STEPHEN GREENBLATT, NEW HISTORICISM, AND CULTURAL HISTORY, OR, WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT INTERDISCIPLINARITY

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH MAZA
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
Historical Practices

Michael Warner, a literary critic with a keen sense of history, wrote in 1987 that “New Historicism is a label that historians don't like very much because they understand something different by historicism. But nobody's asking historians….” This essay is an answer to questions nobody asked me, questions about interdisciplinarity and the differences between literary critical and historical practices. A return to historically informed literary criticism, which many critics still consider a dominant trend in the profession, emerged in the early 1980s following the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980). Reacting as it did against the decontextualized abstractions of New Criticism and Deconstruction, the movement soon labeled New Historicism sought to breathe new life into canonical texts by relating them to non-literary texts and social practices of their day. This historicist inclination should have formed the basis for a coming together of the movement's practitioners with historians interested in literary representations. But no such merger has occurred: New Historicists evince little interest in the systematic, archivally based study of history, and historians have at best shown indifference to the work of Greenblatt and his followers.

scholarly journals New Formalism in the Classroom: Re-Forming Epic Poetry in Wordsworth and Blake

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 100
Author(s):  
Matthew Leporati
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Teaching Literature ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Response To Literature ◽  
Canonical Texts

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in “New Formalism,” a close attention to textual language and structure that departs from the outdated and regressive stances of old formalisms (especially “New Criticism”) by interrogating the connections between form, history, and culture. This article surveys the contributions of New Formalism to Romanticism studies and applies its techniques to two canonical texts, suggesting that New Formalism is useful both for literary criticism and teaching literature. Opening with a survey of New Formalist theory and practices, and an overview of the theoretical innovations within New Formalism that have been made by Romantic scholars, the article applies New Formalist techniques to William Wordsworth’s Prelude and William Blake’s Milton: a Poem. Often read as poems seeking to escape the dispiriting failure of the French Revolution, these texts, I argue, engage the formal strategies of epic poetry to enter the discourse of the period, offering competing ways to conceive of the self in relation to history. Written during the Romantic epic revival, when more epics were composed than at any other time in history, these poems’ allusive dialogue with Paradise Lost and with the epic tradition more broadly allows them to think through the self’s relationship to the past, a question energized by the Revolution Controversy. I explore how Wordsworth uses allusion to link himself to Milton and ultimately Virgil, both privileging the past and thereby asserting the value of the present as a means of reiterating and restoring it; Blake, in contrast, alludes to Milton to query the very idea of dependence on the past. These readings are intertwined with my experiences of teaching, as I have employed New Formalism to encourage students to develop as writers in response to texts. An emphasis on form provides students with concrete modes of entry into discussing literature and allows instructors to help students identify and revise the forms and structures of their own writing in response to literature.

Epilogue: Between Immersion and Critique – Thoughtful Reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 232-237
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Normal Science ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
The Third ◽  
Important Message ◽  
Fredric Jameson

Let’s take a step back. In the introduction, I sought to demonstrate some of the ways in which formalism has become instinctive in literary criticism, using several different genealogies. The first briefly surveyed some current thinkers, including Franco Moretti, Caroline Levine, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, who assert that formalism is constitutive of literary study and a distillation of the best elements of its scholarly history. The second looked at how formalism had emerged as a contrast to methods based on reading for the content and ideas of literary texts, considering first a trajectory up to the New Criticism and Cleanth Brooks’s diagnosis of the heresy of paraphrase and subsequently an arc away from it, one through Fredric Jameson and Jacques Derrida that maintained the suspicion of literary content. And the third looked at the scholarship that formed the ‘ethical turn’, which similarly refused to read for the moral thought in literature, preferring to emphasise the ethical effects of form. All the while, though, there has been a sort of normal science of literary criticism that largely refused the insistence on form and was willing to let its scholarship rest with attempts to bring authors into conversation with issues that the critics cared about. That school of criticism has never received the dignity of a formal title, and I concluded by suggesting that it deserved one. Moreover, I argued, the moral thought in Victorian narratives offered a useful example in this regard, since it is a literary tradition deeply concerned with communicating an important message, and subsequent traditions in moral philosophy offer useful resources for clarifying the ideas such authors had....

The Life and Travels of Xavier Marmier (1808-1892)

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy S Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
History Of ◽  
Headline News

This is the first critical biography of Xavier Marmier. The celebrity of Marmier was such that his death made headline news in most major newspapers in France. Marmier earned his reputation by being a traveller, travel writer, translator, literary critic, comparatist, journalist, novelist, poet, lecturer, linguist, ethnologist, social historian, and latterly as an outspoken member of the Académie Française. His work had a great deal of influence, both direct and indirect, on literary and intellectual developments in France, and also had a significant impact in a number of the countries he visited. Although his name still figures in studies of comparative literature or the history of travel writing, Marmier's innovations have gradually been eclipsed by his successors in various fields, resulting in the neglect of his overall achievements. Marmier's numerous and diverse achievements are assessed in their intellectual and historical context, and within the framework of his colourful and somewhat controversial private life. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of the history of nineteenth-century French literature and intellectual life, the history of literary criticism, travel writing, the introduction of foreign literature to France, and those with an interest in the intellectual, social, and cultural history of the regions Marmier visited.

scholarly journals NEW MATERIALISM: PROJECTIONS INTO LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-159
Author(s):  
Mariya Shymchyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Literary Theory And Criticism

The article considers the recent (re)turn to materiality in philosophy and theory, in particular, such schools as speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy. They offer rethinking of objects and criticism of anthropocentric worldview. The attention to materiality privileges matter, body, and nature. Theorists of New materialism reject the binary oppositions (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, etc.) and insist on intra-action as a new materialist orientation. The author argues that the new materialist critique of conventional critique will be useful for literary theory and criticism. According to Latour, critique should be productive and collaborative. As far as critical judgments rely on thelogic of representation that in its turn is based on similarity, analogy and opposition they restrict the analytic enterprise. Moreover, it is necessary to rethink conventional practices of interpretation and explanation. In this context, K. Barad proposes to substitute these strategies with the practice of ‘diffraction’. In the second part of the article, the author analyzes Graham Harman’s article The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:Object-Oriented Literary Criticism. We pay attention to Harman’s critique of New Criticism, New Historicism, and Deconstruction in their contrast to object-oriented philosophy. In his analysis of New Criticism, Harman figures out the taxonomic fallacy within this theory. He argues against the idea that only poetry has all the non-prose sense while other disciplines have the literal sense. His second argument against New Criticism problematizes the unity of all the elementsin a literary work. Harman outlines the assumptions of New Historicism and points out that it turns everything into interrelated influences. Instead, he argues that contextuality is not universal. In his criticism of Deconstruction Harman underlines that Derrida wrongly believes that ontological realism automatically entails an epistemological realism. In his turn, Harman insists that the thing is deeper than its interactions are.

John Crowe Ransom

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Kieran Quinlan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Robert Penn Warren ◽  
Allen Tate ◽  
Founding Editor ◽  
John Crowe Ransom ◽  
Essential Knowledge ◽  
The University ◽  
Vanderbilt University

John Crowe Ransom (b. 30 April 1888–d. 3 July 1974) was an American poet, Southern Agrarian, literary critic, and editor of the Kenyon Review, arguably the most influential “little magazine” of the mid-20th century. Educated at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Ransom began writing poetry as a member of the Fugitive group that included Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and had its own short-lived magazine in the early 1920s. Most of the poems on which his reputation rests—often on love or death, never long, sometimes quirky, and with intermittent archaic wording—are to be found in Chills and Fever (1924) and Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927). Ransom won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1951 and the National Book Award for his Selected Poems in 1964. Following their Fugitive period, Ransom and his associates moved on to become Agrarians, arguing in their 1930 I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition that the South’s distinctive characteristic was its agrarian culture, separating it from both the capitalist industrial North and Soviet Communism. As an English professor at Vanderbilt where historical studies of literary texts took precedence, Ransom argued and eventually won the cause of the literary critic, a victory that over time changed the hierarchies in the profession at large. The text itself, its structures and images and their complex interrelationship, was what was most important. His 1941 volume of theoretical essays, The New Criticism, made Ransom the quasi founding father—there were many others—of a movement that would dominate the academy for the next three decades. Always fascinated by, but wary of, the sciences as their place within the university increased exponentially, Ransom sought over and over to define the kind of supplementary but equally essential knowledge that poetry offered. As founding editor of the Kenyon Review in 1939 and director of the Kenyon School of English, Ransom exercised enormous influence on both the teaching of literature at American colleges and universities, and on several emerging poets and novelists, most notably Robert Lowell. By the mid-1960s, however, many of Ransom’s critical and social positions had come under challenge, as has his status as a “major minor poet” in several recent critiques. Nevertheless, current studies are also finding overlooked fissures in his poems, and, in the age of digitized textuality, fresh inspiration in his Agrarian and New Critical forays.

TRANSLATION AS MENTAL INTERPRETATION ACTIVITY IN LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (28) ◽  
pp. 43-53
Author(s):  
Svitlana Gruschko
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Dimension ◽  
Cultural Communication ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Cross Cultural Communication ◽  
Cross Language

In the article the phenomenon of translation is regarded as mental interpretation activity not only in linguistics, but also in literary criticism. The literary work and its translation are most vivid guides to mental and cultural life of people, an example of intercultural communication. An adequate perception of non-native culture depends on communicators’ general fund of knowledge. The essential part of such fund of knowledge is native language, and translation, being a mediator, is a means of cross-language and cross-cultural communication. Mastering another language through literature, a person is mastering new world and its culture. The process of literary texts’ translation requires language creativity of the translator, who becomes so-called “co-author” of the work. Translation activity is a result of the interpreter’s creativity and a sort of language activity: language units are being selected according to language units of the original text. This kind of approach actualizes linguistic researching of real translation facts: balance between language and speech units of the translated work (i.e. translationinterpretation, author’s made-up words, or revised language peculiarities of the characters). The process of literary translation by itself should be considered within the dimension of a dialogue between cultures. Such a dialogue takes place in the frame of different national stereotypes of thinking and communicational behavior, which influences mutual understanding between the communicators with the help of literary work being a mediator. So, modern linguistics actualizes the research of language activities during the process of literary work’s creating. This problem has to be studied furthermore, it can be considered as one of the central ones to be under consideration while dealing with cultural dimension of the translation process, including the process of solving the problems of cross-cultural communication.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Whitehead
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Television Film ◽  
Popular Image

The introductory chapter discusses the popular image of the ‘Romantic mad poet’ in television, film, theatre, fiction, the history of literary criticism, and the intellectual history of the twentieth century and its countercultures, including anti-psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Existing literary-historical work on related topics is assessed, before the introduction goes on to suggest why some problems or difficulties in writing about this subject might be productive for further cultural history. The introduction also considers at length the legacy of Michel Foucault’s Folie et Déraison (1961), and the continued viability of Foucauldian methods and concepts for examining literary-cultural representations of madness after the half-century of critiques and controversies following that book’s publication. Methodological discussion both draws on and critiques the models of historical sociology used by George Becker and Sander L. Gilman to discuss genius, madness, deviance, and stereotype in the nineteenth century. A note on terminology concludes the introduction.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

The American Spectator Symposium Controversy: Was Dreiser Anti-Semitic?

Prospects ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 367-389
Author(s):  
Richard Tuerk
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Editorial Staff ◽  
Theodore Dreiser ◽  
Eugene O'neill ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Introductory Note ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Eugene O’Neill

The Nation for April 17, 1935, contained an exchange of letters between Hutchins Hapgood and Theodore Dreiser entitled “Is Dreiser Anti-Semitic?” In a brief introductory note, Hapgood, who put the exchange in the Nation, explained that the question arose when he read a symposium entitled “Editorial Conference (With Wine)” in the American Spectator for September, 1933. It consisted of the record of a conversation among members of the magazine's distinguished editorial staff: drama critic George Jean Nathan, literary critic Ernest Boyd, novelist James Branch Cabell, playwright Eugene O'Neill, and Dreiser. The symposium and the controversy following it form a minor but nonetheless important chapter in American literary and cultural history.

Auszeit

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Computer Games ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Time Out ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Association

This volume uses literary texts, films and computer games to examine how the specifically modern narrative of time-out is represented. The contributions examine time-out narratives from early Romanticism to contemporary pop and game culture: a polyphonic contribution to the cultural history of time-out, that has yet to be written. The volume is based on a panel organised by Stephanie Catani (University of Würzburg) and Friedhelm Marx (University of Bamberg) as part of the 26th Conference of the German Association of German Studies 2019 at Saarland University. With contributions by Prof. Dr. Sabina Becker, PD Dr. Juliane Blank, Prof. Dr. Stephanie Catani, apl. Prof. Dr. Michael Eggers, Prof. Dr. Jörn Glasenapp, Roya Hauck, PD Dr. Nikolas Immer, Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Marx, Beatrice May, Dr. Jasmin Pfeiffer, PD Dr. Jörg Schuster and Julian Weinert.

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