History in Bits
This is an expanded version of a paper that was given at the conference After
the New Historicism, organised by Steve Clark for the Centre for English Studies,
and held at the Clore Centre, Birkbeck College, 13-14 March 1998. A print version
appears in REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature,
17 (2001), 'Literary History/Cultural History', ed. Herbert Grabes, pp. 311-23.
The paper asks whether new historicism needs a strong theory of what it is doing
to do it most effectively and decides that it doesn't. It says that the most important
promise of new historicism lies in the kinds of historical practices it invents
and imagines, rather than in the account that it gives of those practices.
Coming to Bits
Not Knowing What You're Doing
Remembering to Forget
Tales of the Unexpected
Cultural Phenomenology
Writing in Bits
Notes
Coming to Bits
There are several ways in which the new historicism may be said
to come to bits. First of all, it comes to bits in its
deliberated happening upon the bittiness of the world. Against
the formalism and aestheticism of a literary tradition associated
with heroic integration, Stephen Greenblatt suggests that new
historicist critics `have been more interested in unresolved
conflict and contradiction than in integration; they are as
concerned with the margins as with the centre; and they have
turned from a celebration of achieved aesthetic order to an
exploration of the ideological and material bases for the
production of this order'. [1] The writing of history has been said to involve
a necessary acknowledgement of the gratuity and intermittence of
the way things happen to have happened.
This desire to represent the arbitrariness rather than the
necessity of the past has also been accompanied by a new sense
of the complexity of the encounter between the historical period
under investigation and the period of the historian. New
historicism sees the act of writing history not as an
inheritance, nor a fidelity, but as negotiatiated abrasion. The
disjunctive conjunctures between times brought about in the act
of writing history parallel the curiously broken conjunctures
between discourses and forms of symbolic life discovered by the
new historicist in the period that is his or her subject. Instead
of large and inclusive explanations, new historicism has often
been impelled by a Benjaminian willingness to arrest the flows
of history, and to chop into its received continuities. Marjorie
Levinson draws - whether as a new historicist or in an effort to
be something else I will not here decide - on a hermenutic
tradition which allows her to consider the nature of the epochal
conjunctures between times brought about by new historicism in
its practice as well as the complex synchronic conjunctures that
typically form its subject.
We define the structure of the past as an
absent cause promoting a range of effects that, at a
certain historical moment, configurate with an origin to
which they are related by difference and distance. At that
moment, which we regard as a unique opportunity for
critical translation - the origin coalesces as a structure,
one which is really, suddenly, there in the past, but only
by the retroactive practice of the present. Our totalizing
act thereby becomes part of the movement by which history
continually reorganizes itself. Even as we wait upon the
real development of that history as the sufficient
condition for our critical acts, these acts also hasten
that development. That is why we really are part of
the object that we study, subject to the changes that our
study effects. [2]
Such an encounter is supposed to be both
finite and open; it reestablishes the possibility of meaningfully
successive history only in a form of an `epochal relatedness'
which is conjured from within history itself, from within one's
situated, partial perspectives, rather from some imaginary
position outside history, or beyond its imaginary end. History
is unbroken, but is made up of discontinuities, flaws and
faultlines (it is unbroken because it is made up of
discontinuities; its discontinuities are what hold it together).
So new historicism finds bittiness in its subject and in the mode
of its encounter with its subject. The next section deals with
the ways in which it also comes apart from its own purposes or
theoretical self-understanding.
Not Knowing What You're
Doing
The resolve, characteristic of new historicism, to acknowledge
or embrace one's condition of historical partiality (in both
senses) has encountered two contrasting forms of philosophical
challenge, that I am going to use the arguments of Christopher
Norris and Stanley Fish to exemplify. Christopher Norris sees in
new historicism's disposition to see the past as other, and its
professed and displayed willingness to tolerate and itself to
proliferate different ways of being human, a performative self-
contradiction. A performative self-contradiction is a
contradiction between your articulated and your implicit
purposes, between what you say you are up to in doing what you
do and what you have to assume you are up to in order to do it
at all. For Norris, such a relation of contradiction obtains
between the sustaining belief in the possibility of shared
experience and value across regimes of thought and
representation, and a practice that claims to have discarded such
beliefs as sentimental, or appropriative, or downright
oppressive.
With the New Historicists, like Foucault before
them, the normative dimension is everywhere manifest in
their will to redeem the long history of oppression
inflicted upon subject peoples, sexual minorities,
`deviant' sub-groups, victims of coercive (psychiatric or
penal) institutions, etc. Yet their theorizing offers
absolutely no basis for any such principled ethical stance.
Indeed it cuts away the very grounds of judgment by
asserting that history is entirely a product of textual or
discursive representation, that subjects are likewise
constructed in language (along with all categories of
knowledge and experience), and hence - as Lyotard would
have it - that we commit a wrong, an infraction of the
narrative differend, by presuming to speak on the other's
behalf, or by invoking ideas of truth and justice that
would somehow transcend this condition of absolute
alterity. [3]
What I want to isolate from Norris's account
is its own sustaining assumption - which is of course not
implicit at all, but fully and self-consciously announced - that
an historical enterprise, or any enterprise at all, which is
characterised by such performative self-contradiction, must
thereby be rendered rickety and unreliable. I think that what
Norris wants is for the new historicism literally to pull itself
together; to acknowledge its performative self-contradiction in
order to escape it.
For Norris, new historicism is vulnerable to attack, because it
does not sufficiently know what it is doing. One response to this
would be to observe that Norris appears not to have read, or to
be unable to recognise when he does read it, all the work in
which new historicists reflect upon precisely these exquisite
difficulties of self-contradiction. It is not that new
historicists do not recognise contradiction, it is rather,
perhaps that new historicists do not draw from the recognition
of this contradiction the same lesson that Norris draws.
New historicism has also come under challenge by Stanley Fish,
but from seemingly the opposite point of view. Where Norris finds
new historicism insufficiently self-aware, Fish finds it
excessively so. Curiously, and unexpectedly, though, Fish, like
Norris, relies upon an exposure of self-contradiction.
Bertrand Russell once remarked approvingly of theoretical
mathematics that it was an intellectual proceeding in which we
literally do not know what we are talking about. I want, partly
with and partly against Fish, to ask whether history need
necessarily be the kind of intellectual practice in which we
literally do not know, or need not know what we're doing; whether
knowing what we're doing is desirable either in itself, or as a
way of ensuring that we do what we do better. At stake, as
Stanley Fish has insisted throughout his recent writings, is an
ideal of the unity of intellectual enterprise; a wish to believe
that it is not only useful but also necessary to be able to
monitor our own performance theoretically; that our theory and
our practice should sing the same song, rather than pulling us
apart.
Fish's argument is much simpler to set out than to get shut of.
It is that `the insight of historicity - of the fashioned or
constructed nature of all forms of thought and organization - is
too powerful a weapon for those who appropriate it to attack the
projects of others; for it turns against them when they attempt
to place their own project on a footing that is
different...Left critical theory... [is in the condition
of] acknowledging as inescapable the condition of historicity,
but claiming nevertheless to have escaped it.' [4]
Taken not as a loose ensemble of related
habits and idioms, but as a kind of general claim about the ways
in which it is appropriate to read and reread the past, new
historicism can seem to offer the possibility of rotating the
predicament of one's historicity into a kind of epistemological
prerogative, finding an expansion of vision from the historicist
awareness of the necessary limitation of perspective. In an essay
written as an afterword for the volume The New
Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London:
Routledge, 1989, Fish scorns the idea that there could be `a
general faculty, a distinct muscle of the spirit or mind
whose exercise leads not to an alternative plan of directed
action but to a plan (if that is the word) to be directionless,
to refuse direction, to resist the drawing of lines, to perform
multiplicity and provisionality'. [5]
The general condition of historicity embraced
by the new historicism is expressed through its emphasis on
textuality. Fish asks and answers two separate questions of new
historicist practice.
1. Can you at once assert the textuality of
history and make specific and positive historical
arguments?
2. Can you make specific and historical arguments that
follow from - have the form they do as a consequence of -
the assertion that history is textual? [6]
Fish's answer to the first question is a round
and serene yes; his answer to the second is a robust and
obstinate no. The answer to the first question is yes, because
Fish turns the `at once' in the formula `Can you at once...?'
into mere temporal coincidence as opposed to logical
codependency. `The two actions - asserting the textuality of
history and making specific historical argument - have nothing
to do with one another. They are actions in different practices,
moves in different games'. [7] You can do these two things at once, in the same
way as you can say a poem to yourself as you drive to work. What
you cannot do, or cannot legitimately do (but who says so, whose
legitimacy is this?), is to allow or even expect the one action
to define or determine the other. There is just no significant
relationship between saying poetry and driving. Were I to write
a best-selling driving manual in hexameters, such a relation
could, of course, come to obtain; but, in Fish's view, this would
not count as an example of some new or newly disclosed causative
or consequential connection between poetry and driving, since in
order to exert an influence upon driving practices, for good or
for ill, my poem in hexameters would already have to have crossed
over from the language game of poetry to the language game of,
shall we say, vehicular pedagogics. Fish insists that history,
and the practice of writing history, are both more discontinuous
than new historicists themselves acknowledge. His theory is
anticipated by Buck Mulligan's joke told about the old woman
congratulating herself on the strength of her tea at the
beginning of Ulysses: `When I makes tea, I makes tea. And
when I makes water, I makes water.' (God send, Mrs. Grogan, that
you don't make them in the same pot)' For Fish, when the critic
does history he does history and when he does theory he does
theory.
Fish's arguments seem both to bank on and be betrayed by his
extraordinary account of the process of change. In one sense, the
principle of change is vital; we can register the force of the
conditions obtaining within particular disciplines and between
different periods by looking to other times and places when such
conditions were not operative. But, although he insists on the
fact of historical changeability, Fish seems to have no
satisfactory way of accounting for the passage from one set of
assumptions to another. Instead, he offers a view of the
discipline of history and of the history of disciplines as a kind
of catastrophic automatism, in which one is softly and suddenly
abducted from one wholly determining set of disciplinary
assumptions by another, with no memory of or way of establishing
continuity with one's previous life. In the land of the always-
already, there are no links, transitions or half-way houses; nor
yet any shifts of conceptual level or slow stirrings of self-
consciousness. Fish is at his sinuous best in puncturing the
grandiose wholehoggery of certain versions of the
interdisciplinary imperative; but his sternly allergic response
to the mixed, the partial and the imperfect in intellectual and
professional life, and his insistence on being able to see all
the way round the condition of never being able to see round
one's determining conditions, give his own arguments an integrity
that is itself curiously autistic.
Another problem with Fish's argument might be that it seems to
overrate its own implications. If it is not only not necessary,
but also not possible to know what you're doing, to be master of
your own motives and actions and implications, then what is the
force of the critique that Fish mounts, which is precisely a
critique founded on the principle that we should know what we're
doing (we should know, and presumably derive some epistemological
edge from knowing, that we never really know in the round
what we're doing). Why, for instance, does Fish not say that,
since we cannot anyway know what we're doing, there is no harm
in our pretending that we do, or thinking that we do when we
don't? Actually, Fish does come close to saying something like
this, when he argues that we need `theory talk' to engage our
interests, forge intellectual solidarity, buck ourselves up
generally - though not in any significant way to guide or
orientate our practice. If we really do not know what we're
doing, how can we be certain that we don't, even by accident?
Fish wishes to deny others the advantage of knowing what they are
doing, but does not himself wish to surrender the advantage which
apparently accrues to knowing that we don't know what we're
doing.
The strangest thing about Fish's argument is his insistence on
keeping language games, communities of understanding and
disciplinary modes of functioning so sharply quarantined from
each other. When he prohibits the mingling or interference
between these games and frames, he relies upon just the kind of
general faculty of discernment that the theory of the multiple
determinations of games and frames is supposed to disallow.
Besides which, he also emphasises one aspect of these games and
frames, namely their conservative tendency to self-replication,
at the expense of others. If the games and frames of discourse
are contraining, they are also productive, of movement and self-
transformation. One of the rules of functioning of driving - or,
as I think I would currently prefer to say, one of its
phenomenological conditions -is that it includes the possibility
of absorbing or itself being absorbed in other kinds of practice
- to the extent of being dangerously interefered with. You can't
not be in two places at once when you are in a car. There is a
sense in which driving includes poetry, or includes its potential
inclusion of poetry. Correspondingly one of the rules of
functioning of poetry is that it can wrap itself round or thread
itself through other kinds of activity (marching, singing,
philosophical reflection, and so on). Overall, we could do with
a less two-dimensional and more topological way of conceiving the
distinctions between realms of discourse and ways of behaving.
[But does new historicism have a strong
theoretical self-image?]
Remembering to
Forget
Fish suggests that forgetting is an action of
the critical and historical mind that is less culpable than is
often thought. One could say that forgetfulness - in terms of the
separation of actual practices and historical theory - is
necessary and inescapable. Fish might seem to be arguing for
naive empiricism, a form of historical enquiry that would forget
to remember its own theoretical principles; in fact, he is urging
something a little more complicated and, in his own terms, more
dubious than this, namely that we should continuously remember
to forget the contradictions between practice and theory. It is
in this respect that Fish can be seen, not as arguing against
metahistorical and metacritical competence, but finessing a more
sophisticated form of it.
There is a curious and significant parallel between Fish's wish
to keep hold of, or retain acknowledgement of the difference
between practice and theory (which is anyway just a difference
between different kinds of practice) and the very different
claims made by Jean-François Lyotard concerning the need to
remain philosophically open to the indeterminacy of what he calls
the event. What Lyotard calls an event is, of course, almost
exactly the reverse of what an historian tends to mean by this
term. For an historian, an event is something that has happened,
which is to say, something that has attained a kind of
definiteness and visibility. Thus, Nelson's death at Trafalgar
is an event; Nelson's premonitory dream of his own death the
night before the battle is not an event, though, of course, it
would be, had he confided the details to his diary, or his
dresser, such that the dream would have come to have a
significance in the light of the events of the battle, or in
terms of the stories told about Nelson's participation in it.
Even now, were a diary to be discovered which reported such a
dream, it could still attain the status of an historical event.
For Lyotard, an event is something that has not yet happened, has
not yet hardened into form, significance or consequence; has not
yet become representable, interpretable, historical. It is the
business of a postmodernist avant-garde practice, Lyotard says,
to bear witness to the incommensurability of events and their
understandings. Avant-garde practice (the practice of modernism
before it becomes modernism, a practice that qualifies modernism
as exactly the kind of indeterminate, or not-yet-determined event
that Lyotard has in mind) inhabits what Lyotard calls the future
anterior, seeking to discover the rules of what will have
happened.
What interests me in Lyotard's formulation is that it adds a
temporal dimension to an argument that rarely has such dimension.
It seems to me that this openness to elapsing and emergence is
a feature that is missing from many new historicist encounters
with the past, or accounts of such encounters. Coming to bits,
or remaining in bits, means refusing the spurious syntheses of
the absolute self-coincidence that believes itself to be able to
balance all, bring all to mind. The answer to the question `What
are the ethical and political implications of your practice?' is
not `That will depend upon the nature of the language-game,
interpretive community, institutional conditions etc, in which
my practice functions'; and the answer to the question `What is
the significance of the encounter between the historical period
that you are investigating and your investigation itself?' is not
`Well, let me take a look at my political investments and see how
they are encouraged or discouraged by the historical material I
am investigating'. Nor is the answer `given the way things stand
at the moment, there are in principle no meaningful connections
with the ethical and the political.' The answer to both questions
is more simply, and more alarmingly, `Call round later'. (`We
know what we do, and we know why we do it' says Michel Foucault.
`But we do not know what what we do does.' This is a question
that can safely be left to the angels.)
Thus, to appear to proscribe in advance and in principle the
development of any kind of consequential links between different
forms of practice or discourse is to exercise the same kind of
wholehoggery as to attempt to prescribe in advance precisely the
kind of consequential links one is prepared to recognise. It is
not surprising that people read Fish as saying that it is not
only strategically unwise to try to conduct serious politics
through the exercise of literary and cultural theory (given the
actual lack of significant connections between these realms), but
also foolish to expect that these realms or frames of activity
could ever start to approach or leak into each other. For Fish
is more inclined than he needs to be to let snapshot positions
substitute for the evolving topology of his arguments. It is a
mistake to assume that, since Fish's arguments do not give us a
way of lifting or fast-forwarding ourselves out of time, they
leave us merely putting up with the way things are, or listlessly
hanging around waiting to see how they are going to turn out.
Tales of the
Unexpected
I want to project some of the kinds of history that become possible, not
as a fulfilment of any announced or presumptive new historicist programme, but
as a response to some of what new historicism has done. Typically, accounts of
what new historicism is and does will point to its characteristic willingness
to attend to a wide range of different kinds of historical evidence. New historicists,
we are told, do not allow the literary text to exist radiantly and autotelically
on its own terms. For the new historicism, literary texts are not a special form
of textuality; they are part of a web of cultural practices of representation
and self-representation; meaning is derived from the interplay and negotiation
between different forms of textuality and the forms of social energy that they
embody. Here, nearly every characterisation of the new historicism will resort
to a list, which is meant to be exemplary of miscellaneity itself. Literary texts,
we hear, are read alongside sermons, witchcraft trials, dreams, medical writings,
criminal ballads, legal disquisitions, and so on, infinitely.
Miscellaneity goes along in popular accounts of the new
historicism with the use of the anecdote. Paul Hamilton
characterises the use of the anecdote in terms of its unsettling
power:
Discourses of the body, of medicine, exorcism,
conduct and other archives of a purely anthropological
character provide anecdotally interpretative moments with
which to skew the reading a tragedy, comedy, or epic
ostensibly demands. The more anecdotal the critical
intervention, the more likely its chances of evoking the
arbitrariness which history disguises in the uniformity of
narrative. [8]
But Hamilton then grows suspicious of the ways
in which such a levelling of hierarchies might accord or even
collude with a contemporary late capitalist mood:
Decentring, in other words, can begin to look
like deregulation...this democratizing gesture, which
rejects the Elizabethan and Jacobean use of art to mystify
power, can be seen to mime the hegemonies contemporary with
Greenblatt's own writing, Reagonomics and Thatcherism. [9]
The implication here, once again, is that to
have failed to escape the determinations of one's own epoch would
be a failure of knowledge and self-control. Louis Montrose is
also made nervous by the practice of anecdote in new historicism,
and concedes some ground to the objections of critics like Walter
Cohen and Dominick LaCapra that this can lead to facile
juxtapositions, unmotivated montage or simple free association;
new historicism has been susceptible to such reponses, says Louis
Montrose `because it has freqently failed to theorize its method
or its model of culture in any sustained way'. [10] For both Hamilton and
Montrose, the anecdotal is a moment of danger, a chink in the
historicist's self-possession.
Kiernan Ryan, by contrast, sees the opposite danger in the
anecdotal impulse of the new historicism: the use of the anecdote
is meant to demonstrate the force of the unassimilated but always
ends up demonstrating the entrapping force of what it is
assimilated to:
Apart from exuding an antiquarian whiff of
authenticity, the anecdote signals the critic's commitment
to local rather than global knowledge, to petits as
opposed to grand r‚cits. As a strategy of
estrangement the anecdote works admirably at first, forcing
readers to drop their stale assumptions about books and
backgrounds, and confront the work and its world afresh in
all their idiosyncrasy. But in the end the eccentric
anecdote repeatedly turns out to be a synecdoche, an
exemplary illustration of a pervasive cultural logic, which
even the wildest imaginations of the age are powerless to
escape. [11]
The thematics of dissidence and containment
are themselves part of what Ryan calls a `remorselessly
diagnostic attitude' (p. xvii). But of course Ryan's objection
belongs to the same diagnostic paradigm. If the only question
that one can ask is how far this or that apparently irregular
practice shores up or resists regimes of power, then the answer
is always given in advance by the form of the question. If one
asks another kind of question, there might be other kinds of
answer.
The answer to both of these forms of objection might be a history
that set out to provide tales of the unexpected without having
a strong plan for the function of such unexpectedness. A history
in bits may not need to perform like the party bore who keeps
telling you stories that show how completely crazy he is, or how
drunk he was at the time. This may mean a different kind of
remembering to forget, a different way of allowing onself to
suspend the question of whether one's topic of investigation is
indeed hegemonic or marginal, or whether it tends to the
consolidation or the decentring of power.
Cultural Phenomenology
I have recently become interested in fostering, and imagining a
form of historical attention that, if one were being theoretical,
by which I really mean doing publicity, could be called cultural phenomenology. Being given the
opportunity to reflect on the efflorescence and aftermath of new
historicism has made me see how much my ambition and curiosity
owes to those moments of unzipping in which new historicism
suddenly lights, with a wild surmise, upon an entire range of
writings and practices that have previously been seen as nothing
but background evidence, raw material or subsidiary
exemplification in the production of long-range, large-scale
histories. I think that what will turn out to have mattered about
the new historicism will have been the temper, texture and rhythm
of its absorption in its materials (though that prediction does
not form the basis of my own arguments or recommendations here
-
I am not giving share advice). I have suggested that cultural
phenomenology - a term which I make no claim to have invented -
is a good name for the work I have in mind because it would
inherit from the phenomenological tradition a desire to
articulate the worldliness and embodiedness of experience - the
in-the-worldness of all existence, while also remaining alive to
the collective or shared conditions of making that constitute
that in-the-worldness. Cultural phenomenology would at times be
a history of the everyday, but not programmatically of the
everyday; it would try to do without the category of
everydayness. It would certainly be a history that was drawn to
the unintegrated or unassimilated, but would not be
congratulating itself all the time about its zaniness, or for its
daring demotion of the authority of the literary text (new
historicists and their interpreters need to remember that they
are vastly outnumbered by people who are entirely untrammelled
by any considerations of the transcendental authority of the
literary text). It would not, like new historicism, try to define
a category of the noncategorial. It would probably have to be a
history that was much less concerned with integrating its
practice with its outcomes, less laced together by feedback loops
and self-monitoring.
This makes it difficult to specify in advance, and in total, what
a history of bits, a history of the bittiness of things might be
concerned with. If I give a list of some of the topics that
historical phenomenology might well concern itself with, it is
not in order to have you guess at the essential features that
underlie all these different items in the list. It is to help you
and me to imagine the kinds of substances, habits, organs,
obsessions, pathologies, processes and affective forms to which
historical attention might well be paid. If, like Marina Warner,
you become interested in a history of bananas, such a history
would have to include the ludicrous along with the dignified,
since the meaning of the banana is, or has become, the ludicrous
itself. I leave you to imagine the strange and striking ensemble
of arguments about the economics of slavery, the theology and
sexuality of food, the relationship between ridicule, hostility
and fear, and so on, that such an investigation might require or
provoke. If you are interested as I am in a history of skin, or
an historical investigation of topics like malediction,
miniaturisation, luck, disgust, remote control, gossip or pop-up
books, (here is an amplified
curriculum of the kind of subjects that cultural
phenomenology might be drawn to) you are going to have to be
prepared to cultivate a similar kind of willingness to
improvise.
Writing in Bits
The generalised awareness of the importance of the writtenness
of history, the importance of trope and narrative and textuality
has had a surprising lack of effect on the actual forms in which
history gets written. Despite its attention to the density, the
actuality and the gratuity of the social word in all its forms,
the new historicism, like history in general, proclaims in its
own practice that it believes in the absolute transparency of its
word, in the absolute power of a particular form of writing - the
academic book or article - to embody historical truth. Given the
invigorating sensitivity to the different ways in which cultures
are made and negotiated in different forms of writing and
symbolic expression, this apparent faith in the forms in which
history happens currently to have to be written is intriguing,
to say the least. The insight into the textuality of history
leads has done nothing to discompose the tranquil consensus that
history is bibliomorphic. It may be that a history in bytes will
start to offers advantages over a history in bits conducted in
the usual bibliographic forms, for example by making it easier
to correlate texts and commentary, or to create more various
ensembles of visual and auditory material; it may be that this
will happen, though I wouldn't bet on it in the short term. But
I do find myself imagining a history that could be written in
different ways, not instead of but as well as the ways in which
it currently gets written.
I characterise all this a disposition rather than a programme.
I am not inclined to try to specify in advance the full range of
possibilities and outcomes of such thinking and writing. Nor -
and this is the point which I have had the most difficulty in
getting people to believe - am I arguing that what I call
cultural phenomenology is the only or the best kind of historical
research that cultural or literary historians, or historians in
general should be undertaking. I lay a wager, that it would give
me great pleasure to lose, that I will not be able to persuade
you to believe me when I tell you that I am not recommending that
you do cultural phenomenology all the time, or abandon every
other kind of history in order to devote yourself to it. It's a
ravelling, a concavity; a loophole, not a lifeline.
Notes
1. Stephen Greenblatt, `Resonance and Wonder',
in New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader, ed.
Kiernan Ryan (London: Edward Arnold, 1996), p. 59. Back to Text
2. Marjorie Levinson, `The New Historicism: Back
to the Future', in Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome
McGann and Paul Hamilton, Rethinking Historicism: Critical
Readings in Romantic History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p.
23. Back to Text
3. Christopher Norris, Truth and the Ethics
of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994),
p. 54. Back to Text
4. Stanley Fish, `Critical Self-Consciousness,
or, Can We Know What We're Doing?', in Doing What Comes
Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in
Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
pp. 455, 456. Back to Text
5. Stanley Fish, `The Young and the Restless',
in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech And It's A Good Thing,
Too (New York and Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 251. Back to Text
6. Ibid, pp. 247-8. Back to
Text
7. Ibid, p. 248. Back to
Text
8. Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London and
New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 169. Back to
Text
9. Ibid. Back to
Text
10. Louis Montrose, `New Historicisms', in
Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and
American Literary Studies (New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1992), p. 400. Back to
Text
11. Kiernan Ryan, `Introduction', New Historicism and Cultural
Materialism: A Reader, p. xvii. Back to Text