anecdote
to analyze the Shakespearian Iago's "improvisation of power"2.
He uses "an incident recounted in 1525 by Peter Martyr in the seventh decade of
De orbe novo" (226). This incident shows how the Spanish invaders used
the native's cosmological and mythical beliefs to convince them to be slaves.
The use of this anecdote as a starting point to reach a full
understanding of the way Iago used his intellectual power to manipulate Othello
leads us to deal with another fundamental element of new historicism, which is
intertextuality.
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