"Classic" Acephalous: The New New Historicism: A Primer

Today seems to be the day I hit publish on all those lists I've been compiling.  So for all of you future historicists out there, I present to you a list of works which will introduce you to exciting world of literary historicism.  I'll begin with what a less careful chap would call "prehistoricism."  These works posit a naive relation of historical moment to literary production; that said, they exhibit a thoroughness which many works of new historicism would (often proudly and willfully) lack:

• The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook, James Harvey Robinson
• America's Coming of Age, Van Wyck Brooks
• "On Creating a Usable Past," Van Wyck Brooks
• On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin
• Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler

They are all men, yes, and American exceptionalists at that.  I could list many more such men—including important ones like Charles Beard and F.O. Matthiessen—but the point I wish to make with this list is that dry, empty formalism was not the only available mode of literary scholarship in the years before and of New Critical dominance.  Now let's move to some of the theoretical influences of the New Historicists:

• "Linguistics and Literary Theory," Leo Spitzer, trans. Michel Foucault
• "Philology and Weltliteratur," Erich Auerbach, trans. Marie and Edward Said
• "The Thinking of Thoughts," Gilbert Ryle
• "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," Clifford Geertz
• Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault

Note the emphasis on late Foucault.  New Historicists think less about the repressiveness of power and more about the organization and channeling of it.  Note, however, the conspicuous absence of the Annales school. As constructed from these particular sources, New Historicism embraced a radical perspective on the events and narratives they purported to explain.  Despite the attempt to distance themselves from the "stuffy" historians of the first half of the century, in the end they had far more in common with the Progressive School of historiography than they're wont to admit. 

The historicism I espouse fails all sorts of political tests.  It does not attempt to the advance the cause of the working class.  It bombs every test of direct social effect one could throw at it.  It is more interested in an account of what happened and why and how than in tracking the flow of power at a particular moment in order to liberate contemporary readers from said moment's social or political bequest. But if one is to be an historicist today one must be familiar with that form of historicism and should therefore read:

• The New Historicism, H. Aram Vesser

Seminal, that is.  It addresses most of the aforementioned works . . . only in a way that makes one wonder whether there isn't some unstated principle of selection at work.  The collection's triumphalist tone remains clarion-loud throughtout with one exception.  I implore you to read the entirety of the book from which that exception is excerpted:

• The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, Brook Thomas

Yes, Thomas is on my dissertation committee ... but it's not as if I'm responsible for the inclusion of his confrontational essay in an anthology published when I was in the 6th grade.  Once the necessary theoretical legwork has been tackled, I recommend reading a couple of truly phenomenal works of what could be called the "New New Historicism" or "Post-New Historicism" or somesuch.  Because literary historicism today is many things to many scholars but lacks the movementy feeling of other literary revolutions.  A couple of obviously biased suggestions:

• The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels
• New Deal Modernism, Michael Szalay
• Gumshoe America, Sean McCann
• White Diaspora, Catherine Jurca
• The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, Michael North
• Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas

I could—and by request will—continue.  But I believe that sketch of the field complete enough for the time being.  Obviously it bears an Americanist bias, but the names of the English Early Modernists who work the field are already so common.  You don't need me to tell you to read some Stephen Greenblatt or Catherine Gallagher or Stanley Fish. Maybe I should've mentioned Jonathan Arac ... but I can do all of that in the comments. 

Today seems to be the day I hit publish on all those lists I've been compiling.  So for all of you future historicists out there, I present to you a list of works which will introduce you to exciting world of literary historicism.  I'll begin with what a less careful chap would call "prehistoricism."  These works posit a naive relation of historical moment to literary production; that said, they exhibit a thoroughness which many works of new historicism would (often proudly and willfully) lack:

• The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook, James Harvey Robinson
• America's Coming of Age, Van Wyck Brooks
• "On Creating a Usable Past," Van Wyck Brooks
• On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin
• Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler

They are all men, yes, and American exceptionalists at that.  I could list many more such men—including important ones like Charles Beard and F.O. Matthiessen—but the point I wish to make with this list is that dry, empty formalism was not the only available mode of literary scholarship in the years before and of New Critical dominance.  Now let's move to some of the theoretical influences of the New Historicists:

• "Linguistics and Literary Theory," Leo Spitzer, trans. Michel Foucault
• "Philology and Weltliteratur," Erich Auerbach, trans. Marie and Edward Said
• "The Thinking of Thoughts," Gilbert Ryle
• "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," Clifford Geertz
• Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault

Note the emphasis on late Foucault.  New Historicists think less about the repressiveness of power and more about the organization and channeling of it.  Note, however, the conspicuous absence of the Annales school. As constructed from these particular sources, New Historicism embraced a radical perspective on the events and narratives they purported to explain.  Despite the attempt to distance themselves from the "stuffy" historians of the first half of the century, in the end they had far more in common with the Progressive School of historiography than they're wont to admit. 

The historicism I espouse fails all sorts of political tests.  It does not attempt to the advance the cause of the working class.  It bombs every test of direct social effect one could throw at it.  It is more interested in an account of what happened and why and how than in tracking the flow of power at a particular moment in order to liberate contemporary readers from said moment's social or political bequest. But if one is to be an historicist today one must be familiar with that form of historicism and should therefore read:

• The New Historicism, H. Aram Vesser

Seminal, that is.  It addresses most of the aforementioned works . . . only in a way that makes one wonder whether there isn't some unstated principle of selection at work.  The collection's triumphalist tone remains clarion-loud throughtout with one exception.  I implore you to read the entirety of the book from which that exception is excerpted:

• The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics, Brook Thomas

Yes, Thomas is on my dissertation committee ... but it's not as if I'm responsible for the inclusion of his confrontational essay in an anthology published when I was in the 6th grade.  Once the necessary theoretical legwork has been tackled, I recommend reading a couple of truly phenomenal works of what could be called the "New New Historicism" or "Post-New Historicism" or somesuch.  Because literary historicism today is many things to many scholars but lacks the movementy feeling of other literary revolutions.  A couple of obviously biased suggestions:

• The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels
• New Deal Modernism, Michael Szalay
• Gumshoe America, Sean McCann
• White Diaspora, Catherine Jurca
• The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, Michael North
• Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas

I could—and by request will—continue.  But I believe that sketch of the field complete enough for the time being.  Obviously it bears an Americanist bias, but the names of the English Early Modernists who work the field are already so common.  You don't need me to tell you to read some Stephen Greenblatt or Catherine Gallagher or Stanley Fish. Maybe I should've mentioned Jonathan Arac ... but I can do all of that in the comments. 

Comments

[Stephen]

In terms of theorists who influenced many New Historicists (or at least many "New New Historicists"), Pierre Bourdieu should be mentioned - especially _Distinction_ and _The Rules of Art_.

For me, Bourdieu sums up much of what is (or should be) distinctive about New Historicism. It doesn't just trace the sources of literary texts (although it does that too). Rather, its ultimate goal is to historicize the literary field, to show how ideas of literature and the aesthetic are historically contingent and to see what kind of cultural work those ideas accomplish in various contexts.

[Tim Lacy]

This list interests me insofar as it demonstrates the connections between history and literature as professional endeavors. Common authors or influences include James Harvey Robinson, Van Wyck Brooks, Clifford Geertz, Foucault, and Ann Douglas. Good stuff.

But I've always wanted to ask the following questions of today's literary historicists: Who were the Old literary Historicists? And who, furthermore, were the Old Old Historicists?

Clearly the NEW in New Historicism baffles me.

And don't brush me off by telling me to read Gerald Graff's Professing History. It's a fascinating read, but it clearly didn't offer a pithy memory trick for understanding who the Old and Old Old Historicists were.

So, SEK, I expect new lists and a few memory tricks. - TL

[Susie]

To build off what Stephen mentions about theory, I usually think of New Historicism engaging with Marxism and Marxist/cultural studies theorists while still being ambivalent about using scholarship to advocate or press for political/social change (whereas I think of "old historicism"(?) as being much more a "history of ideas" or at least taking class and material culture much less into account.

A good book to pair with Ann Douglas, though _nowhere_ near as impressively massive in scope, is New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism Between the Wars, by William J. Maxwell.

And to be picky and annoying about your lists: these Americanist texts seem to break down on a black-white racial paradigm. Are there no new historicists who study Latina/o, Native or Asian American historicisms? Or do those scholars work in RES fields with completely different approaches and thus not "do" new historicism? And what about new historicist books in gender studies?

[SEK]

Susie, the black/white dynamic of the lists is an artifact of my (original) dissertation idea: to do work on liberalism and African-American literature in the '20s and '30s. (The Maxwell, as you can well imagine, was an important text there.) I agree with you about New Historicism, which is why I expanded this to the New New Historicism: people who consider themselves historicists (myself and Stephen included) don't think (at least I don't think we think) of themselves as wedded to the early '80s paradigm set up by Greenblatt et al. I think we're much closer to Old Historicism, i.e. intellectual history, than we are to New Historicism.

This goes some way to answering Tim's question, I think. An example: when I met with Eric Rauchway for the UC Davis event, he said that I while I may be in an English department, I'm really interested in the History of Ideas, only I'm tracking them through literary texts. (He said this to other historians, I suppose to invalidate their preconceptions of what people do in English departments.) I can't help but agree: I'm using the techniques of literary scholarship (close-reading, &c.) to do the work of an intellectual historian.

As for who the Old Historicists were: read Professing Literature.

... I kid, I kid. Although it does have a few chapters on the kind of biographical and philological material the New Critics responded to, and that, generally speaking, is "Old Historicism." They didn't call themselves such; they were called such by the New Historicists, in order to demonstrate that they weren't doing biographical studies of Chaucer (Robertson) and Twain (Van Wyck Brooks) or philological studies of Chaucer (Muscatine).

Stephen, I agree with you about Bourdieu, even though he's not (as you know) that important an influence on me. (Because this is all about me. ME ME ME. Ahem.) In fact, Distinction and The Rule of Art both fell to the fury of the Five Year Rule recently. Maybe I should rectify that ...

[Tim Lacy]

Well said, SEK. BTW: I think my incorrect reference to Graff's Professing HISTORY [sic] was a kind of Freudian slip due to his role in that particular book. Mea culpa anyway.- TL

[Susie]

Did you see this Chronicle article: "History Descending a Staircase: American Historians and American Culture" by Richard Pells? It's another interesting take on this historian/ new-historicist- in-the-English-department thing, and was especially interesting to me because I knew all the stuff he referenced and had read most of the books. Evidently, while I've been trying to overcome my feelings of being a fraud about American history and culture, historians have been ignoring the whole area of study. Or so says Pells.