Pretending to be real: Stephen Greenblatt and the legacy of popular existentialism

New Literary History

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 491-519

  Stevens, Paul ^a  

^a QUEEN S UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950198381     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2002.0026     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. "Greenblatt named University Professor, " Harvard College Gazette, November 2000, p. 2; hereafter cited in text
2. David Norbrook, "Kaddish at Elsinore, " New Republic, 23 July 2001, p. 43
3. Stephen Greenblatt, "Racial Memory and Literary History, " PMLA, 116 (2001), 48-49
4. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980); hereafter cited in text as RS
5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978)
6. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago, 1980)
7. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca. N.Y., 1981)
8. and Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford, 1983)
9. Stephen Greenblatt. introduction to "The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance." Genre, 15 (1982). 1-4
10. According to Louis Montrose ("Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture, " in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser [NewYork, 1989], p. 32)
11. although the term "new historicism" was first introduced into Renaissance studies by Michael McCanles in "The Authentic Discourse of the Renaissance, " Diacritics, 10 (1980), 77-87, it was Greenblatt's use of the term in the Genre article that gave it its contemporary currency. Ironically, for Lentricchia writing in 1980
12. "What Foucault calls 'effective history, ' then, is not a new historicism" (After the New Criticism p. 210)
13. For early accounts of new historicism's relation to poststructuralim, see, for exanrple, Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies, " English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 13-43
14. and Alan Liu, "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism, " ELH, 56 (1989), 721-71
15. See Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature (New Haven, 1990), pp. 32-59
16. and In Plato's Cave (New Haven, 1999), pp. 108-18, 274-75, 292-93; hereafter cited in text as PC
17. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York, 1990), p. 4; further references to Learningto Curse are from the 1992 edition unless noted otherwise; hereafter cited in text as LC
18. David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (London, 1975), pp. 173. 175
19. Compare also Peter Dale Scott, "For Stephen Greenblatt." Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (New York, 1992), pp. 121-25
20. Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama, " PMLA, 102 (1987), 294, 300
21. Frank Lentricchia. Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison, Wis., 1988), p. 100
22. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N. C., 1991), pp. 188-89; hereafter cited in text as P
23. Anne Barton. "The Perils of Historicism, " The New York Review of Books. 28 March 1991, p. 53
24. John Lee. "The Man Who Mistook His Hat: Stephen Greenblatt and the Anecdote." Essays in Criticism, 45 (1995), 285-300; hereafter cited in text as MH
25. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London, 1985); hereafter cited in text
26. Compare Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978; rpt. New York, 1996), pp. 3-4
27. See Essays in Criticism, 48 (1998), 290
28. These differences make Lee's error all the more ironic. While Lee had Greenblatt's text in front of him, Greenblatt had to remember the note card from thousands of miles away; similarly, while Lee is absolute for accuracy, Greenblatt makes it clear that neither the vagueness of the note card nor the accuracy of his own recollection is central to his point about resonance: "If this miniature history of an artifact is too vague to be of much consequence ... it nevertheless evokes a vision of cultural production that I find compelling" (Learning to Curse [1990], p. 161)
29. Compare Bakhtin's observation that "the word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word" (The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin, 1981], p. 280)
30. and Lynne Magnusson's extensive discussion of it in Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge, 1999)
31. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, " in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971)
32. rpt. in Dan Latimer, ed., Contemporary Critical Theory (New York, 1989), pp. 61-102
33. John Milton, The Reason of Church-Government (1642)
34. rpt. in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, 1957), p. 680
35. Stephen Greenblatt, "The Inevitable Pit, " London Review of Books, 21 September 2000, pp. 8-12; hereafter cited in text as IP
36. Our sharpest images of what these thinkers were talking about were derived from Albert Camus's novels" (In Plato's Cave, p. 98)
37. On Greenblatt's reading of Foucault, see Suzanne Gearhart, "The Taming of Michel Foucault: New Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and the Subversion of Power, " New Literary History, 28 (1997), 457-80
38. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, 1973), p. 13; hereafter cited in text as WR
39. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, and Humanism, tr. Philip Mairet (1948; rpt. London, 1960), pp. 28-30
40. Alvin B. Kernan, introduction to Man and His Fictions: An Introduction to Fiction-Making, Its Forms and Uses. ed. Alvin B. Kernan, Peter Brooks, and J. Michael Holquist (New York. 1973), p. 10
41. Michel Foucault. "What is an Author?" in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979)
42. rpt. in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), p. 102, my emphasis; hereafter cited in text as WA
43. Dominick La Capra, "On the Line: Between History and Criticism, " Profession 89 (1989), 7
44. Adam Begley, "The Tempest around Stephen Greenblatt, " New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1993, p. 38
45. Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (New Haven. 1965), p. 109; hereafter cited in text as TMS
46. Alvin Keman. The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, 1959), p. 47; hereafter cited in text as CM
47. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London, 1998), p. 57
48. Alvin Kernan. "The Plays and the Playwrights, " in The Revets History of Drama in English ed. Clifford Leech and T. W. Craik (London, 1975), vol. 3. p. 247; hereafter cited in text as PP
49. According to James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York. 1993), p. 246, Foucault started teaching at Berkeley in the spring of 1975
50. Louis Althusser's most influential work Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays was published in English in 1971, Foucault's Madness and, Civilization in 1965. The Order of Things1970, Archeology of Knowledge 1972, Birth of the Clinic 1973, Discipline and Punish 1977, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 1977, The History of Sexuality 1978, and "What is an Author?" 1979
51. It is also clear that most critics in the seventies and early eighties were not looking for the gradual reconstitution of the self in Foucault perceived by, among others, Miller, Passion of Michel Foucault, pp. 319-53
52. Gearhart, "The Taming of Michel Foucault, " and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 488-90
53. Stephen J. Greenblatt, "Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism, " Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978). 291-307; rpt. in Learning to Curse
54. Compare Miller, Passion, pp. 37-45
55. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York. 1972), p. 12; hereafter cited in text as AK
56. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, 1992), p. 275
57. Greenblatt's essay "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion" has been reprinted many times. Up to 1988 there were four versions - in Glyph, 8 (1981). 40-61; hereafter cited in text as IB
58. also in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 18-47
59. hereafter cited in text as PS; Shakespeare's "Rough Magic": Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark, 1985), pp. 276-302
60. and Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 21-65; hereafter cited in text as SN
61. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966), in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (London, 1978), pp. 280-81: hereafter cited in text as SSP
62. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (1949; rpt. London, 1966), p. 273; hereafter cited in text
63. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977); quotation from The Foucault Reader p. 230
64. Compare In Plato's Cave, pp. 98-99
65. and "The Plays and the Playwrights, " pp. 372-83
66. There are of course many Foucaults: Gearhart, for instance, draws a distinction between the Foucault of The History of Sexuality and the Foucault of the earlier work, and "nowhere in his work is Foucault further from the new historicists than in The History of Sexuality, where the subject becomes the ultimate fashioner or creator of his own being'" ("The Taming of Michel Foucault, " 476)
67. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, 2001), p. 254; hereafter cited in text as HP
68. Stephen Greenblatt, "What is the History of Literature?" Critical Inquiry, 23 (1997), 478; hereafter cited in text as WHL
69. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), p. 1; hereafter cited in text as MP
70. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, tr. Harry Zolin, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1988), pp. 86-87
71. For more on the political rhetoric of paradox, see Paul Stevens, "The Political Ways of Paradox: Renaissance Literature and Modern Criticism, " English Literary Renaissance, 26 (1996), 203-24
72. Roberto Echevarria, in "Imagining Christopher Columbus, " The New York Times Book Review, 16 Februar)' 1992, p. 23
73. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (1896), rpt. in The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York, 1959), p. 222
74. Compare Paul Stevens, '"Leviticus Thinking' and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism, " Criticism, 35 (1993), 441-61
75. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), p. 8
76. Thomas More, The Supplication of Souls, qtd. in Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 150
77. This argument is more fully developed in Paul Stevens, "Milton's Nationalism and the Rights of Memory, " in Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton, ed. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (New York, forthcoming)
78. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet (1952)
79. qtd. in Alvin B. Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare's Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven, 1979), p. 146