Stephen Greenblatt
Encyclopedia
Stephen Jay Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943) is a literary critic, theorist
and scholar.
Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism
, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture
, Renaissance
studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller list
for nine weeks. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFD81738F930A15752C0A9639C8B63&fta=y
He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists.
and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts
. After graduating from Newton
High School, he was educated at Yale University
(B.A.
1964, M.Phil 1968, Ph.D.
1969 and Pembroke College, Cambridge
(B.A.
1966, M.A.
1968). Greenblatt has since taught at University of California, Berkeley
and Harvard University
. He was Class of 1932 Professor at Berkeley (he became a full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking a position at Harvard University where in 1997 Greenblatt became the Harry Levin Professor of Literature; he was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. Greenblatt is a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. As a visiting professor and lecturer, Greenblatt has taught at such institutions as the École des Hautes Études, the University of Florence
, Kyoto University
, the University of Oxford
and Peking University
. He was a resident fellow at the American Academy of Rome, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been president of the Modern Language Association
. Greenblatt was "a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s" (Leitch 2250).
; they have one son (Harry).
. Greenblatt has also stated that while pursuing his Ph.D.
at Yale he "rushed out of a corner drugstore and knocked down an elderly man who turned out to be T. S. Eliot
… he survived" ("Greenblatt Named"). Greenblatt also notes that while at Cambridge he performed with some of the group that would become the Monty Python's Flying Circus
troupe ("Greenblatt Named"). He is mentioned by name (in a long list of victims in a parody trial) in at least one episode, "Multiple Murderer Court Scene," which is in Episode 27, Whicker's World (originally aired October 19, 1972).
"My students... have had a profound influence upon everything I have written. And at the center of my intellectual life at Berkeley is the group of colleagues who have... shared ideas, argued, criticized, and given of themselves with remarkable generosity" (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations ix).
Greenblatt’s scholarly interests are listed as “Shakespeare; Early Modern Literature and Culture; Literature of Travel and Exploration; Religion and Literature; Literature and Anthropology
; [and] Literary and Cultural Theory” on his faculty profile webpage. His critical work is deeply indebted to "Foucauldian
and Marxist theories of history" (Rivkin 506). In an interview with Barnes and Noble, Greenblatt stated that the book which most influenced his life/career as a writer was Friedrich Nietzsche's
On the Genealogy of Morals. Though he hated the book, it made him aware that some books have the power to challenge one’s beliefs (Greenblatt, Interview). He lists Michel de Montaigne's
Essais, Edward Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, William Shakespeare’s Complete Works and Leo Tolstoy
’s Anna Karenina
among his favourite works (Greenblatt, Interview). Some of his favourite films are M
, The Third Man
and Shakespeare in Love
(Greenblatt, Interview). He enjoys classical music, including Verdi's
opera
Don Carlo and Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, but does not listen to music while writing (Greenblatt, Interview).
Greenblatt has written extensively on Shakespeare, the Renaissance
, culture
and new historicism
(which he often refers to as "cultural poetics"). Much of his work has been “part of a collective project,” such as his work as co-editor of the Berkeley-based literary-cultural journal Representations (which he co-founded in 1983), as editor of publications such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature and as co-author of books such as Practicing New Historicism (2000), which he wrote with Catherine Gallagher
(Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 1). Greenblatt has also written on such subjects as travelling in Laos
and China
, story-telling and miracle
s.
Greenblatt's collaboration with Charles L. Mee
, Cardenio, premiered on May 8, 2008 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. While the critical response to Cardenio was mixed, audiences responded quite positively. Some audience members even went so far to send the theatre emails to about the unfair treatment of the piece in the press. The American Repertory Theatre
has posted audience responses on the organization's blog. "Cardenio" has been adapted for performance in ten countries, with additional international productions planned.
Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism
” in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth's “bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare’s Richard II
on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the “mutual permeability of the literary and the historical” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 1-2). New historicism
is regarded by many to have had an impact on "every traditional period of English
literary history” (Cadzow). Some critics have charged that it is “antithetical to literary and aesthetic value, that it reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical, that it denies human agency and creativity, that it is somehow out to subvert the politics of cultural and critical theory [and] that it is anti-theoretical” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 1). Others praise new historicism as “a collection of practices” employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature
by considering it in historical context while treating history
itself as “historically contingent on the present in which [it is] constructed” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
In an interview with Matthew Norris, he says "I didn’t imagine [New Historicism] as a program, or a long-range ten-year plan. Or a twenty-year plan. It was a way of trying to do a new kind of work. Of course, I hoped it would have an impact, but I wasn’t trying to start a school or imagining myself as founding a new movement. I imagined it as expressing this powerful sense that we need to try to do things differently." Paradigm Interview
Greenblatt's works on new historicism and “cultural poetics” include Practicing New Historicism (2000) (written with Catherine Gallagher
), in which Greenblatt discusses how “the anecdote… appears as the ‘touch of the real’” and "Towards a Poetics of Culture" (1987), in which Greenblatt asserts that the question of “how art and society are interrelated,” as posed by Jean-François Lyotard
and Fredric Jameson
, “cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance” (Cadzow). Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare
are regarded as good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
Greenblatt states in "King Lear and Harsnett's 'Double-Fiction'" that "Shakespeare's self-consciousness is in significant ways bound up with the institutions and the symbology of power it anatomizes" (Richter 1295). His work on Shakespeare has addressed such topics as ghosts, purgatory, anxiety, exorcists and revenge. He is general editor of the Norton Shakespeare.
Greenblatt's new historicism opposes the ways in which new criticism
“[consigns] texts to an autonomous aesthetic realm that [dissociates] Renaissance writing from other forms of cultural production” and the historicist notion that Renaissance texts
“[mirror]… a coherent world-view that was held by a whole population,” asserting instead “that critics who [wish] to understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing must delineate the ways the texts they [study] were linked to the network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constituted Renaissance culture in its entirety” (Cadzow). Greenblatt’s work in Renaissance studies includes Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), which “had a transformative impact on Renaissance studies” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
as general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature
published by W.W. Norton during the 1990s. He is also the co-editor of the anthology's section on Renaissance literature (Gewertz) and the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare, “currently his most influential piece of public pedagogy” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
, Queen Mary
, University of London
:
"I was putting together some lectures in the early 80s and I suggested Greenblatt to the faculty. No one had heard of him. But when he and I arrived at the lecture room we were greeted by a grumpy porter who complained that the event was a fire hazard. The audience was hanging from the rafters. That was Stephen Greenblatt. The faculty hadn't heard of him, but the students were in there." (Miller)
Stephen Greenblatt’s account of his reaction to being told that several American job advertisements were requesting responses from experts in new historicism:
"I said, 'You've got to be kidding. You know it was just something we made up!' I began to see there were institutional consequences to what seemed like a not particularly deeply thought-out term." (Miller)
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
and scholar.
Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism
New Historicism
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller list
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
for nine weeks. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EFD81738F930A15752C0A9639C8B63&fta=y
He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists.
Education, academia and employment
Greenblatt was born in BostonBoston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
. After graduating from Newton
Newton, Massachusetts
Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States bordered to the east by Boston. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population of Newton was 85,146, making it the eleventh largest city in the state.-Villages:...
High School, he was educated at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
(B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
1964, M.Phil 1968, Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
1969 and Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college has over seven hundred students and fellows, and is the third oldest college of the university. Physically, it is one of the university's larger colleges, with buildings from almost every century since its...
(B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
1966, M.A.
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
1968). Greenblatt has since taught at University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
and Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. He was Class of 1932 Professor at Berkeley (he became a full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking a position at Harvard University where in 1997 Greenblatt became the Harry Levin Professor of Literature; he was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. Greenblatt is a permanent fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. As a visiting professor and lecturer, Greenblatt has taught at such institutions as the École des Hautes Études, the University of Florence
University of Florence
The University of Florence is a higher study institute in Florence, central Italy. One of the largest and oldest universities in the country, it consists of 12 faculties...
, Kyoto University
Kyoto University
, or is a national university located in Kyoto, Japan. It is the second oldest Japanese university, and formerly one of Japan's Imperial Universities.- History :...
, the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
and Peking University
Peking University
Peking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...
. He was a resident fellow at the American Academy of Rome, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has been president of the Modern Language Association
Modern Language Association
The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
. Greenblatt was "a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s" (Leitch 2250).
Family
Greenblatt has three children. He was married to Ellen Schmidt from 1969–96; they have two sons (Joshua, an attorney, and Aaron, a doctor). In 1998 he married fellow academic Ramie Targoff, also a Renaissance expert and a professor at Brandeis UniversityBrandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
; they have one son (Harry).
General interest
Greenblatt shares many anecdotes about his academic and non-academic experiences in interviews and in his writing. He has for instance stated that as counsellor at a summer camp, he spent some time playing guitar and singing “mournful folk songs” with co-counsellor Art GarfunkelArt Garfunkel
Arthur Ira "Art" Garfunkel is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and actor, best known as being a member of the folk duo Simon & Garfunkel...
. Greenblatt has also stated that while pursuing his Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
at Yale he "rushed out of a corner drugstore and knocked down an elderly man who turned out to be T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
… he survived" ("Greenblatt Named"). Greenblatt also notes that while at Cambridge he performed with some of the group that would become the Monty Python's Flying Circus
Monty Python's Flying Circus
Monty Python’s Flying Circus is a BBC TV sketch comedy series. The shows were composed of surreality, risqué or innuendo-laden humour, sight gags and observational sketches without punchlines...
troupe ("Greenblatt Named"). He is mentioned by name (in a long list of victims in a parody trial) in at least one episode, "Multiple Murderer Court Scene," which is in Episode 27, Whicker's World (originally aired October 19, 1972).
Literary interests, influences and personal favourites
"At a certain point I passed from the naïve to what Schiller calls the sentimental—that is, I stopped reading books of marvels and began reading ethnographies and novels—but my childhood interests have survived in a passionate curiosity about other cultures and a fascination with tales" (Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions 2)."My students... have had a profound influence upon everything I have written. And at the center of my intellectual life at Berkeley is the group of colleagues who have... shared ideas, argued, criticized, and given of themselves with remarkable generosity" (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations ix).
Greenblatt’s scholarly interests are listed as “Shakespeare; Early Modern Literature and Culture; Literature of Travel and Exploration; Religion and Literature; Literature and Anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
; [and] Literary and Cultural Theory” on his faculty profile webpage. His critical work is deeply indebted to "Foucauldian
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
and Marxist theories of history" (Rivkin 506). In an interview with Barnes and Noble, Greenblatt stated that the book which most influenced his life/career as a writer was Friedrich Nietzsche's
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
On the Genealogy of Morals. Though he hated the book, it made him aware that some books have the power to challenge one’s beliefs (Greenblatt, Interview). He lists Michel de Montaigne's
Michel de Montaigne
Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne , February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism...
Essais, Edward Gibbon's
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, William Shakespeare’s Complete Works and Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...
’s Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...
among his favourite works (Greenblatt, Interview). Some of his favourite films are M
M (1931 film)
M is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed more than a dozen films previously....
, The Third Man
The Third Man
The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard. Many critics rank it as a masterpiece, particularly remembered for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and unique musical score...
and Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love is a 1998 British-American comedy film directed by John Madden and written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard....
(Greenblatt, Interview). He enjoys classical music, including Verdi's
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...
opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
Don Carlo and Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, but does not listen to music while writing (Greenblatt, Interview).
Works
Greenblatt on his audience and work: “I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough” ("Meet the Writers").Greenblatt has written extensively on Shakespeare, the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
, culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
and new historicism
New Historicism
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
(which he often refers to as "cultural poetics"). Much of his work has been “part of a collective project,” such as his work as co-editor of the Berkeley-based literary-cultural journal Representations (which he co-founded in 1983), as editor of publications such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature and as co-author of books such as Practicing New Historicism (2000), which he wrote with Catherine Gallagher
Catherine Gallagher
Catherine Gallagher is a historicist literary critic and Victorianist and is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is The Body Economic : Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel...
(Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 1). Greenblatt has also written on such subjects as travelling in Laos
Laos
Laos Lao: ສາທາລະນະລັດ ປະຊາທິປະໄຕ ປະຊາຊົນລາວ Sathalanalat Paxathipatai Paxaxon Lao, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south and Thailand to the west...
and China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, story-telling and miracle
Miracle
A miracle often denotes an event attributed to divine intervention. Alternatively, it may be an event attributed to a miracle worker, saint, or religious leader. A miracle is sometimes thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature. Others suggest that a god may work with the laws...
s.
Greenblatt's collaboration with Charles L. Mee
Charles L. Mee
Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts.-Early Life and Early Career:...
, Cardenio, premiered on May 8, 2008 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. While the critical response to Cardenio was mixed, audiences responded quite positively. Some audience members even went so far to send the theatre emails to about the unfair treatment of the piece in the press. The American Repertory Theatre
American Repertory Theatre
The American Repertory Theater is a professional not-for-profit theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1980 by Robert Brustein, the A.R.T. is known for its commitment to new American plays and music–theater explorations; to neglected works of the past; and to established classical texts...
has posted audience responses on the organization's blog. "Cardenio" has been adapted for performance in ten countries, with additional international productions planned.
New historicism
Greenblatt is quoted as saying, “My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago" (“Greenblatt Named”).Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism
New Historicism
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
” in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth's “bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare’s Richard II
Richard II (play)
King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to be written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's...
on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the “mutual permeability of the literary and the historical” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 1-2). New historicism
New Historicism
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
is regarded by many to have had an impact on "every traditional period of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
literary history” (Cadzow). Some critics have charged that it is “antithetical to literary and aesthetic value, that it reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical, that it denies human agency and creativity, that it is somehow out to subvert the politics of cultural and critical theory [and] that it is anti-theoretical” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 1). Others praise new historicism as “a collection of practices” employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
by considering it in historical context while treating history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
itself as “historically contingent on the present in which [it is] constructed” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
In an interview with Matthew Norris, he says "I didn’t imagine [New Historicism] as a program, or a long-range ten-year plan. Or a twenty-year plan. It was a way of trying to do a new kind of work. Of course, I hoped it would have an impact, but I wasn’t trying to start a school or imagining myself as founding a new movement. I imagined it as expressing this powerful sense that we need to try to do things differently." Paradigm Interview
Greenblatt's works on new historicism and “cultural poetics” include Practicing New Historicism (2000) (written with Catherine Gallagher
Catherine Gallagher
Catherine Gallagher is a historicist literary critic and Victorianist and is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is The Body Economic : Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel...
), in which Greenblatt discusses how “the anecdote… appears as the ‘touch of the real’” and "Towards a Poetics of Culture" (1987), in which Greenblatt asserts that the question of “how art and society are interrelated,” as posed by Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
and Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
, “cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance” (Cadzow). Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare
W. W. Norton
W. W. Norton & Company is an independent American book publishing company based in New York City. It is well known for its "Norton Anthologies", particularly the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the "Norton Critical Editions" series of texts which are frequently assigned in university...
are regarded as good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
Shakespeare and Renaissance studies
"I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter" (Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory 4).Greenblatt states in "King Lear and Harsnett's 'Double-Fiction'" that "Shakespeare's self-consciousness is in significant ways bound up with the institutions and the symbology of power it anatomizes" (Richter 1295). His work on Shakespeare has addressed such topics as ghosts, purgatory, anxiety, exorcists and revenge. He is general editor of the Norton Shakespeare.
Greenblatt's new historicism opposes the ways in which new criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
“[consigns] texts to an autonomous aesthetic realm that [dissociates] Renaissance writing from other forms of cultural production” and the historicist notion that Renaissance texts
Writing
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
“[mirror]… a coherent world-view that was held by a whole population,” asserting instead “that critics who [wish] to understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing must delineate the ways the texts they [study] were linked to the network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constituted Renaissance culture in its entirety” (Cadzow). Greenblatt’s work in Renaissance studies includes Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), which “had a transformative impact on Renaissance studies” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
Shakespearean Negotiations
- "This book argues that works of art, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange" (Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p vii). This book investigates how complex events influenced the works of Shakespeare and how he chronicled them. It takes the form of five essays discussing theoryTheoryThe English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...
or events of the time and relating them to the playsPlay (theatre)A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
of Shakespeare. The essays are entitled:- The Circulation of Social Energy
- Invisible Bullets
- Fiction and Friction
- Shakespeare and the Exorcists
- Martial Law and the Land of Cockaigne
Norton Anthology of English Literature
Greenblatt joined M. H. AbramsM. H. Abrams
Meyer Howard Abrams is an American literary critic, known for works on Romanticism, in particular his book The Mirror and the Lamp. Under Abrams' editorship, the Norton Anthology of English Literature became the standard text for undergraduate survey courses across the U.S...
as general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature
Norton Anthology of English Literature
The Norton Anthology of English Literature is an anthology of English literature published by the W. W. Norton & Company. It has gone through eight editions since its inception in 1962; it is the publisher's best-selling anthology, with some eight million copies in print. The influential critic...
published by W.W. Norton during the 1990s. He is also the co-editor of the anthology's section on Renaissance literature (Gewertz) and the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare, “currently his most influential piece of public pedagogy” (Greenblatt, Greenblatt Reader 3).
Honours
- 1964-66 Fulbright scholarship
- 1975 Guggenheim fellowshipGuggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
- 1983 Guggenheim fellowshipGuggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
- 1982 University of Peking, visiting professorship
- 1989 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language AssociationModern Language AssociationThe Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...
(Shakespearean Negotiations) - 2002 Honorary degree, Queen Mary College, University of London
- 2002 Erasmus Institute Prize
- 2002 Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award
- 2005 William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, DC
- 2006 Honorary degree, University of BucharestUniversity of BucharestThe University of Bucharest , in Romania, is a university founded in 1864 by decree of Prince Alexander John Cuza to convert the former Saint Sava Academy into the current University of Bucharest.-Presentation:...
, Romania - 2010 Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
- 2011 National Book AwardNational Book AwardThe National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
(Nonfiction), The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Lectures
- Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University (1988)
- Carpenter Lectures, University of Chicago (1988)
- Adorno Lectures, Frankfurt, Germany (2006)
- Campbell Lectures, Rice University (2008)
Selected works
- Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965)
- Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (1973)
- Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) ISBN 9780226306599
- Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988)
- Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (1990)
- Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (1992) ISBN 9780226306520
- Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992)
- The Norton Shakespeare (1997)
- Practicing New Historicism (with Catherine Gallagher)(2000) ISBN 9780226279343
- Hamlet in Purgatory (2001)
- Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004)
- The Greenblatt Reader (2005)
- Cardenio (2008) Premiered at the American Repertory TheatreAmerican Repertory TheatreThe American Repertory Theater is a professional not-for-profit theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1980 by Robert Brustein, the A.R.T. is known for its commitment to new American plays and music–theater explorations; to neglected works of the past; and to established classical texts...
in CambridgeCambridgeThe city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, MA - Shakespeare's Freedom (2010) ISBN 9780226306667
- The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) ISBN 9780393064476
Quotations
Lisa JardineLisa Jardine
Lisa Anne Jardine CBE , née Lisa Anne Bronowski, is a British historian of the early modern period. She is professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London, and is Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority...
, Queen Mary
Queen Mary, University of London
Queen Mary, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
, University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
:
"I was putting together some lectures in the early 80s and I suggested Greenblatt to the faculty. No one had heard of him. But when he and I arrived at the lecture room we were greeted by a grumpy porter who complained that the event was a fire hazard. The audience was hanging from the rafters. That was Stephen Greenblatt. The faculty hadn't heard of him, but the students were in there." (Miller)
Stephen Greenblatt’s account of his reaction to being told that several American job advertisements were requesting responses from experts in new historicism:
"I said, 'You've got to be kidding. You know it was just something we made up!' I began to see there were institutional consequences to what seemed like a not particularly deeply thought-out term." (Miller)
See also
- New HistoricismNew HistoricismNew Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....
- Cultural MaterialismCultural materialismThe term Cultural materialism refers to two separate scholarly endeavours:* Cultural materialism — an anthropological research paradigm championed most notably by Marvin Harris....
(often contrasted with) - Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
- DiscourseDiscourseDiscourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
- EpistemeEpistemeEpisteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek word ἐπιστήμη for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, "to know".- The Concept of an "Episteme" in Michel Foucault :...
- MarxismMarxismMarxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
- HistoricismHistoricismHistoricism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
- Literary theoryLiterary theoryLiterary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
External links
- http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~cardenio Website with details about international productions of Cardenio
- American Repertory Theatre's production page for Cardenio
- http://hrtv.org/
- http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/index.html
- http://www.harvard.edu/
- http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/
- http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/
- http://www.therainfarm.com/paradigm4