H. ARAM VEESER. ED., THE NEW HISTORICISM

H. Aram Veeser, Ed. THE NEW HISTORICISM. New York: Routledge, 1989.
BIOGRAPHIC AND BIBLIOGRAPHIC
Veeser is Assistant Professor of English at Wichita State University.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION, by H. Aram Veeser

HISTORY AS USUAL? FEMINISM AND THE "NEW HISTORICISM", by Judith Lowder Newton. [[CAVEAT: this link has not yet been established. 2 jun 97]]

SELECTED SUMMARY NOTES ON THE TEXT
INTRODUCTION BY H. ARAM VEESER

Veeser describes the embattled intellectual conditions accompanying the rise of "the new historicism" in the late '80s. He attributes the tag to Stephen Greenblatt in an aside to a special issue of Genre in 1982. Greenblatt wrote Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1988). The controversy between traditionalists and new historians centered on the challenge issued by scholars such as Greenblatt to "the norm of disembodied objectivity to which humanists have increasingly aspired." (p.ix)

Veeser points to two different opponents to the new historicism: (1) traditionalists worried about losing the "scholarly armature of proof and evidence" (p.x); and (2) leftists distrustful of the "culturalism and textualism" (p.x) nourished by it.

Veeser says that this collection reflects the conflict, with contributors from across the spectrum.

He lists the assumptions about the new historicism which appear to be shared by its practitioners and its critics alike: (p.xi)

  1. "every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices."

  2. "every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice is exposes."

  3. "literary and non-literary 'texts' circulate inseparably."

  4. "no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature."

  5. "a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe."

New historicists reject "overarching hypothetical constructs in favor of surprising coincidences." (p.xii) They forsake "allusion, symbolization, allegory, mimesis" (p.xii) and "monologic and myopic historiography." (p.xiii) The line between literature and historical matrix dissolves.

Veeser believes that new historicists deserve to be recognized for establishing new ways of doing history and raising awareness of "how history and culture define each other." (p.xiii)

He says this volume helps fill the lack of a discussion of the methodology and implications of the new historicism.

He says new historicists favor "the moment of exchange" over grand themes. "Circulation, negotiation, exchange"--these are their focus. (p.xiv)

They also "challenge the assumptions that help to compartmentalize the disciplines." (p.xv) [They dethrone the "timeless" quality of works of art.]

New historicism, Veeser holds, has not become a new orthodoxy. It is filled with cross-currents and contradictions among practitioners. (p.xv)

QUOTABLE QUOTES
BREAKING DOWN CONVENTIONAL DISCIPLINES: "[T]he New Historicism has given scholars new opportunities to cross the boundaries separating history, anthropology, art, politics, literature, and economics. It has struck down the doctrine of noninterference that forbade humanists to intrude on questions of politics, power, indeed on all matters that deeply affect people's practical lives...." H. Aram Veeser, Introduction, p. ix.

SIGNIFICANCE, EVALUATION, AND RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER WORK
This set of essays offers us various ways of looking at COMMANDMENT V in the "Ten Commandments of the Postmodern," which constitutes THE PROGRAMME's summation of the critical theory of the postmodern.

CAVEAT: WORK WILL RESUME ON THIS INCOMPLETE FILE. MEANWHILE, WE INVITE READERS/BROWSERS TO TAKE FROM WHAT IS HERE WHAT THEY WILL. THEY SHOULD UNDERSTAND THAT THE PROGRAMME DOES NOT HOLD ITSELF RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS FILE UNTIL WE REMOVE THIS CAVEAT.

28 May 1997; updated 2 June 1997

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