| New Historicism and Cultural Poetics,first initiated by Stephen Jay Greenblatt, have become a highly influential and far-reaching poetics system in contemporary Europe and America,as well as an important component of contemporary European and American literary theory.This poetics theory is featured by interdisciplinary studies. Greenblatt is named by Harvard University as "Professor of Interdisciplinary Culture" and "Father of New Historicism".The clue behind Greenblatt's theory falls mainly into two parts.The first is disruptive outlook of history.Greenblatt considers history as unstable and uncertain,but a kind of ruptured,accidental and interrupted existence.The second is the integrated outlook of culture.This integrated outlook of culture is by no means contraditary with the rupture of history.Greenblatt considers culture as a systematical structure of "metaphor",among which the nature of human being is unstable,but rather a constantly shaping process.Human culture is mobility and constantly constructed.In certain respects,New Historicism refers more to a theoretical research method. In such a theoretical effort,it unavoidably makes a comparison between literary text and non-literary text,arguing and exploring their interior structures and various potential connections and differences hidden in the icons.New Historicism means the multi-interpretation and theoretical construction to the connotation of history.For New Historicism,history is activated history,not rigid facts and literary background.The Dissertation mainly includes eight parts.The Introduction makes a simple explanation on the choice of the topic,target scope and literature review.It also gives an introduction of the general idea and structural arrangement of the Dissertation.Chapter One mainly depicts Greenblatt's academic experiences,adopting his own theoretical terminology to delineate his academic tracks,thus making an introduction to Greenblatt in the perceptual and life perspective in the most possible way.Greenblatt once talked in a joking way about some peculiar experience and fleeting opportunities in his early academic years.For Greenblatt,human nature is not a stable and completed existence,but a dynamic,mobility and changing process,with the historical features. His interpretation of"Self-Fashtioning" is rooted in this philosophical view.In addition, story-telling takes an important position in the study of Cultural Poetics theory of Greenblatt.It is just because of these narratives that indicate how history has been constructed and shaped.These narratives have been merged into the research on Cultural Poetics theory.Such text structure represents the zero distance and equality between literary text and life,and between literary text and social text.And it also represents the cultural and academic concepts of Greenblatt as an interdisciplinary scholar.It is not only literary text has aesthetic charm,but life itself and even everything in the world has certain aesthetic trail and contains aesthetic values.Of course,aesthetic significance is not independent of social life.It is a complicated course of the repressing and subversion of the mainstream ideology discourse.Chapter Two mainly introduces three important concepts of Greenblatt's New Historical and Cultural Poetics.The concept of New Historicism and Cultural Poetics are often used in a mixed way,but each having a particular emphasis.They are a pair of concepts with many common but certain different features.New Historicism should be understood mainly the perspective of historical poetics,while Cultural Poetics emphasizes the relationship between literature and various texts from the broad view of culture and from this finds the nature of poetics and the political connotation of ideology. This chapter first introduces New Historicism in the perspective of historical poetics. According to New Historicism,first,man and history are not the essence but the existence of constructed text.It is not that man are windy existence,nor history is completely relative,but that the existence of man is the result of various cultural factors and man is not existing passively.Human Beings are social forces that are not neglectable in social networks.Secondly,a more important view is historical narratives are full of poetics factors,implicit of the leading historical codes or ideological codes, catering to and constructing the mainstream ideology.Therefore,the traditional historical text as mainstream ideological discourse sometimes means the blindness to marginal existence and deletion of alienable forces.Therefore,New Historicism,since it emerged,has evoked numerous imbroglios by critical theorists and aroused extensive response from social science sector.It can be said that no matter how many attacks or extensive annotation,they all explain the value of existence and charm of New Historicism."Historical text" and "textual history"both emphasize the erasing of the border between history and literature,thus clearing up the dual opposition between literature and history,literature and life,literary text and non-literary text.The real history can not be re-presented.What can be re-presented is the existence of text. Especially due to the regulation of mainstream ideology and repression of political system,people cannot record the whole facts into history.Therefore,historical text is not integral and stable,but insteadly ruptured.In the aperture of the ruptures there exists certain aesthetic particularity.Therefore,historical text is also the target for analysis of Cultural Poetics.In the mean while,there exists the tension between political and mainstream ideological repression and subversion in literary text.The individuality and personality of the writer,the aim of writing,and the circulation of the works are not completely self-conscious.Literary text takes part in the power structuring.And the social power structure and ideological factors have also regulated the potential meaning of the text.Therefore,text and social power is formed through bidirectional and multiple interactions.Secondly,the chapter introduces Cultural Poetics in the perspective of the generation of poetics and integral cultural view.Cultural Poetics takes all human activities as a king of cultural text,and tastes the charm of Poetics in the interpretation of such a text.Culture takes poetics as a metaphoric mode of human existence.Of course,Cultural Poetics refers more to the strategy for cultural interpretation and unscrambling of literature.Culture is a view as well as a connotation;while literature is a starting point as well as a central point of theory.This strategy for literary interpretation and unscrambling is to take literary text into an analysis and description through the relationship between special historical period and its cultural mechanism, thus bestowing the work with complete and collective experience.Apart from that,the Anecdote is a major measure for text interpretation by Greenblatt's.The anecdote is the important content and method of New Historicism;it explains the connotation and Poetics significance of the anecdote.Greenblatt shows great interest in the non-historical materials such as archive materials,police records and ship logs sailed by anecdotes.It should be mentioned that this is also an important feature of New Historicism and Cultural Poetics theory,i.e.the stress on anecdotes.If considered from methodology,this is the concern and focus on non-mainstream history and the affirmation on the significance of marginal existence.New Historicism sticks to the point that anecdotes excluded from official history have "the touch of the real" and "counter-historical" features.This is the anecdote.Chapter Three is one of the core parts of the paper.It mainly analyzes the relationship between Cultural Poetics and other criticism theories,and elaborates on the main characteristics of Greenblatt's theory from various cultural perspectives at a macro level.Section 1 is divided into three parts.The first part explains the origin of New Historicism and the main features of historical turn,the second part analyzes the theoretical development venation and the connotation of Cultural Poetics,and the third part introduces the practical theoretical context in which Cultural Poetics was born. Section 2 starts from the entanglement of Greenblatt with Marxism,analyzes the relationship between Cultural Poetics and western Marxism,and elaborates on the hidden connection between traditional Marxism and western Marxism on the one hand and Cultural Poetics on the other hand.To Greenblatt's eye,Marxism exposes the cruelty during the stage of primitive accumulation by capitalism and lifts that to the level of historical inevitability to show the bloody nature of capitalism.But such an abstract conclusion makes it easy to lose the poetic qualities of text description of the Dark Age,unconsciously summarize the sensible pain of the people to an abstract concept and then lose the stirring power of poetics.The paper further analyzes Williams and Jameson and the intertexuality between their researches and Greenblatt's theory. Section 3 makes analysis of the relationship between Cultural Anthropology and Greenblatt's theory and mentions the concepts of "thick description" and "metaphor structure".Taking a viewpoint of Cultural Anthropology,this section has a deeper discussion of the origin and features of Greenblatt's view on culture and Cultural poetics.Greenblatt maintains that everything in practical life is an expression of such "metaphor" and has hidden poetic meanings.Therefore Cultural poetics is a kind of poetic interpretation and discovery of "metaphor" within the overall scope of human culture.It is a theoretical effort to link culture and literature with every meaningful event of human life.In Section Four,the text interpretation strategy of Greenblatt is analyzed from the perspective of readers' criticism.The purpose of placing Greenblatt's theory in the big category of readers' criticism is to highlight the importance placed by Greenblatt's text interpretation on readers' participation.Without the proactive and diversified exchanges and interaction with readers,Greenblatt's theory would have no foundation.When reading and interpretation allow readers and critics to participate in the construction of texts,there will definitely be certain political preference and ideological attitude.Such emotional and rational strength of readers by participating in the text and being activated is the "wonder" and "Resonance" called by Greenblatt.Chapter Four writes about the text interpretation by Greenblatt of "self-fashioning" during the Renaissance and introduces the characteristics of his theory and his achievements in this field.This chapter first discusses about the theoretical development of the "self" concept in the European and American cultural tradition,and then compares Greenblatt's theory with other theories to pinpoint the characteristics of Greenblatt's theory on "self-fashioning".This part is also one major part of Greenblatt's theory.Through analysis of the works form More to Shakespeare during the Renaissance,Greenblatt found that the self-fashioning of these writers combines strong resistance against and obedience and recognition of dictatorship.These fashioning powers outside the self are God,Bible,church,court,colonization,military authority and some other authorities.When talking about self-fashioning during the Renaissance, Greenblatt said that the effect of self-fashioning is acquired through something regarded as heretical,strange or frightful and done by revolting against such heretical images.He believes that self-fashioning gradually takes shape in the contradiction,subversion and suppress with mainstream ideology and dissident factors,and such self-fashioning reflects the dynamic process when the self is suppressed and relieved during the fashioning process,and demonstrates the omnipresent inherent connection between self and power structure and ideology.His belief is closely related with Foucault's Theory of Power and Discourse.There is kind of cranny between the suppression and hindrance of mainstream ideology and people's thinking and acts.The ruling class reaches a stable balance of rule in the tension of subversion and suppress by creating dissident factors and assimilating and resolving the contradiction incurred.In other words,the self in literary interpretation is formed in the resultant force of the history,after conflicts, pursuit and fighting among various powers that shape the self.The threatening dissident factors,hidden prejudice,overwhelming ideological standard and invisible power structure are exposed in text interpretation,thus revealing the fabrication and text cranny of mainstream ideology historical course.It is perceived by Greenblatt that "self-fashioning" is a kind of comprehensive cultural behavior which contains authorship,text representation and realization,and reading and interpretation.All those cultural activities are interrelated,repeated rather than finished once for all,and are the interaction of various meanings within a specific culture.Any human behavior is not generated in vacuum,but out of others' influence or with influence on others.So any boundary is merely a metaphysical wish and expression and demanded by some theoretical standards and cognition.Chapter Five introduces the main content of text interpretation theory by analyzing its interdisciplinary feature.By studying the Shakespeare plays during the Renaissance, Greenblatt explains with a concrete aesthetic practice the involvement of New Historicism in different theories.Greenblatt believes that New Historicism steps in the fields of literary criticism and literature.It tends to make hypothesis of itself and other theories by its own methodology and pose questions.That is one of the most important parts of the paper.Section 1 introduces dialogism and carnival,the two features of text interpretation of Greenblatt and analyzes Greenblatt connected with Bakhtin.Dialogism and carnival are aimed to form subversion and resistance to mainstream ideology and try to avoid the formation of new academic authority and power discourse.Section 2 tells the different layers and characteristics of text interpretation.These layers are made merely for the purpose of a clearer understanding because they are an inseparable whole. This section first exposes the complex connection between art and society,history and economy.It then introduces the theory of "negotiation","circulation" and "exchange" between literary text and social energy.Greenblatt places literary text in the extensive scope pf social culture so as to melt the boundary between literary text and social text. The concepts of "negotiation","circulation" and "exchange" mentioned here are introduced by Greenblatt from the field of economic development of United States,in order to create a familiar and surprising poetic effect.To understand these concepts is pivotal to the understanding of Cultural poetics.He says that the formation of art works contains the negotiation and exchange of social energy and involves money and reputation-the dominating medium of circulation in society.Seen by Greenblatt, literary theory and criticism are never monolog exclusive to a specific field,in particular, such literary and art forms as audio and video,Hollywood films,TV shows and novels have shaped people's life in an extensive and subtle manner,and the practical matters like practical life,political power and economic benefit have in turn become the hotbed of literary works.In addition,Greenblatt's emphasis on the context poetics nature was mainly introduced in the aesthetic effect of the interpretation of the context,that is,"wonder" and "resonance"."Wonder" and "resonance" are the two key words often used by Greenblatt and reflect his aesthetic thoughts.Though Greenblatt emphasized the ubiquitous power structure of ideology and the universal constrained upheaval and moulding,he also noticed that masterpieces surpass the ideology as the former absorbs the context elements of a certain time and creates the power of art.The "resonance" nature of literature mentioned by Greenblatt mainly refers to the aesthetic connotation of the literature context and the tension of the interrelation with various kinds of social powers that initiates and creates new context power.In this sense,literature reading is not a process of objectifying but the conflict,integration and exchanges of powers,the molding of self power and the creation of new context.Chapter Six study the conception of power by comparing and analyzing the theories of Greenblatt and Foucault.The two theorists,though having respective characteristics,have many things in common.Actually this relation has been touched in this thesis and can't be really given a though and comprehensive analysis in this chapter alone as it is a wide issue.This chapter only studies the exercise of power and the touch of the real.For the part of "the touch of the real",it has been discussed in "the Anecdote" part before.It is really an unwilling choice to discuss it again in this chapter because all problems have to be expounded separately although it is an entirety.This is the "non autonomy" of academic research explained by Greenblatt,the internalized concept model and realistic requirement,and constrains of ideology.Greenblatt accepted Foucault's concept that sometimes power is an unpredictable kind of way of thought that determines people's behavior and destiny,and that the context is the result of "negotiation" between context and social power relating to religion,custom, psychological structure,social system,family ethics and many other aspects.Power sometimes is the potential strength hidden inside the deep of people's though and its effects appear as customs,as the illusion of warm-heartedness.It alienates the nature of people and leads to the fall and failure of the ego.To Greenblatt,these invisible contending and exercising of power are "the touch of the real" as the poetic connotation in our life.Greenblatt used raw materials such as the finding of New World by Columbus to make analysis to revel the power conquer during the process of the mysterious colonization,which was in the friend atmosphere of presenting small gifts like glass beads.Language,knowledge and power together became the tools of colonization.This nature is the in-built reality.The touch of the real gives the found of the nature of the happenings.Colonization conquer is a kind of power conquer.The point is not in the conquer itself,but in the conquer stand,thought ways and angles that are neglected.The colonists didn't think the colonized local people are human beings just independent existence and beings same as themselves.They took them as the "others",as a kind of materialized existence.Under this circumstance,the presenting of a piece of glass bead became generosity and decent behavior,and the generous giving and obedience of the indigenous became their rights as the masters.This hidden thought formed the intangible cultural terrorism,which maintains the advantages of the occupiers and neglects the evil purposes of invasion by dehumanizing others in their thoughts.The last part is the conclusion of the paper,which is a brief overall assessment and a multi-level review of Greenblatt's New Historicism and Cultural Poetics,a further conclusion and summing-up of the paper,and some personal opinions.In Greenblatt's view,real life,art and aesthetics are not two utterly different things,which are separated with each others.Art and aesthetics are an important level in the form of our life and they have a infiltrating,condensing and moulding factor to the real life.Aesthetic existence and live activities are not separable from the moulding and impact of social factors.The live activities of human being are impossible to be primitive form the very beginning and this determines that they are only limited single existence in their social space.To Greenblatt,the facts of real history are often hidden in the historic archives and some inconspicuous journals,diaries,paintings and anecdotes since history is segmented and not complete.So Greenblatt usually turned his attention to "histories" and tried to fred the hidden code of the history by some narrative stories.Greenblatt's analysis of social and literature text was not based totally on the analyzing of the aesthetic nature,language characteristics and other things of formism.Instead,it was the finding of the historical factors that hidden mainstream ideology and political powers through reconstructing context in the context interpretation.The interdisciplinary feature of New Historicism is not only a striding over the subjects in the universities and the academic research institutes,but also a striding over text and social life.It is a new brand theoretical research concept that all subjects are connected with life,history are constituted with various kinds of situations and texts and those texts are connected to form the completion of culture.Historical context may be inevitable;it is more likely to be occasional stories because usually inevitability is often caused by much randomness.To some extent,Greenblatt's contributions are that he tried to connect the academic concern of the elite scholars with all real life activities such as politics and economy.He endeavored to find the materials flowing through literature,and the art and aesthetic relics in the analysis of social context.New Historicism is to probe into the meaning of human social activities from a broad view and so it is not limited to one single area.It is interdisciplinary and all human cultural phenomena are the focus of its concern.It is a wide networking of cultural interpretation,and literature is one of the core elements of its theoretical studies.New Historicism and Cultural Poetics of Greenblatt changed the relations between history and literature in the eyes of traditional scholars(including historicists and literature critics).History is clearly shown because of the hidden nature of context and narrative and is more connected theoretically and in the reality with literature.The reflection and discretion of literature on historical happenings not only revealed the social reality and people's everyday life conditions under a certain historic background, but also touches on the literature,political rights and ideology of that time.Greenblatt's New Historicism and Cultural Poetics changed the research domain of literature critics by unique ways of research and mode of theoretical thoughts,and exerted revolutionary influences on the historic research,and even more art categories including novels, poems,dramas,movies and TV programs.
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