The political wisdom of cultural poetics

Modern Philology

Volumn 93, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 423-441

  Hall, Anne D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249236792     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/392338     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. For criticism of Greenblatt's historical model, there are many places to turn. Carolyn Porter maintains that power should be historicized more precisely by an analysis of institutions ("Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87 [1988]: 743-86).
2. Others have objected to the arbitrariness of the representative anecdote: see Jean Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," ELR 16 (1986): 13-43, esp. 38;
3. and Walter Cohen, "Political Criticism of Shakespeare," in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London, 1987), pp. 18-46.
4. David Myers objects to the grounding of arguments about culture in personal aesthetic responses ("The New Historicism in Literary Studies," Academic Questions 2 [1988-89]: 27-36).
5. Myers stands out for his attempt to criticize the method at ground level rather than fine-tuning its history. On this score, see also Frank Lentricchia, "Foucault's Legacy - New Historicism?" in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York, 1989), pp. 231-42;
6. Richard Levin, "Unthinkable Thoughts in the New Historicizing of English Renaissance Drama," New Literary History 21 (1990): 435-47;
7. and Anne Barton, "Perils of Historicism," review of Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, by Stephen J. Greenblatt, New York Review of Books 38, no. 6 (March 28, 1991): 53-56.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1980), p. 48.
9. Ibid., p. 31.
10. Ibid., p. 44.
11. Ibid., p. 33.
12. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago and London, 1980), p. 74.
13. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 66 ff.
14. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and London, 1990), pp. 59 ff.
15. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), p. 86.
16. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 136.
17. Ibid., p. 177; emphasis in original.
18. Ibid., p. 94.
19. Ibid., pp. 96-97.
20. Quoted in Ernest Gellner, "The Stakes in Anthropology," American Scholar 57 (1988): 29.
21. For an excellent discussion of anthropology as a mixture of discourses, see Thomas Dezengotita, "Speakers of Being: Romantic Refusion and Cultural Anthropology," in Romantic Motives: Essays in Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George Stocking (Madison, Wis., 1989), pp. 74-123.
22. On the embarrassed self-reflexivity of New Historicists, see Alan Liu, "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELH 56 (1989): 721-71.
23. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (n. 6 above), p. 113.
24. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (n. 7 above), pp. 3, 19.
25. Ibid., p. 175, n. 65; emphasis added.
26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in The Basic Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1987), bk. 2, chap. 7, p. 165.
27. W. H. Auden, "In Praise of Limestone," lines 69-70, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, 1976), p. 415.
28. Borrowed by Greenblatt from Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in Marvelous Possessions (n. 9 above), p. 46.
29. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 45.
30. Ibid., pp. 49-50.
31. Thomas Mann: "By bourgeois tradition I mean the values of culture, enlightenment, humanity, in short of such dreams as the uplifting of the people through scientific civilization" (Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkün as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter [New York, 1948], p. 365).