Lkgal history and intellectual history New Historicism is not as novel as its name suggests (or as some of its adherents contend); in several respects, it resembles other approaches already discussed. Like the Textualists, the New Historicists tend to be highly sensitive to the ambiguity of all texts, their susceptibility to multiple readings. Also like the Textualists, they typically adopt a staunchly (even obsessively) antifoundational posture when reading documents; they insist that “we have no access to a full and authentic past ... unmediated by the surviving textual traces of [our own] society.”-*^ All history is perspectival; its “factuality” is an illusion.^° Like the Contextualists (and unlike the Textualists), the New Historicists are intensely interested in the cultural and ideological settings of all texts - their relationships to “contemporaneous social institutions and nondiscursive practices.”^' Three aspects of the NewHistoricists’ methodology, however, are genuinely novel. The first pertains to the kinds of material they deem worthy of analysis. While the Textualists typically concentrate on “great” or canonical texts (read noncanonically) and while the Contextualists typically seek to identify the common themes and assumptions in the writings of the members of a discursive community (and then interpret individual texts in light of those assumptions), the NewHistoricists typically focus on small events or anecdotes (often ones they have discovered serendipitously) that they believe are suggestive of the “behavioral codes, logics, and motive forces controlling a whole society.”-^- These suggestive anecdotes or “historemes” typically bridge the worlds of literature and history; each has “something literary about it, but ... is nevertheless directly pointed towards or rooted in the real.”^-^ Second, NewHistoricists are as much concerned with the ways that texts inflncnce their cultural contexts as they are with the ways texts are shaped by 35 Louis B. Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance,” in H. AramVeeser, ed.. The New Historicistn (NewYork; Routledge, 1989), 20. Ibid., 23, 29-30; Marjorie Garber, “Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History,” in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds.. The Historical Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 79-103; R. B. Kershner, “Dances with Historians,” The Georgia Review45 (1991); 584. This conviction helps explain the New Historicists’ irritatingly self-critical pose; they regularly insist that all their analyses are necessarily partial; that “every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.” Veeser, supra n. 29, xi Montrose, supra n. 29, 17. See also Kershner, supra n. 30, 584. -U Veeser, supra n. 29, xi. ’’ Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in Veeser, supra n. 29, 56-57. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, begins each chapter of his two books with an evocative anecdote. See Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From Rome to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988). Similarly, in a recent essay, Grecnblatt employs an evocative account of a walk to Nevada Falls in Yosemite National Park as the vehicle for a sweeping analysis of the relationship between art and capitalism. “Towards a Poetics of Culture, “ in Veeser, supra n. 29, 9 ff.
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