An Interpretation Of Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics From Two Dimensions

The history is a tension structure of culture, literature interacts with and“fashion” by culture in the history. Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics is expandedon this understanding of the relationship between literature and culture. Hebelieves that social actions “are themselves always embedded in systems ofpublic signification,” and literary works are “by their nature the manifestassurance of a similar embeddedness.” Cultural Poetics as an interpreter,must grasp more sensitively the consequences of the fact “by investigatingboth the social presence to the world of the literary text and the socialpresence of the world in the literary text.” In the opinion of Cultural Poetics,all human activities were seen as cultural texts, and it advocates tounderstanding that “how literary and social identities were formed in thisculture” in its text interpretation.Greenblatt’s Cultural Poetics shows a transfer of value orientation fromliterary studies to cultural studies. While the traditional boundary between literature and culture was subverted, the unique nature and noumenon ofliterature was ignored. There are two most important dimensions, reality andaesthetic, that distinguishes literature from other cultural forms. From theinterpretation on these two dimensions, Greenblatt’ Cultural Poetics broughtliterary study in the plight: on the one hand, the authenticity of literature isalmost equivalent to it of culture; on the other hand, he tries to dig out anaesthetic energy from real social life and discourse. If it lost its essentialattribute, literature would be a vague existence. Then literary texts couldn’tdistinguish itself from other cultural texts on essential nature, and literaturecouldn’t distinguish itself from other cultural forms.