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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.1 (2001) 99-101



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Book Review

Practicing New Historicism


Practicing New Historicism. By Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Green- blatt (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000) 249 pp. $25.00

This is, for a historian, a rather hard book; it is a rather hard sell, too. For Benedetto Croce, writing before World War I, the "new historicism" was a return to Vico's principle that humanity can only know its own history; for Wesley Morris in 1972 it was, more vaguely, accommodating free and original creativity to historical meaning; but for contemporary scholars who march under this banner, whether or not quite in step, it is a coinage of Greenblatt some twenty years ago. New Historicism defines not a doctrinal position but rather the agenda of an interdisciplinary group who institutionalized their vision by founding the journal Representations in 1983. New historicists have largely ignored the historical background of their own claims (aside from recognizing some affinities with Romanticism), but in this book Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher do glance back at the culturalist approach of Johann Gottfied von Herder, though substituting multiculturalism for "a singularly nasty volkisch nationalism." But the key to the New Historicism is a much more radically literary turn than Herder's, a turn regarding cultures as texts, or art objects, which gives even greater privilege to scholars and critics of the printed book and the hanging painting.

Like the "nous des Annales," satirized by Richard Cobb many years ago, the "new historicists" are also a self-proclaimed, self-referential "we," who have staked out a territory to display their new and improved intellectual wares. They assume an Old Historicist, or Whiggish, view of their own role in advancing learning. In this post-Marxist age, such advancement involves a bias against theory and grand narratives in general. Though avoiding the rival jargon of "postmodernism," Greenblatt and Gallagher nevertheless deny, postmodernistically, the possibility of a "unitary story" and revel in what Ezra Pound called "Luminous Detail" and what Clifford Geertz called "thick description"--the result being what might be named the New Anecdotalism. Not the "good God" (to paraphrase Aby Warburg) but historical (or new-historical) meaning "resides in the details."

This line of argument, justifying "practice" without theory and incoherence in the name of rich diversity, and expanding historical curiosity as "a social rebellion in the study of culture," is essentially a fishing license for interpretive experiments; brilliant as they are, these four essays really constitute what once was termed a miscellany, or quodlibeta. As such, they are impressive, even virtuoso productions, drawing on anthropological and philosophical as well as literary, historical, and art- historical arguments. The marvelously allusive chapter, "The Touch of the Real," invoking Geertz and Erich Auerbach, reaches out for "real bodies and living voices," or at least traces thereof, but what it grasps is the historicist realism of the latter rather than the descriptive realism of the former, whose anthropological colleagues have not all followed his hermeneutical (and indeed literary) call. [End Page 99]

The second chapter introduces "counterhistory" as another, more up-to-date label for the new historicism. The authors associate it with "the anecdote" to distinguish it from old-fashioned, plotted, and teleological "Big Stories" on which historians have always relied but which the new historicist "we" "wanted to interrupt" in order to replace the grand récit by a choice of petit récits, which are not postmodern but "counterfactual"--even "metahistorical"--with debts to British radicalism (Edward P. Thompson, Raymond Williams) and Foucauldianism. The Big Stories are, in effect, the fictions of the winners; the counterhistorical anecdotes try to catch the voices and images of the lost, the forgotten, the oppressed, the feminine, the gay, and other sorts of alterity obliterated in the narrative of mainstream history. This is a noble dream, though a longer perspective on interdisciplinary historio- graphical practice suggests that it is a dream not exclusive to the new historicism.

Chapter 3, "The Wound in the Wall," moves the quest for the tangible into the art-historical realm and returns to analogies with theology...

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