The new, New Historicism

[Ian Murray]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n10/simp2310.htm
New historicism's opponents have not been slow to find fault with this
commitment to particularities, seeing in it a symptom of leftist
disillusionment, an evasion of the challenges posed by feminism and
the women's movement, and a head-in-the-sand attitude to the
movement's own historical identity as, for example, the purveyor of a
history of the early British Empire (Shakespeare and all) which has
remained incurious about the doings of the American empire of the
present day. New historicism's preference for Foucault over Marx,
discourse over class and ideology (the latter again criticised here by
Catherine Gallagher as a sort of fetish), metaphors of circulation and
exchange - 'social energies' - over those of cause and effect, and
almost anything over Derrida and the challenge of radical
deconstruction, seemed to many to be a rather too comfortable
rehabilitation of old pleasures in the face of what came to be known
as Theory. At the same time, there was and is a foxiness to new
historicism, which threatens its critics with the hint (sometimes more
than a hint) that all this has been thought about and dismissed for
good reason, or already taken care of. Is this true, or just
finessing? Who might tell, and how? Can we have 'devices of doubt'
along with the pleasures of 'real presence' without creating
hermeneutic turmoil? Can we enjoy our acts of reading, and the
'pastness' we meet with in them, without suffering too much anxiety?
[snip]