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Comparative Literature Studies 39.2 (2002) 168-171



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Book Review

Practicing New Historicism


Practicing New Historicism. By Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. ix + 249pp. $25.00

The form of Practicing New Historicism—unusual for an academic book—is almost as original and fascinating as its content, which, in typical new historicist style, juxtaposes readings of canonical literary texts (such as Hamlet and Great Expectations) with readings of "texts" as unlikely and undertheorized as the potato and a ritual of the Passover Seder. Formally, though, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt's work is especially noteworthy for its innovative collaborative approach and the multidimensional historical perspective that results. The book's first two chapters explore the theoretical moorings of new historicism in Geertzian anthropology, British radical history and French Foucauldianism. The next four demonstrate, as the title suggests, new historical practice: each author is responsible for two chapters on her or his period of specialty, and interrelated strands of inquiry loosely link all four chapters together.

While new historicism has been routinely accused of spreading itself thin synchronically, the book's setup allows the argument to acquire its greatest scope diachronically, as Gallagher and Greenblatt deftly lob ideas about modernity's vexed relationship to the representation of materiality back and forth across their respective chapters. These virtuosic cross-currents will remind readers of the unique richness of collaborative writing, exemplified most prominently in Sandra Gilber and Susan Gubar's monumental feminist [End Page 168] intervention, The Madwoman in the Attic. Unlike Gilbert and Gubar, though, whose voices in their writings blend seamlessly together, the authors of Practicing New Historicism perform the acrobatic feat of simultaneously constructing and deconstructing the first person plural. Though they write as "we," Gallagher and Greenblatt largely retain a sense of the individual encounter with the text, an encounter that the book sees as central to the practice and value of new historicism: "No progress can be made on methodological problems without total immersion in practice, and that immersion is not for us fundamentally collaborative: it is doggedly private, individual, obsessive, lonely" (18). The book's bold attempt to traverse selective terrain from the medieval period to the nineteenth century (and, in the last chapter, beyond) might be frustrating to some historicists and historians. However, the authors' thick descriptions of their selected texts are often more convincing for the historical gaps between periods and places that they choose to leave open, for these underscore the fact that the object of their scrutiny is not, in the end, history, but representation.

Notably, both Greenblatt and Gallagher attempt to flesh out representation—and new historicism's particular take on representation—via the shifting, sometimes shifty, ground of the "real." In embracing anthropological work, Greenblatt argues, new historicists were looking "to recover in our literary criticism a confident conviction of reality" (31), one that would place the literary and the nonliterary on a single plane, as mutually pivotal to the interpretation of the material past. The coveted "touch of the real" (31), however, seems to come from the integrated, dynamic, and reciprocal processes of representation and interpretation themselves. As Greenblatt tells the story, legends, doctrines, paintings, and plays "circulate" (87). Their circulation guarantees multiple layers of contingency, and those multiple layers of contingency give the history of the early modern period its vital edge. The more tears there are in the fabric of representation, the more real (and fascinating) that fabric becomes—at least at this critical moment, when complication, fracture, disintegration, and uncertainty represent the reality we might otherwise neither seek nor believe.

So, for example, when Greenblatt looks at Joos van Gent's Communion of the Apostles (which served as the main panel for a complex altarpiece), he looks at the ways its "doctrinal formalism" (78)—its abstraction of the Last Supper out of history into the transcendent realm of Truth—is broken apart by the historically embedded and recognizable figure of a contemporary Jew, who stands in the background observing and belying the ritual. The Jew's presence demands explication and hence presses...

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