In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ofthe matter, irrespective ofcontext. Dasenbrock demonstrates again and again how many who argue explicitly to deny it hold this notion oftruth implicitly. But there are manywho reject the game altogether, who proceed then on pragmatic grounds: given our time and place, does the particular theory cash out as we want it to? Does it, for example, widen the circle ofinclusion ofthe academic literary canon? Dasenbrockaddresses this pragmaticstream ofliterary theory head on, and succeeds in bringing out salient features of the principles involved. His work here is valuable, but less carefully extended, and less convincing, than his more formal argumentative treatment ofthe issues. Nevertheless, on both counts, Truth and Consequencesrewards close reading throughout, and deserves as careful a response from literary theorists ofevery sort. ^ Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. PracticingNew Historicism. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. 249p. Catherine Kunce University of Colorado, Boulder What do potatoes, fifteenth-century religious paintings, mousetraps, Hamlet's suicidal bent, and Dickens' Pip have in common? Plenty, according to Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt in PracticingNew Historicism, which serves as apologyand showcase for historical literarycriticism. Complexyet conversational, the work spellbinds the reader by wringing insight after stunning insight from history's seeming incidentals. Using specific fifteenth-century altarpieces as a focus of study, for example, "The Wound in the Wall" posits that a painting's bizarre bleeding wall relates not only to the attempt to justify the burning alive ofa Jewish family (including a screaming innocent child, whose father desecrated a Host), but also pertains to warning "believers" of the horrific consequences of doubting transubstantiation. Extending the discussion oftransubstantiation into the nineteenth-century potato debates (whether or not the potato should sustain the Irish), "The Potato in the Materialist Imagination" examines how the potato proved one man's Eucharist and another's paradoxical cause ofpoverty and foil of starvation. With dizzying virtuosity, Gallagher and Greenblatt then connect Hamlet's relationship to his father's ghostand Pip's relationship to Magwitch with the problem ofthe "mousetrap"—the question ofwhether a mouse, after eating the Eucharist, actually houses the body of God—at one time a bitterly debated issue, with life or death often the debater's trophy. Yet further debates underlie the authors' analyses: to what extent, for example, do all ofthese convoluted discussions bear witness to Marxist precepts? When the rich pattern ofso many tightly 124 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 2002 Reviews woven arguments begins to unravel for the reader, the authors pull the threads back together with well-placed "In other words" paragraphs. Additionally, Gallagher and Greenblatt employa device rare in contemporarycriticism: humor. The potato chapter commences, for example, with ruminations about Vice President Dan Quayle's misspelling of"potato." Few scholars, furthermore, would be brave enough to terminate an erudite argument with a reference to "the holy mouse turd" as these critics do in their final page (210). The first two chapters, calculated to "explain [Gallagher and Greenblatt's] most consistent commitment ... to particularity," lack the sparkle ofsubsequent chapters (19). Still, the entire work represents scholarship at its finest. Since the authors use paintings, historical documents, and non-canonical literature (such as debate pamphlets) to focus their discourse, however, the question remains: is this literarycriticism?The authors register their answer in the introduction, thework's apologyfor new historicism. Although they concede the impossibility ofprecisely defining "new historicism," Gallagher and Greenblatt insist that a culture itself should be considered as a text, since the interstices ofliterature, political realities, collective assumptions—all that constitutes a "culture"—prove too numerous and intertwining to be considered in isolation: "We are trying ... to deepen our sense ofboth the invisible cohesion and the half-realized conflicts in specific cultures by broadening our view of their specific artifacts," which would include, ofcourse, the paintings and debate pamphlet "artifacts" the authors examine (13-14). Many will delight in the critically egalitarian perspective outlined in the introduction. But when it comes to waltzing through, no matter how gracefully, what the selected "artifacts" signify, Gallagher and Greenblatt most likelywill crush a few toes. In "The Novel and Other Discourse of Suspended Disbelief," for example, the authors impugn Dickens' imagination. The anecdote recounted to convey Dickens' "problem" is nothing short of amusing: upon hearing that...

pdf

Share