Comrades:

Michel Foucault

I know you've heard about this guy—he's one powerful dude. Speaking of which, that's totally his favorite subject: he pretty much wrote the book—well, many books—on power structures throughout history.

I'm way into Michel's concept of épistèmes, or the social-historical-political systems or paradigms that run the show from behind the scenes at any given time. For example, evolutionary biology could be considered an épistème behind much of modern medicine.

Basically, since I'm all about figuring out the historical context behind a work of literature, I couldn't do better than lean on the work of this dude.

Funnily enough, my most successful work, Swerve: How the World Became Modern (it even snagged a Pulitzer Prize), is deeply indebted to Foucault but never mentions him once. Like, zero times. Oops.

Harold Aram Veeser

Good old Harry helped launch New Historicism back in the day by editing The New Historicism, a collection of essays with contributions from biggies like Hayden White and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It really got the conversation going, and it set New Historicism up as a pretty solid contender in the theory death-matches of the 90s. Love this guy.

Catherine Gallagher

Catherine and I wrote a book together, and it's kind of a big deal. It's pretty much a how-to manual for anyone with a hankering to test their New Historicist chops.

I cannot express to you just how important this is to me, because the one thing I keep trying to express to people is that New Historicism is a method, not a doctrine. I'm not about pushing beliefs; it's all about doing good work. Well, what I think of as good work, anyway.

Alan Liu

So, I'm all up on the Renaissance, and Alan's more into the Romantics. I want to tell you about him, anyway. Not only are we both super into New Historicism; we're also super not into calling what we do "New Historicism." Yeah, yeah: I know I invented the whole thing, but the name "New Historicism" has got too much baggage, too many misconceptions... and, honestly, it's not very elegant. 

But whatevs, man. We've got archives to visit.

Rivals:

Carl Rapp

Insufferable. This guy is all about giving New Historicists a bad rap. Basically, Rapp thinks we think too much of ourselves. As in, he thinks that all we want is to give ourselves pats on the back for being aware of our own biases.

To be fair, Rapp is not a cheap-shots kind of guy. He did, however, write a book that tries to take the wind out of the sails not just of New Historicism but also of other postmodern trends like deconstruction and pragmatism.

Harold Bloom

So, Bloom is a BIG NAME in lit crit (even though most other literary critics hate him), and his big beef with me and mine is that we value cultural artifacts like letters, newspapers, and other non-literary documents too highly. It's the old you've made literature a footnote to history! argument.

I think Bloom should just relax. We're just trying to situate literature in its larger historical framework, after all. That doesn't mean literature isn't awesome; it just means we think that the other stuff were doing and thinking about back in the day was super cool, too, and can probably tell us a lot about the literature that was written back then.

Camille Paglia

This lady sure knows how to throw down. Harold Bloom was her mentor at Yale, but she's no fan of New Historicism. Just look at the kinds of things she says about it:

New Historicism [...] seems to be a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science... At its best, in Stephen Greenblatt, it is still too bright, crisp, clean, too dressed-for-success. As a student at Yale, Greenblatt had available as models two brilliant exemplars of his own spiritual tradition, the ascetic, poetic Geoffrey Hartman and the turbulent, brooding Harold Bloom. But Greenblatt's books, waving vaguely from a distance at Sixties ideas, go the old bland WASP route, where nothing is actually personally risked or exposed. There is no passion or suffering, no deep learning. (Source)

What Paglia is a fan of I can't quite fathom. She's super flashy for an academic, so I try—I try really hard—not to let her Meanie McMeanerson words sting too much.

Jean-François Lyotard & Fredric Jameson

There's not much love lost between the three of us, and Jean-François and Fredric think that I'm the one who picked a fight. I'm not really angling for a conflict, though; what I'm really interested in is looking at how we differ from each other, since the three of us have similar historicist-y impulses. My main problem is that I think both these guys use history to support one overarching, theoretical viewpoint that they decided on before they even looked at the facts.

Lyotard and Jameson both come at capitalism from different angles: Lyotard sees it as something that creates a false unity that erases many important voices, while Jameson sees it as something that creates many fake voices to keep us from connecting.

Me, though? I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa: capitalism is complicated, dudes. It's like, don't just decide that there's one big idea controlling everything. Instead, let's break it down. Let's look at the contradictions in each moment and movement of history.