“New Historicism: Postmodern Historiography Between Narrativism And Heterology” by Jürgen Pieters: Summary and Critique

🔍 New Historicism as a Postmodern Historiographical Method

• Pieters establishes that New Historicism shares theoretical ground with postmodern historiography, especially the narrativist historicism of Frank Ankersmit and the heterological theory of Michel de Certeau.
• He takes Catherine Belsey’s remark that “at its most brilliant, its most elegant, New Historicism is characteristically postmodern” (p. 21) as a springboard for his analysis.

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⚖️ Rejection of Traditional Historicism

• New historicists like Greenblatt and Montrose repudiate the objectivist and positivist assumptions of earlier historicists, who viewed history as a unified, knowable monolith.
• Greenblatt critiques traditional historicism’s adherence to three flawed beliefs: deterministic views of history, value-neutrality, and a reverence for the past:

“Most of the writing labelled new historicist… has set itself resolutely against each of these positions” (Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, p. 164; quoted p. 23).

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📚 Terminological Confusion: Historicism vs. Historism

• Pieters notes that Greenblatt conflates Hegelian teleological historicism with Rankean empiricism, though they are historiographically distinct.
• Frank Ankersmit recommends labeling the latter “historism,” reserving “historicism” for speculative philosophies of history like Hegel’s (Aesthetic Politics, p. 375-6; cited p. 23).

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🧩 Narrativist Historicism: Constructing, Not Discovering, Coherence

• According to Ankersmit, narrativist historians do not uncover pre-existing coherence in history, but rather construct it through discourse:

“Narrativists… believe that the historian’s language does not reflect a coherence… in the past itself, but only gives coherence to the past” (History and Tropology, p. 155; quoted p. 26).

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📖 Greenblatt’s Dialogical History: Listening to the Past’s Multiple Voices

• Greenblatt sees history as a dialogue both within the past and between past and present, echoing Gadamer’s hermeneutics:

“While speaking about the past, [historians] also talk to it” (p. 25).

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🔁 Two Strands of Postmodern Historicism: Narrativism and Heterology

• Pieters defines narrativism (Foucault) as focused on discourse and systems of knowledge; it analyzes how epochs construct meaning through discursive formations.
• Heterology (Certeau) is more psychoanalytic, concerned with the repressed “other” of history—that which resists representation:

“The repressed… returns in our descriptions of [the past]” (p. 28).

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📚 Greenblatt as Both Narrativist and Heterologist

• Greenblatt’s method combines both approaches via his distinctive use of historical anecdotes.
• These anecdotes function both as discursive nodes (narrativist) and as sites of estrangement and alterity (heterological):

“The anecdote both serves as the central locus of a culture’s dispersive nature… and as the site where history’s other can be brought to the fore” (p. 29).

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🔬 The Anecdote: Bridge Between Narrative and the Real

• Anecdotes provide textual entry points into historical energies and subjectivities, yet their connection to reality is constructed, not mimetic:

“[The] anecdote… exceeds its literary status… [and] uniquely refers to the real” (Joel Fineman, quoted p. 37).

• Greenblatt’s term “social energy” captures this effect: moments that transmit affect across time and social structures, though their origin is not empirically fixed:

“The term implies something measurable, yet I cannot provide a convenient and reliable formula… it is manifested in the capacity to produce… collective experiences” (Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 6; quoted p. 33).

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🎭 Cultural Zones and Discursive Systems

• In Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt expands on how cultural “zones” like religion, theater, or politics regulate discourse and meaning.
• Influenced by Foucault, these zones are not discrete but interconnected through the circulation of symbolic materials and power:

“Zones… are societal spaces whose specificity is functionally determined by the discourses that are proper to them” (p. 32).

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📡 Resonance and Wonder: Dual Function of Cultural Artifacts

• Greenblatt theorizes two aesthetic-historical effects:
  • Resonance: cultural artifacts reflect historical systems.
  • Wonder: they also provoke estrangement and attention to singularity.

“It is the function of the new historicism continually to renew the marvelous at the heart of the resonant” (Learning to Curse, p. 181; quoted p. 36).

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🪞 The Risk of Regression: Historicism’s Return?

• Pieters warns that Greenblatt’s use of “social energy” may unintentionally reintroduce metaphysical coherence, akin to traditional historicism’s “historical idea”:

“Anecdotes will no longer serve as scenes of dispersal, but as… manifestations of social energy” (p. 34).

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Conclusion: A Hybrid Heuristic Practice

• Pieters concludes that Greenblatt’s method is best seen as a hybrid, drawing strength from both narrativist and heterological postmodern historiography.
• The tension between discursive construction and yearning for the real is not a flaw but a heuristic asset, grounding New Historicism’s critical potential.

🔍 1. Postmodern Historiography

• Bridges literary criticism and historiographical theory by aligning New Historicism with the postmodern critique of historical objectivity.
• Draws directly on Frank Ankersmit’s “narrativist historicism”, showing that New Historicism shares postmodern skepticism about historical facts and emphasizes discursive construction (Pieters, p. 24).

“[N]ew historicism can indeed be regarded as the literary-historical counterpart to recent, ‘postmodern’ developments in the theory of history” (Pieters, p. 22).

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🧩 2. New Historicism

• Clarifies the theoretical ambiguity in Stephen Greenblatt’s rejection of the term “historicism”, revealing that Greenblatt’s approach aligns more with a revised, postmodern form of historicism rather than rejecting it outright (Pieters, p. 23).
• Identifies dual methodologies within New Historicism:
  • Narrativism (influenced by Foucault)
  • Heterology (inspired by de Certeau)
    → This dual typology deepens understanding of New Historicist practice (Pieters, p. 27).

“To fully characterize Greenblatt’s reading method, we do well to distinguish between two variants of postmodern historicism” (Pieters, p. 21).

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🗣️ 3. Discourse Theory / Foucauldian Criticism

• Shows how Foucauldian “archaeology” and “genealogy” inform New Historicist methods of cultural analysis (Pieters, p. 29–30).
• Introduces the concept of “cultural dispositifs”, systems of discursive and institutional formation, rooted in Foucault’s theory, as central to Greenblatt’s method.

“Such discursive systems resemble what Michel Foucault has termed cultural ‘dispositifs'” (Pieters, p. 30).

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🧠 4. Psychoanalytic Historiography (via Michel de Certeau)

• Emphasizes the role of repression and the unconscious in history-writing, grounding the heterological variant of New Historicism in psychoanalytic theory.
• Certeau’s “return of the repressed” is linked to Greenblatt’s use of anecdotes as sites where the silenced or marginalized resurfaces (Pieters, p. 27–28, 35).

“The repressed… returns in our descriptions of it. The repressed… is there in its absence” (Pieters, p. 28).

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📖 5. Narrative Theory / Theory of Representation

• Applies the “historical idea” (from Humboldt via Ankersmit) as a literary-critical tool for interpreting Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning as a narrative function rather than a historical “fact” (Pieters, p. 26).
• Shows how historical narratives do not discover structures in the past but impose them, reinforcing poststructuralist views of narrative mediation (Pieters, p. 25).

“Narrativists believe that the historian’s language… gives coherence to the past” (Pieters, p. 25).

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🎭 6. Cultural Materialism / Cultural Poetics

• Deepens cultural materialist theory by detailing how social energy—as used by Greenblatt—circulates between cultural zones and texts, shaping meaning (Pieters, p. 33).
• Emphasizes that literary texts are active agents in cultural discourse, not passive reflections of social reality.

“[Cultural] zones are societal spaces… whose specificity is functionally determined by the discourses that are proper to them” (Pieters, p. 32).

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🧵 7. Rhetoric and Aesthetics

• Reframes Greenblatt’s aesthetic terms “resonance” and “wonder” as rhetorical devices that negotiate between historical context and textual autonomy (Pieters, p. 36).
• Connects “social energy” to rhetorical traditions via Aristotle’s energeia, reviving classical poetics within a postmodern historiographical frame (Pieters, p. 33–34).

“Its origins lie in rhetoric rather than physic… the metaphor refers to the power of language to cause in the reader ‘a stir to the mind'” (Pieters, p. 33).

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✍️ 8. Critical Hermeneutics

• Applies Gadamerian insight about the historian’s historicity and the dialogical nature of understanding the past (Pieters, p. 22, 25).
• Strengthens literary hermeneutics by recognizing that all readings are historically situated dialogues rather than objective reconstructions.

“[W]hile speaking about the past, [historians] also talk to it” (Pieters, p. 25).

• ⚠️ Ambiguity in Greenblatt’s Positioning
  Pieters admits that it’s difficult to place Stephen Greenblatt definitively within either the narrativist or heterological tradition:

“His reading method can be said to contain traces of both approaches.” (p. 28)
This lack of clarity may weaken the heuristic value of the narrativist/heterological divide itself.

• ⚠️ Tension Between Theory and Practice
  Although the essay establishes theoretical foundations (via Ankersmit, Foucault, Certeau), Pieters acknowledges Greenblatt’s resistance to theorization and his tendency to blur philosophical distinctions for rhetorical purposes:

“Greenblatt tries to take the two under one and the same umbrella, without wondering about the appropriateness of doing so.” (p. 23)

• ⚠️ Risk of Sliding into Traditional Historicism
  Pieters warns that despite New Historicism’s postmodern claims, it may inadvertently revert to traditional historicist assumptions—particularly through its search for cultural coherence via concepts like “social energy”:

“This logic may ultimately be taken to imply that the historian… will be able to get in touch with the real of the past.” (p. 34)

• ⚠️ Problem of “Arbitrary Connectedness”
  Greenblatt’s use of anecdotes (as discussed by Pieters) has been criticized for lacking causal or methodological rigor:

“What is the exact nature of the relationship between Iago’s attitude and that of the Spanish conquistadores?” (p. 31)
Critics like Walter Cohen argue this leads to thematic free association rather than disciplined historical analysis.

• ⚠️ Anecdote as a Double-Edged Method
  While the anecdote offers insight into cultural systems (resonance/wonder), its referential ambiguity raises problems:

“The anecdote both serves as the central locus of a culture’s dispersive nature… and as the site where history’s other can be brought to the fore.” (p. 28)
This duality complicates claims to either historicist precision or heterological disruption.

• ⚠️ Overreliance on Poststructuralist Canon
  Pieters’ reliance on Foucault, Certeau, and Ankersmit, while insightful, may limit alternative historicist models (e.g. Marxist materialism, feminist historiography), narrowing the theoretical diversity.
• ⚠️ Potential Idealization of Anecdotal Heuristics
  The trust placed in “thick description” and cultural micro-events risks romanticizing isolated fragments, while neglecting broader socio-economic structures or empirical history.
• ⚠️ Methodological Vagueness of “Social Energy”
  Pieters acknowledges Greenblatt’s own uncertainty in defining this concept:

“The question of the true essence of social energy is to a large extent unanswerable.” (p. 33)