Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to MiltonRethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.
Previous articleNext article FreeAnn Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton. Edited by Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. vii+306.William JunkerWilliam JunkerUniversity of St. Thomas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, editors Ann Baynes Coiro and Thomas Fulton gather eleven essays (and an afterword by Nigel Smith) from established and up-and-coming scholars in early modern literary studies. The book opens with three theoretically oriented essays—by Andrew Hadfield, Michael McKeon, and Marshall Grossman—followed by a “series of focused historicist studies” arranged thematically under four subheadings: “Historicism and Theology,” “Dramatic Histories,” “Milton and the Problems of History,” and “Gendering Historicism” (12). As stated in the introduction, the goals of Rethinking Historicism are threefold: “to examine the potential problems of historicism in literary criticism, to provide a brief sense of the history of the practice from its roots in the Renaissance…and to offer examples of historicist work that will not only demonstrate the continuing vitality of this methodology, but also suggest new directions for research” (11). While every one of these essays illumines its object in new and interesting ways, in most cases the essays do not rethink historicism so much as provide exemplary instances of its current period style. A few essays examine “potential problems” in historicism, but only Marshall Grossman’s adopts a truly critical stance toward it, and only one essay—Fulton’s own—argues in sustained fashion for the Renaissance roots of historicism. Rethinking Historicism thus achieves its third goal most ably, while its pursuit of the other goals meets with less success. It is a mark of the volume’s strength, however, that its blind spots no less than its insights convey the “continuing vitality” of historicism, while underscoring two or three issues that continue to vex its methodology and practice.Of course, the realization that there are “potential problems” in historicism is not a new one. Some of the most trenchant criticisms of the New Historicism—a label that this volume tends to eschew in favor of the less contentious but correspondingly more vague “historicism”—had appeared well before the close of the last century. But aside from the occasional reference to Fredric Jameson and Alan Liu, the volume does not engage these earlier criticisms at any length.1 Rethinking Historicism does not respond to those scholars who, while skeptical of historicism, nonetheless claim to be resolutely historical in their own work.2 Nor, for that matter, does it address recent attacks on historical periodization itself.3 Rather, and a bit oddly, the book takes as its main target the New Presentism.At issue between the New Presentists and the historicists is the very availability of the past from the perspective of the present. Where historicists argue that historical difference is real and knowable, New Presentists argue that every discovery of a significant historical difference is motivated by the interests of the present. But as Andrew Hadfield points out in “Has Historicism Gone Too Far; or, Should We Return to Form?,” these claims are not logically exclusive (28–29). This observation, combined with the notorious difficulty in specifying when the present begins and the past ends, has rightly made New Presentism appear problematic to most scholars—even to those who are in other respects critical of historicism. In “The New Presentism and Its Discontents: Listening to Eastward Ho and Shakespeare’s Tempest in Dialogue,” Paul Stevens observes that not even the contributors to Grady and Hawkes’s Presentist Shakespeares are true believers in the movement.4 Presentist Shakespeares, Stevens writes, is “a collection quite extraordinary for the way in which the subversive asides of its contributors routinely deflate the larger claims of its editors” (136).At several points in the volume, though, New Presentist objections to historicism are conflated with the very different objections of Stanley Fish. Unlike the New Presentists, Fish’s objection to historicism is not that it holds historical difference to be real and knowable but that it tends—in theory and in practice—to forget that what literary critics discover about the past should be ancillary to, rather than substitute for, their illumination of the “aesthetic structure” of the text or performance (135). In fact, Fish’s argument is conceptually closer to that of the historian Gabrielle Spiegel, who is quoted in the volume’s introduction. For Spiegel, the fundamental problem in New Historicism is the “refusal to differentiate text from context or to establish an intelligible relation between them that does not lead to their mutual implication in a textually conceived universe” (7).5 In other words, literary critics who repudiate the primacy of aesthetic structures in their pursuit of historical knowledge are likely to approach history itself as though it possessed its own kind of aesthetic structure. Downplaying the poetic integrity of individual texts paradoxically gives rise to the “textually conceived universe” of cultural poetics.Perhaps Rethinking Historicism directs itself against this strange hybrid of New Presentism and Stanley Fish’s brand of formalism because historicist scholarship has already assimilated most of the earlier charges that have been leveled against it. Several of the essays suggest as much. In “Historicizing Satisfaction in Shakespeare’s Othello,” for example, Heather Hirschfield begins by arguing that a classic complaint about the New Historicism—its “neglect of the role of religion in the daily life as well as in the politics of the period” (113)—is belied by the “recent cottage industry of studies on literature and religion” that have emerged over the past two decades (114). In the remainder of her insightful essay, Hirschfield proceeds in supererogatory fashion to show how Reformation controversies over the theological concept of satisfaction inform the language and plot of Shakespeare’s Othello. Likewise, essays by Martin Dzelzainis and Michael McKeon show that contemporary historicist practice has moved beyond the old contention that New Historicism depends on a synchronous or structuralist depiction of history in which social energies are circulated but change is never made. In his provocative essay, “Milton, Foucault, and the New Historicism,” Dzelzainis acknowledges the partial truth of this contention but argues, following Catherine Belsey, that it reflects the influence of Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz rather than, as is usually maintained, the Foucault of The Order of Things (1973) and Discipline and Punish (1977).6 And Michael McKeon, whose “Theory and Practice in Historical Method” is the most challenging of the volume’s essays and one of its best, offers a subtle reconstruction of Marx’s own historical method in which “diachronic and synchronic analyses are not ‘absolute’ but dialectically intertwined” (59).Finally, the two most intellectually rewarding essays of the volume show that historicist literary scholarship does not preclude, but draws strength from, plain old-fashioned close reading—what Reuben Brower called “reading in slow motion.”7 Thomas Fulton’s piece, “The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More,” traces the fascinating process whereby the humanist reception of classical authors, and Seneca in particular, gave rise to a series of novel interpretations of Romans and other politically sensitive biblical texts that, in turn, informed Erasmus’s and More’s theorization of panegyric. And Sharon Achinstein’s “Medea’s Dilemma: Politics and Passion in Milton’s Divorce Tracts” looks to “the rhetoric of citation in one of Milton’s polemical title pages” (182). The passage from Euripides’s Medea that precedes Milton’s Tetrachordon, she argues, implies an entire “aesthetic of citation” that bears directly on Milton’s passionate defense of human freedom (182).These two essays impress not only because of the analytic pressure that Fulton and Achinstein bring to bear on their texts. Additionally—and relatedly—both authors stretch the temporal boundaries of these texts’ “historical context,” a phrase that the volume as a whole might have subjected to greater scrutiny. We discover that Paul, Nero, and Seneca are as much a part of Erasmus’s world as are Henry VIII and Thomas More and that Euripides’s words weigh as heavily on Milton’s mind as do those of his more temporally proximate opponents. The radical extension of context in these two essays never loses sight of the contemporary pressures of the early sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Instead, Fulton and Achinstein persuasively demonstrate the complexity and range of ideas communicated by authors of the caliber of Erasmus, More, and Milton. And so when Fulton, in an obvious rejoinder to Fish, claims near the end of his essay that “neither historicism nor politics is guilty of diminishing the value of the text as an interpretive object,” it is hard to disagree with him, at least in theory (105).In practice, however, the truth of Fulton’s assertion is less certain. For a historicism that emphasizes “the text as an interpretable object” to the extent that Fulton’s and Achinstein’s does lays bare the inadequacy of what, in other historicist scholarship, continues to pass for the historical context of the text itself. Fundamentally, this tension within historicism arises from two different approaches to literary or poetic form, which Michael McKeon helpfully defines as “the more or less ostensible patterning of…language” within a text (44). To be sure, one of historicism’s chief accomplishments has been to alert us to the ways in which a text’s form registers and responds to the historical pressures surrounding its time of composition. But, as Fulton and Achinstein illustrate, it sometimes happens that closely attending to the form of a text results in our having to alter, rather than simply appeal to, what we thought we knew about its context. On the basis of the essays collected in Rethinking Historicism, though, I think it is fair to say that mainstream historicist scholarship continues to privilege the explanatory resources of context over the formal capacity of texts to test its adequacy. Why should this be the case?The volume suggests that an adequate response to this question requires that we understand contemporary historicist scholarship both in light of its own methodological development and in light of the disciplinary and institutional contexts within which its practice is embedded. I will treat each in turn. As has often been noted, the ambitious claims of New Historicist work in the 1980s and 1990s depended on a constriction of both the temporal and ideational aspects of context. This allowed the New Historicists to discover a small but compelling set of issues that, at a given moment in time, were said to have structured the cultural productions of a society at every level. Later, in response to criticism issuing from within and without the field, New Historicism limited the scope of its argument and gradually abandoned its theoretical basis in the historiography of early Foucault (pace Dzelzainis). The earlier New Historicist conception of con-text as formally indistinguishable from text came to be replaced with a much weaker, but simultaneously more determinative, conception of context as the set of conditions that preexists the text and yet is temporally contiguous with the moment of its creation—what used to be called its background. Contemporary historicism is thus marked by recurring attempts to specify a conception of context that neither is overly determined by a particular theory of historiography—structuralist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, queer, feminist, and so on—nor reduces to a naive appeal to the brute facts.Something of the resulting dynamic is captured in Paul Stevens’s nimble discussion of the interplay between theory and fact in recent interpretations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest—a play that looks very different when read through a historicism informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism rather than through one informed by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British travelogues. Stevens’s essay excellently models what he calls the “dialogic relationship between historical research and theory,” in which each is employed to offset the limitations of the other (153). However, without minimizing his achievement, I think it bears noting that it is only after Stevens adjudicates the claims of theoretical sophistication and historical fact that he mentions “the rhetorical constitution or ‘literariness’ of texts,” which, it turns out, is also important for our discipline (153). Stevens’s essay reaffirms “what makes our discipline so distinctive” at the same time that it relegates—not, I think, intentionally—the problems posed for historicism by the “‘literariness’ of texts” to second place.Indeed, in the current volume only McKeon seems fully to acknowledge that the methodological problem of context is both intrinsic to and yet potentially debilitating for historicist literary scholarship. He admits, for example, that there exists within literary studies a burgeoning dissatisfaction with “the reifying tendencies of periodization,” but he responds by attributing such dissatisfaction to a misconception of historical contextualization or categorization, which—he explains—is not a “dogmatic strategy for closing down understanding” but is rather “the first step in opening it up to questions that otherwise would never be asked” (60). McKeon’s summation of the important role of contextualization is as good as we are likely to get, but it might itself be accused of idealizing the professional context within which historicist scholarship actually takes place.This point is brought home in Andrew Hadfield’s realist assessment of the disciplinary pressures at work in historicism’s continuing dominance over the field. Some opponents of historicism, Hadfield notes, claim that the ongoing production of narrowly historicist scholarship is a function of junior academics’ “anxious quest for intellectual honors and preferment” (24). After all, part of the power of historicist methodology is that “it can be learned, repeated, and endlessly reproduced,” so that anybody needing another publication on her curriculum vitae might, for example, “rea[d] through The Faerie Queene one more time to find yet another possible allusion to kern, gallowglasses, or a crannog in Coleraine that Spenser might once have seen when he possibly traveled north with Lord Grey who might have taken him with him” (24–25). This wonderfully absurd hypothetical concludes with an equally wonderful quip: “The logic of the past conditional can become very wearying” (25). But is Hadfield here speaking in the voice of his opponents or in his own voice? It is difficult to tell.Hadfield presents the opposition as holding that “young academics” trained by historicists “realize that they should not rock the boat if they desire a foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, let alone professional success” (24). And yet, on the next page, we encounter a much bolder set of academics: “The need to find obscure allusions in texts in order to get published, the need to specialize too narrowly, and the absence of the bigger picture has led many to revolt against what they see as the prevailing professional ethos in the present” (25). The tension between these two sentences resolves itself in the realization that those who are in “revolt” against “the prevailing professional ethos” are a different class of scholars from those “young academics” who—the revolutionaries claim—realize they should not rock the boat. Those in revolt are themselves senior members of the profession, scholars who at least approximate the status that Hadfield (rightly) enjoys. On the one hand, it is not surprising that the battles waged over historicism should be fought by senior scholars—for these scholars are, all things considered, better equipped to fight them. On the other hand, though, the instability of Hadfield’s voice over these pages might suggest that, whether or not those senior scholars who are in revolt against historicism are right about its methodological limitations, their perception of the institutional conditions that reinforce its present influence—especially on younger academics—is truer than we would like to admit. The conservative effects of professionalization combined with the ever-increasing expectations of scholarly production might very well ensure the continuing relevance of historicism regardless of whatever problems it faces or avoids having to face.As I noted above, the single essay in the volume that does not end up defending historicism is penned by Marshall Grossman, who passed away before Rethinking Historicism was published. It seems fitting, then, to conclude by acknowledging the challenge posed by Grossman’s “Limiting History” for contemporary historicist scholarship. In large part a development and refinement of “the ethics of reading” Grossman has long championed, “Limiting History” posits a qualitative distinction between “understanding the historical nature of literary texts”—a task that requires placing “renewed emphasis on an artistic hearing of literature that attends to the exigent and nonsystematic experiences of writing and reading”—and “the recent preoccupation with historicizing literary texts,” which, Grossman states, “renders art documentary and instrumental when it should be proactive” (66).8 This distinction turns, finally, on the question of agency: understanding the “historical nature of literary texts” requires that we affirm their capacity to act on us in the present, whereas “historicizing” a literary text requires that we bracket the capacity of the text to so act. The historicized text is reduced to an “instrument” or “document” that “witnesses, records, and pretends to transparency” but that is no longer proactive for us readers (70).One of Grossman’s concerns is that a pedagogy dominated by historicist concerns is self-defeating. As he puts it, “helping students become aware of” Paradise Lost’s deep investment in seventeenth-century political and religious controversy is “part of the substance and pleasure of teaching them, but the case for them taking the trouble to learn these things must stand on the premise that, embedded though the poem may be in the time and place of its production, there remains also a poem to be read in our time and place” (68). Why should students bother learning to read Milton in the first place, in other words, if all that his poetry does is “witness the context of its own creation” (68)?More important, though, is Grossman’s argument that historicist methodology often ignores what is perhaps the central mystery of a literary text’s actual “historical nature.” The mystery is that texts like Paradise Lost and the Odyssey continue to move us when we read them in the present and that they do so even if we have no particular stake in the controversies of seventeenth-century European Christianity or in the development of archaic Greek paganism. “What is it,” Grossman asks, “about literary works that remains active and potent after the historical facts have been naturalized?” (69). To ask such a question is not, for Grossman, to seek out an ahistorical formalism; quite the opposite, it is to inquire after the conditions—in the literary work, in us, and in the history of each—that make possible our experience of being moved, intellectually and emotionally, by a piece of writing from the past. To do this is to practice an ethics of reading: “What I am proposing as the proper work of literary criticism makes an ethical turn toward understanding the mechanisms that facilitate the transfer of the seductions of the will at the limit of history, from writer to text to reader and to writer as reader” (77). Grossman’s own account of these “mechanisms,” which emerges through his microanalysis of Milton’s language, is not always fully persuasive. But in a volume in which the project of rethinking historicism often becomes the project of it, Grossman’s essay out simply for having posed a question that no one thought to Liu, “The of The New Historicism,” The argument of this essay is in on Historicism and the of Press, Fredric of the New Historicism may be in or, The of York: and Renaissance of Press, in Renaissance and Its York: For a discussion of the issues by and see “What New “The in After and of and is the most of the many essays in this issue of the of and also and and Renaissance in University Press, Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, on Shakespeare York: editors from Gabrielle Spiegel, Historicism, and the of the Text in the “Historicizing New Historicism,” in Grady and Presentist Shakespeares, in in In of A to Reuben Brower and York: Marshall Grossman, Renaissance in Renaissance Marshall Grossman York: Previous articleNext article by on this For to no articles this
Read more
17