What's Missing in New Historicism or the "Poetics" of Feminist Literary Criticism

What's Missing in New Historicism or the "Poetics" of Feminist Literary Criticism Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Jeanette Clausen Judging by recent conference programs, special journal issues, and calls for papers, a great deal of critical attention is being focused on new historicism. Just what is this phenomenon, and should feminist Germanists concern themselves with it? We have chosen to address this topic because we think some démystification is needed. We would like to situate our observations in the context of the current discussion on the relationship between feminist Germanistik and the rest of the profession. Touted as a way of doing literary criticism that spurns the formalism of new criticism as well as the positivism of nineteenth-century German or "old" historicism, new historicism seems poised to become one of the dominant critical positions of the 1990s. In little more than a decade it has spread from its somewhat casual coinage by Stephen Greenblatt to a variety of academic disciplines with the speed of what Adam Begley, writing in the New York Times Magazine last spring, likened to a "California brash fire" (32). And that despite the lack of a theory or methodology or unifying epistemology of the kind traditionally required for a "school of criticism." Greenblatt himself exhibits a postmodern disdain for systematization, stressing instead the tentativeness of the enterprise and the importance of remaining ever open to the new. Louis Montrose, another proponent of new historicism, emphasizes his refusal to call it a "school, movement, or program," opting instead for "merely... an emergent historical orientation" (406), by titling a recent article "New Historicisms."1 New historicism then defies any clear definition, as little of its methodologies as of its theoretical underpinnings. Nevertheless, what Greenblatt would call a "practice" (15) threatens to become dogma. While its effect on German departments is less pervasive than on certain other disciplines, the summer 1992 issue of Monatshefte devoted to its discussion and even the 1993 WIG-sponsored MLA session at which another version of this essay was read reflect its encroachment. Not that new historicism is without its detractors: throughout the country it has been the focus of a sometimes heated debate from the right and the left, both from within and outside of academia (cf. Will). The contributors to the Monatshefte issue do not offer unanimous praise, and Women in German Yearbook 9 (1993) 254What's Missing in New Historicism feminists too are of differing persuasions. While there are certainly feminists who publish in Representations, the journal Greenblatt helped found at Berkeley, others have expressed their skepticism and for a variety of reasons (Lennox). We would like to add our voices to theirs, challenging new historicism's claim to uniqueness on the one hand and questioning its compatibility with the goals of feminist literary criticism on the other. Most explicators of new historicism in fact acknowledge that it is not new and stress instead its eclectic nature. It is our contention that as part of its eclecticism, it has incorporated—not necessarily consciously—many of the underlying theoretical postulates and assumptions of feminist criticism, without, however, adopting feminism's unifying focus on gender. Thus we are skeptical of those who celebrate the new historicism —or "poetics of culture" as Greenblatt calls it—as a panacea for rejuvenating the profession (Kaes), but not because we disagree with its fundamental practices, for many of those practices are already inherent in most forms of feminist literary criticism. Rather, we believe it does not sufficiently challenge the critical practices it claims to refute. The repudiation of new criticism did not spring newly born from the new historians, but has in fact been one of the main propellants of feminist Germanistik and other oppositional criticism. If we do a little history ourselves, many of us remember our own training in the methods of new criticism with its exclusive focus on the text in question and its sublime refusal to consider social, political, and historical contexts. It was partly as a reaction to that type of formalism that feminists began to develop their own interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the role of literature in society. Greenblatt may have formulated his term as a punning response to new...