New historicism: Postmodern historiography between narrativism and heterology

History and Theory

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 21-38

  Pieters, Jurgen ^a  

^a GHENT UNIVERSITY   (Belgium)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0039146675     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00111     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Catherine Belsey, "Making Histories Then and Now," in The Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance, ed. F. Barker, P. Hulme, and M. Iverson (Manchester. Eng., 1991), 29
2. A fairly comprehensive survey of the discussion and further bibliographical references can be found in John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (London, 1998).
3. For Greenblatt's own comments upon the swift institutionalization of the term see Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York, 1990), 146.
4. Cf. Frank Ankersmit, "Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis," History and Theory 34 (1995), 144
5. Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London and New York, 1957).
6. The terminological problem can be solved, along the lines of Frank Ankersmit's suggestion (Frank Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value [Stanford, 1996], 375-376), by applying the concept of "historicism" to the work of Hegel and his like, and to label that of Ranke and his successors "historism. "
7. See also Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1983)
8. Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis: Over interpretatie, representatie en historische realiteit (Groningen, 1990), 127-148
9. Ankersmit, "Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis," 143-162
10. and Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London and New York, 1996), passim. Seen from Ankersmit's angle, it would be more logical and appropriate to label Greenblatt's practice "new historist" rather than "new historicist."
11. For further reading materials on the subject see also Ankersmit's "bibliographical essay" in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (London, 1995), 278-283
12. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 164
13. and also Frank Ankersmit, "The Origins of Postmodernist Historiography," in Historiography between Modernism and Postmodernism: Contributions to the Methodology of the Historical Research, ed. Jerzy Topolski (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1994), 90
14. White offers a good survey of Ranke's "historism" (in Metahistory, 163-190, as does Iggers, German Conception, 63-89)
15. and opposes it to Hegel's philosophy (Metahistory, 81-131)
16. For a further contrastive treatment see Pieter Geyl, Gebruik en misbruik der geschiedenis (Groningen and Djakarta 1956), 31, and Iggers, German Conception, 66-67.
17. See, for example, Pieter Geyl, From Ranke to Toynbee: Five Lectures on Historians and Historiographical Problems (Northampton, Mass., 1952)
18. Pieter Geyl, Geschiedenis als medespeler (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1958), 9-25.
19. Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis, 127-148; Ankersmit, "Origins of Postmodernist Historiography"; Ankersmit "Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis"
20. and Ankersmit, "Reply to Professor Iggers," History and Theory 34 (1995), 168-173.
21. Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis, 138, 131.
22. Frank Ankersmit, History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, 1994), 126.
23. In this, Greenblatt adopts Machiavelli's famous dictum (from the Discorsi) in considering historical practice as a dialogue with the dead. (See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England [Berkeley, 1988], 1. )
24. History and Theory 34 (1995), 143-162
25. followed by a reply by Georg Iggers, "Comments on F. R. Ankersmit's paper: 'Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis,'" History and Theory 34 (1995), 162-167
26. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel Darmstadt, 1994), 80-99
27. Ankersmit, "Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis," 154.
28. Ankersmit, "Historicism: An Attempt at Synthesis," 155.
29. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 3.
30. Foucault's example crops up more than once in Ankersmit's treatment of narrativist historicism. See, for example, Ankersmit, De navel van de geschiedenis, 63ff. and Aesthetic Politics, 96-136
31. Michel de Certeau, L'Ecriture de l'histoire (Paris, 1975), 22.
32. I intend to elaborate this part of my argument in the larger project of which this article is a part.
33. On this point see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 2.
34. In this respect, Greenblatt's idea of self-fashioning could be profitably brought in line with Foucault's analysis of the rise of theories of "governmentality" in the early-modern period. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits (Paris, 1994), III, 635-657
35. See Lawrence Grossberg, "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall," in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York, 1996), 141
36. Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago and London, 1995), 225
37. For a thorough treatment of this aspect of Greenblatt's practice, see Joel Fineman's contribution to The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London and New York, 1989)
38. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London, 1980), 222-254.
39. Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London and New York, 1987), 34
40. Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du Discours (Paris. 1971), 39
41. Jacques Duval, Des Hermaphrodits, Accouchemens des Femmes, et Traitement qui est requis pour les releuer en santé, et bien eleuer leurs enfants (Rouen, 1603)
42. Aristotle, The "Art" of Rhetoric, with an English translation by John Henry Freese (London and Cambridge, Mass. , 1947), 475.
43. Von Humboldt defines living language (speech) as "Energeia," not "Ergon" (work). (Von Humboldt, Schriften zur Sprachphilosophie, 418.)
44. Stephen Greenblatt, "The Touch of the Real," Representations 59 (1997), 14-29.
45. Certeau, The Writing of History, transl. Tom Conley (New York, 1988), xxvii, his italics
46. One is devoted to Les Mots et les choses ("Le noir soleil du langage: Michel Foucault," in Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction, ed. L. Giard [Paris, 1987], 15-36)
47. Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction, 55-57.
48. Certeau, L'Ecriture de l histoire, 58.
49. Cf. Certeau, L'Ecriture de l histoire, 19-20
50. In Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 161-183.
51. In The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, 56
52. Roland Barthes, "L'effet de réel," in idem, Le bruissement de la langue (Paris, 1984)
53. see also Ankersmit, History and Tropology, 125-161.
54. The same ambivalence, so I have argued in another place (Jürgen Pieters, "Facing History, or the Anxiety of Reading: Holbein's 'The Ambassadors' according to Greenblatt and Lyotard," in Literature and History, ed. Tamsin Spargo [Houndmills, Eng., forthcoming]) comes to light in a confrontation between Greenblatt's concept of the "dialogue with the dead" and his analysis of Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors" in Renaissance Self-Fashioning
55. Greenblatt "The Touch of the Real," 27.