Circulating Representations
New Historicism and the Poetics of Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4387526 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Prendergast (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 90 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3685421 |
| OpenAlex | W2094624679 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
NEW HISTORICISM, LIKE ALL THE OTHER ISMS of our time, has rapidly become a catch-word, a label, under which the heterogeneous is re-packaged and marketed as the more or less homogeneous. The intellectual reality of in fact discloses a variety of sins or virtues or a mix of both depending on one's point of view (the points of view themselves of course vary in that from its inception to the present New Historicism has been an object of fierce and continuing controversy). For example, in the very fine book by Graham Bradshaw on Shakespeare, we will find, convincingly demonstrated, fundamental differences, at least in the case of Shakespearean interpretation, between American (as instantiated by the work of Stephen Greenblatt) and British (as instantiated by the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield). Bradshaw, quite rightly in my view, sustains a respectful dialogue with Greenblatt (whose work he simultaneously admires and disagrees with), while reserving for the British scholars a disdain verging on contempt for their wilful dogmatism and polemical straw men, and above all and paradoxically, for their radical inability to think in a genuinely historical way at the very moment they speak in the name of History -for instance, by ripping speeches out of context as if they were embodiments of Shakespeare's own views, and thus perpetrating the gravest error of all: namely, systematic disregard of the elementary point that any historicizing of Shakespeare must attend to the generic and structural realities of what Bradshaw calls dramatic thinking. Dramatic thinking is a particular modality of thought (just as poetic and philosophical thinking are), a perspectival mode in which a speech is relativized not simply to a point of view (that of the speaking character) but also to its place in the temporal unfolding of the play. How the generic and structural temporalities of thinking relate to the conditions of a wider history is exactly the task in hand. To short-circuit that inquiry in a crude reduction of texts to symptomatic ideology is a travesty of anything that might productively be
Aesthetics · Art · Historicism · Literature · New Historicism · Poetics · Poetry · Irish and British Studies · Philippine History and Culture
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2013 (10) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |