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I. Cultural Analysis and Its Discontents
The issue of culture has been at the center of critical and literary-critical studies for quite some time now, and nowhere has it been more prominent than in the influential form of literary criticism that has come to be known as the "new historicism." Like virtually everyone else who has written on this topic, let me hasten to add that I fully recognize the difficulty of summarizing convincingly the project of the new historicism given both the diversity of the work of those who have been labeled new historicists and the multifaceted nature of the project itself. But certainly one of the most important contributions of the new historicists lies in the insistence and persuasiveness with which they have argued for the central importance of culture not only in relation to literary studies but to the human sciences in general.
New historicists were frequently criticized, at least initially, for a perceived failure to articulate the methodological or theoretical bases for their work. It was nonetheless obvious from the beginning that what was "new" about the new historicism was an implicit frustration with the limitations of previous attempts to understand and describe the relation of cultural artifacts of all sorts-literary, theatrical, visual, and so forth-to the historical forces and subjects they had been thought by previous literary historians merely to reflect. The initial work of the new historicists was rooted in an always implicit but at times explicit critique of older forms of historicism that saw culture as the expression of the unified worldview of a particular historical period or social group or class. But it also implied a critique and even a rejection of psychological and psychoanalytic theories insofar as they saw particular cultural artifacts as the expression or reflection of an individual psyche. From the perspective of Stephen Greenblatt and others, culture could no longer be considered merely the mirror of so-called deeper political forces and powers but must be seen instead as a political force or power in its own right. But neither could culture be interpreted in terms of what Greenblatt called the "romantic assumptions" of psychoanalysis and especially the "dream of authentic possession," which he asserted lay behind Freud's view of the alienated self. 1