That's a great question. New Historicism both as the name of a set of
practices and as an object of critique has come to mean a lot of
different things. For my money (old money), the most useful examples
are those in which the arts of close reading have been revised and
flexibly deployed in the interpretation of institutional and
ideological structures-but without leaving textual analysis behind. I
guess I've gotten used to thinking of this project as a kind of
reconstructed old New Criticism, with the emphasis on "reconstructed."
>Dear All,
>
>I'm just finishing up a project with a student on her way to grad
>school, and the idea is to get her oriented on graduate study (literary
>studies generally, and English Renaissance in particular). She asked an
>interesting question yesterday, which was, where are we currently? When
>I was at her stage in 1992, we all had a pretty clear idea of where the
>momentum was in literary scholarship, even though there were clearly
>differing schools and opinions -- all scholarship seemed to be
>positioned in one way or another with regard to the New Historicism. So
>I thought I'd turn the question out to the group: Is there a collective
>sense that we are operating in a particular phase of criticism -- either
>as Spenserians, Sidneyans, or more generally?
>
>All the best,
>
>Michael
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