This discussion revolves around Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Yet, it has a more fundamental purpose—namely, to critically examine Greenblatt's theoretical premise regarding the relations between history, ideology and literary texts in light of Ludwik Fleck's notion of thought-style (denkkollektiv). The analysis of Greenblatt's Lucretian argument demonstrates that when applied to the study of literature, despite its overwhelming creativity and rhetorical charm the neo-historical thought-style is both reductive and woefully speculative. It thus needs to be adopted far more cautiously. In line with Aristotle's notion of mimesis, I finally suggest that studies of this nature should be presented as the embodiment of historical possibilities—i.e., a fictional stance à la " alternative history " approach.
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The Johns Hopkins Guide to …
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In this age of instability, when the semiotic paradigm seems to have effectively established the postmodern destabilization of authority by requiring the production of knowledge to be situated in terms of total contingency, Stephen Greenblatt’s position on the central issues of critical theory seems to be situated in the unstable spaces between positions, and it is, I argue, precisely this liminality that allows his productive practice to explore the space between the discourses of Anthropological and Literary analysis, between a work of art and its social context, and between the agency of an existential self and the deconstruction of that self in language. The fecundity of a strategic negotiation of these conceptual conflicts between agency and contingency appears to be at the heart of Greenblatt’s methodological confessions in his essay “The Touch of the Real,” and thus, understanding this negotiation is key to understanding Greenblatt’s ability to produce literary knowledge. In this paper, I examine Greenblatt's ability to mobilize a broad range of linked but distinctive contradictory theoretical positions, and how the tactical negotiations he develops exposes the problematic nature of how the rhetorical strategy of New Historicism fits into the semiotic paradigm.
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In a metahistorical perspective, the present articles demonstrates that identifications of radical rupture in history often work as an attempt to deny the role of the historical within the humanities and especially within the discipline of comparative literature; it furthermore argues that it also influences the possibility of general cultural criticism because it presupposes certain ontological assumptions of time and history and a specific idea of what ‘modern society’ is. The article concludes by discussing two strategies for a more coherent notion of literary history in C.S. Lewis’ historiographical essays and Bruno Latour’s theory of science respectively. This leads to the claim of the inevitability of history within the humanities: One cannot get dispose of it, even if that were desirable; luckily that is not even the case.
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Comparative Literature Studies
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