Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :Practicing New Historicism
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….There has been in effect a social rebellion in the study of culture, so that figures hitherto kept outside the proper circles of interest…have now forced their way in, or rather have been invited in by our generation of critics.
When we think of culture as a text, it makes our job as literary critics so much more interesting. That’s because we then open up all aspects of culture for literary analysis. We don’t have to confine ourselves to just analyzing Shakespeare
and John Milton and Geoffrey Chaucer and all those other literary bigwigs (and let’s be honest: we sometimes get tired of reading those bigwigs).
When we think of culture as a text, we free ourselves to analyze some random writer that no one’s thought about for, like, 400 years. We can analyze food recipes or football games or historical documents from a literary angle.
And what’s good about this approach is that it challenges the really “uppity” view of culture that nothing is worth paying attention to unless it’s high culture. You know: it’s all worthless unless it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, or art house films.
Which is not cool.
Because what if we really love Rihanna and want to write about her music videos, or other similar things? Or what if we love The Twilight Saga (or hate it) and want to write about that? Why can’t we?
Well, today’s your lucky day, because you can. Because these “non-canonical” and “nonliterary” texts also have a lot to teach us about the culture that produced them. Because yes, a Rihanna music video can be analyzed as a text from a New Historicist perspective—just as Twilight can have swaths of lit crit writ about it).
Also note that here Greenblatt and Gallagher are giving a shout-out to Clifford Geertz, who, you might remember, is the anthropologist who came up with the idea of “culture as text.” Greenblatt and Gallagher are directly referencing Geertz’s ideas here, even if they all came before Twilight.
Greenblatt and Gallagher are also outlining one of the defining characteristics of the New Historicist approach—the tendency to mix it all up by throwing together all kinds of texts, such as canonical with non-canonical, literary with non-literary, you name it.
Quote :Practicing New Historicism
One of the recurrent criticisms of new historicism is that it is insufficiently theorized. The criticism is certainly just, and yet it seems curiously out of touch with 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. We speculated about first principles and respected the firmer theoretical commitments of other members of our discussion group, but both of us were and remain deeply skeptical of the notion that we should formulate an abstract system and then apply it to literary works. We doubt that it is possible to construct such a system independent of our own time and place and of the particular objects by which we are interested.
What these two are saying is that we New Historicists have a very a conflicted relationship to theory. On the one hand, we draw a lot of inspiration from theoretical works (like those of Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault). But on the other hand, we don’t like theory very much because it’s kind of rude to the whole cultural focus we try to have, so we aim to do without it when we analyze literary works.
The reason we try to resist theory is because we believe that we can’t just come up with one theory that can apply to any text. It’s like sewing a dress in one size and then expecting it to fit bodies of all different shapes. Um, no.
And anyway, any theory we come up with is going to be limited in perspective. That’s because we, as literary critics, are the product of a certain culture and a certain historical moment. We can’t escape the fact that we’re living in a specific time and place (21st century America), and whatever theory we come up with is also going to be limited by the time and place that we’re living in.
Here, Gallagher and Greenblatt are outlining New Historicism’s very complicated relationship to theory. These critics are not too crazy about being characterized as “theorists” because they think that theory doesn’t always get us very far in understanding literary works.
And what’s also important about Gallagher and Greenblatt’s statement is that they’re calling attention to their own situation as literary critics. They’re very aware of the fact that they’re the product of a certain set of historical circumstances, just like the Renaissance authors they study have their own, much puffier-sleeved version of circumstances. And G & G believe that they can’t escape their own location in a specific culture and/or historical moment, just like the Renaissancers couldn’t.