Practicing New Historicism

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PRACTiCING •I

NEW

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HISTORICISM

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CATHERINE GALLAGHER

& STEPHEN GREENBLATT

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' The University of Chicago Press

Cf;icago and London

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To the editorial board of Representations,

)33~5 ll The University ,of Chicago Press, Chicago 6o637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2000 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2000 Paperback edition 2001 Printed in the United StatC:s of America og o8 07 o6

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past, present, and future

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ISBN: o-226-27934-o (cloth) ISBN: o-226-27935-9 (paperback) Chapter x, "The Touch of the Real,"© 1997 by the Regents of the University of California. ·Reprinted frozp R~r~sentations (no. 59, summer 1997): 14~9, by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

· Gallagher, Catherine. Practicir~g new historicism I Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. p. em. Includes index, ISBN: o-226-27934-o (alk. paper) I· Criticism. 2. Historicism. I. Greenblatt, Stephen 1943-. II. Title. PNSI. G237 2000 Sox '.gs- dc:u ® The paper used in this publication meets the minimum ~equireinents of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39•48-1992.

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

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The Touch of the Real

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Two

Counterhlstory and the Anecdote

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Three

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The Wound in the Wall 75 Four

The Potato in the 'Materialist Imagination

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The Mousetrap

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The Novel anJ-V -.. . . maintaining of that boundruy is itself an ev~nt.

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ilarly cease to have a settled relationship ·of symbolic distance from matter and J?articularly from human bodies. The way bod-

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ies are understood to function, the difference between m~n and women, the nature of the passions, the experience of illn~ss, the

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• In the larger perspective of the cultural text, representations sim-

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border line between life and death are all closely bound up with

paiti~~-~cp!CSe~tatiotl§_, __Q~~--tJley_~an.92!.~!!!~te-

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dliCea to tho~ represe!.'!_~he body fu_l!q)_qus J!!..a !@iof v' ''spoiler," always b:Jiling or exceeding the ~~J'S .in whi£1>it i~ j re.Eresented. .

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• The unsettling of the relation between imitation and action, between background and foreground, and between representation

There are, we conclude, no a:bstract, purely theoretical answers

and bodily reality gives rise to a sense of archival and interpretive inexhaustibility. There is always something further to pursue,

to these questions. To a considerable extent the units are.. given] by the.archive itself-that is, we almost always receive works whose boundaries have already been defined by _the technology V and generic assumptions of the original makers and readers.

satisfyingly tight and coherent argument. Moreover, works that are at first adduced only in order to illuminate a particular cultural object develop an odd tendency to insist upon themselves

But new historicism undertakes to call these assumptions into

as fascinating interpretive enigmas.

always some extra trace, always some leftover, even in the most

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Introduction

• If a whole culture is regarded as a text::-;-if all the_t_