The New Historicism Reader. - book reviews

Style, Spring, 1996 by Gustavo Guerra

In the collection The New Historicism Reader, H. Aram Veeser offers a sequel to his The New Historicism (1989). Different from the previous, theoretically oriented volume on the subject, The New Historicism Reader presents a selection of New Historicist essays engaged in practice. We do not find here a group of essays discussing the New Historicism from a theoretical perspective, but a group of scholars doing New Historicism. The stated purpose of Veeser's collection is to present readers with "the furthest reaches of New Historicist scholarship" (v). Veeser's language indicates that there have been major developments in the field since his previous collection. Although this is in fact the case, Veeser's new collection fails to live up to its promise. This failure results primarily from Veeser's reluctance to enlist in his ranks anybody outside of literature departments. But it also results from his strong determination to confine the movement to the (now somewhat calcified) five-point definition of the New Historicism that he gave in The New Historicism. Thus Veeser here turns the New Historicism into something it always denied being: a unified movement whose tools could be applied mechanically to any text - albeit in actual fact the movement is limited only to literary texts.

The fact that it was not a movement, that it was not a common set of practices had, until the publication of The New Historicism Reader, been one of the New Historicism's most problematic - if not baffling - issues. Veeser himself, in his new book, testifies to this prior critical concern. "When I attempted something like this in 1989" (that is, defining and grouping the New Historicists), writes Veeser, "I was intrepid ... because New Historicists were always proclaiming themselves to be unrelated to each other. In the very book that I was introducing, the four bona fide New Historicists were in denial about indulging in a movement of any sort" (1). And then in a bold sweep of the pen, almost comparable to those of some New Historicists, Veeser came up with a phrase that would resonate for long in the ears of many readers: "the New Historicism," Veeser established, "is a phrase without an adequate referent." But rather than saying this it would have been better to call "the New Historicism" a phrase with a very broad referent. The broad referentiality of the phrase makes it possible to include almost anybody in the field. To defend himself against the early accusation that the New Historicism was a movement limited only to those at Berkeley, Veeser quotes Vincent Leitch writing that the movement was "manifested first during the late 1970s in the writings of [Stephen] Greenblatt, [Frank] Lentricchia, [Edward] Said, and others" (28). Although Lentricchia has commented - negatively - on the movement (see Lentricchia), he is not normally associated with New Historicist writing. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, is Said.(1) But most interesting is Leitch's "others," which leaves the field open for the inclusion of anyone who might come in handy for argumentative purposes. This broad referentiality also helps explain reactions like that of some critics who protest against what looks like one of the main features of the movement: its capricious capacity for all-inclusiveness. Simon During, for example, protests that "books and articles of a bewildering variety have been called New Historicism" (quoted in Veeser 1). A recent ad advertises Sacvan Bercovitch'swork as New Historical.(2) For some of the contributors to the present collection, Bercovitch's work embodies all those elements which the New Historicism opposes rabidly: grand narrative, a unified view of history, inattention to the seemingly unimportant and minute. But whereas before The New Historicism Reader critics made it a point to discuss what made the New Historicism such, Veeser has now used his five-point definition of New Historicism to delimit considerably its field of concern. Whereas Veeser's first anthology was marked by a striking lack of consensus as to what this critical site (not in principle a movement then) was really all about, his new collection is conversely marked by the serene acceptance and complacency of a movement that has won critical acclaim and has easily made its way in the academic world.

Veeser uses this five-point definition of the movement because, he claims, it is these five points that commentators have cited the most. The five points Veeser refers to are:

1) every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices; 2) every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tool it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes; 3) literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably; 4) no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths or expresses unalterable human nature; and 5) a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe. (2)