“The New Historicism and Marxism” by Tom Lewis: Summary and Critique

🔴 Critique of New Historicism’s Class Position

• 🧩 New Historicism reflects middle-class intellectual detachment: Lewis argues it emerged from the “new middle classes” and expresses a “modernist stance of ironic detachment” after the failures of the 1968 radical wave (p. 14).
• 🕳️ Politically “abstract and paralyzing”: Though nuanced, New Historicism’s politics are seen as ultimately hollow and non-transformative (p. 14).
• 📉 It fails to offer a path to real social change, remaining within the confines of academia.

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🟢 Gallagher’s Defense of New Historicism Challenged

• 📖 Catherine Gallagher’s essay “Marxism and the New Historicism” is the focal point of Lewis’s critique. She claims New Historicism continues the legacy of 1960s radicalism, particularly the New Left (p. 14).
• 🚫 Lewis disagrees, arguing that Gallagher “preserves and continues” New Left tendencies while overlooking their failures (p. 14–15).
• 📚 He sees her narrative as a misrepresentation that evades the structural decline of radical activism into academic theory.

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🟡 New Left: From Revolution to Radical Chic

• 🎯 Initial successes: The New Left opposed the Vietnam War and supported civil rights and anti-imperialist struggles (p. 15).
• 🏫 Co-opted by academia: Lewis criticizes the transition of radicals into academic roles, noting that they “quickly went from radical to radical chic” (p. 15).
• 🌀 Obsession with theory: The shift from organizing to writing about “Althusser-Lacan-Barthes-Derrida-Foucault” became symptomatic of this detachment (p. 15).

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🔵 Feminism and the Limits of Separatism

• 👭 Women’s radical movements were crucial, but fragmented by internal contradictions and identity politics.
• 🔍 Sexism within radical groups: Women faced “virulent sexism and bureaucratic elitism” in groups like SDS (p. 15).
• 🚪 Separatist responses: Groups like Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists emerged, but often led to exclusion and division (p. 15–16).
• 💔 Fragmentation over unity: Debates over lesbianism, men’s involvement, and personal lifestyles led to the movement’s splintering: “Real political differences manifested themselves in supposedly personal disagreements” (p. 17).
• 🔕 Loss of democratic structure: Meetings degenerated into confusion and cliquism, exemplified by Bread and Roses’ Meredith Tax: “The meetings were a total turn-off” (Echols 1989, quoted on p. 17).

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🟣 Critique of Identity Politics and “Decentered” Solidarity

• 🧱 Gallagher celebrates the “logic of decentered distribution,” where each group speaks for itself against a system of oppression (p. 17).
• ❗ Lewis argues this leads to political dead ends: “Every oppression presumed that its particular oppression was causally primary” (p. 17).
• 🚧 He warns that identity politics, as practiced, became an “anti-politics of identity” leading to fragmentation and “apolitical introspection” (Kauffman 1990: 68).

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🟠 Cultural Critique Without Class Is Empty

• 🎭 Gallagher favors New Historicism’s view that “culture achieves total control through its very fracturing” (p. 19).
• 🚫 Quietism over resistance: This “seems in itself quietistic,” leading to the belief that resistance is futile (p. 19).
• 📚 Lewis critiques this position as surrendering the possibility of revolutionary literature in favor of academic relativism.

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🟤 New Historicism vs. Left Formalism

• 📐 Gallagher distances herself from Althusserian formalism but retains some of its apolitical methods: she critiques the idea that “form itself were revelatory” (p. 18).
• 🧠 Lewis sees New Historicists as combining “a politics of voluntarism with a politics of textualism,” avoiding structural material analysis (p. 18).
• 🎭 Their emphasis on ironic consciousness promotes passivity, not political change.

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⚫ Political Cowardice: No Space for Revolution

• 🛑 Gallagher claims critics can’t become political subjects without “an experience of decentered helplessness” (p. 21).
• 📣 Lewis denounces this as academic defeatism. Revolutionary movements have always emerged from those deemed “decentered” by the system.
• 💥 He asserts that refusing to “argue confidently for revolutionary positions” leads to complicity with the status quo (p. 20–21).

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🔶 Rebuilding Class-Based Criticism

• 🏗️ Lewis calls for returning to socialist, class-oriented criticism—not postmodern detachment.
• ✊ Key tasks include:
  • Challenging Stalinism, Maoism, and Eurocommunism
  • Reaffirming the agency of the working class
  • Confronting movementism’s limitations
  • Re-engaging with Marxist strategies for change (p. 21–22)
• 🧭 A political alternative to liberal reform must be forged through critical, organized activism—not just “signifying practice.”

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⚪ Final Warning: Intellectual Elitism and Technocratic Drift

• ⚖️ Lewis warns that post-1968 intellectuals increasingly fantasize about “hegemonic leadership roles” in a future society based on “technocratic expertise” (p. 22).
• 📉 This shift reflects the “abandonment of real politics” in favor of academic careerism and top-down change.

🔴 📌 Reassertion of Historical Materialism in Literary Criticism (Marxist Theory)

• Lewis defends Marxist theory as essential for restoring the link between literature and material conditions.
• He insists on class struggle as the “crucial contradiction” overlooked by New Historicism, which “knows but denies the primacy of class” (p. 20).
• 📣 Contribution: Re-centers class and political economy as non-negotiable foundations of literary theory, against post-structural detachment.

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🟢 📌 Critique of Postmodernism and Cultural Relativism

• While New Historicism claims postmodern lineage, Lewis calls it a disguised form of modernist elitism: “Ultimately modernist in a ‘postmodernist’ guise” (p. 18).
• 📣 Contribution: Challenges the theoretical legitimacy of postmodernism within literary criticism by exposing its depoliticized, academic core.

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🟡 📌 Intervention in the Identity Politics Debate (Cultural Theory / Feminist Theory)

• He critiques the fragmentation caused by identity politics, stating it led to “a cycle of fragmentation and diffusion of political energies” (Kauffman 1990:68, cited p. 17).
• 📣 Contribution: Warns that substituting identity for class undermines collective resistance, calling for theories that integrate both identity and class struggle.

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🔵 📌 Deconstruction of New Historicism’s Political Claims (New Historicism)

• While acknowledging its influence, Lewis argues that New Historicism’s “ironic detachment” and emphasis on textual multiplicity result in political paralysis (p. 14, 19).
• 📣 Contribution: Exposes New Historicism’s limitations as a literary-political framework, pushing scholars to rethink its revolutionary pretensions.

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🟣 📌 Recovery of Revolutionary Criticism (Critical Theory / Praxis-Based Theories)

• Advocates for literary criticism that makes explicit political commitments: “What’s wrong with a political criticism that furthers the struggle for socialism, women’s liberation…?” (p. 20).
• 📣 Contribution: Reorients literary theory toward activism and movement-building, bridging critique and praxis.

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🟠 📌 Re-evaluation of Althusserian Formalism (Structuralist Marxism)

• Lewis critiques the “left formalism” of Althusser and Macherey for assuming art’s subversiveness without political grounding (p. 18–19).
• 📣 Contribution: Suggests that even Marxist formalism must be accountable to historical and revolutionary practice, not just structural reading.

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🟤 📌 Challenge to the Academic Co-option of Radicalism (Cultural Studies)

• Notes that many radicals “went from radical to radical chic” as academia replaced activism (p. 15).
• 📣 Contribution: Calls on Cultural Studies to re-engage with its political roots, including trade unionism and working-class alliances.

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⚫ 📌 Redefining the Role of the Intellectual (Public Intellectualism / Theory & Politics)

• Warns against technocratic elitism: “The generation that lost its revolutionary illusions… fantasizes a hegemonic leadership role in the future society” (p. 22).
• 📣 Contribution: Urges literary theorists to act as participants, not managers of social transformation.

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🔶 📌 Restatement of Collective Agency in Theory (Radical Humanism / Political Literary Theory)

• Rejects the idea that “decentered subjects” cannot change the world, noting they have—through revolutions, movements, and uprisings (p. 21).
• 📣 Contribution: Defends a critical humanism rooted in collective agency, challenging the fatalism of structuralist/poststructuralist models.

🔴 🧱 Overreliance on Class as the Primary Analytical Lens

• Critics might argue that Lewis’s unwavering focus on class struggle ignores the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and identity.
• His Marxist insistence on economic determinism may overlook the complexities of cultural production and subjective experience in literature.

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🟡 🔍 Reductionism Toward New Historicism

• Lewis presents a monolithic and often dismissive portrayal of New Historicist critics.
• He underplays the nuanced, historicized readings of power and ideology offered by New Historicists like Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher.

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🟢 🎭 Mischaracterization of Postmodernism and Irony

• His critique that New Historicism promotes “ironic detachment” (p. 14) could be seen as oversimplified.
• Postmodern irony, in many readings, serves as resistance, not apathy—contrary to Lewis’s claim that it “paralyzes” political engagement.

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🔵 📚 Dismissal of Identity Politics as Fragmentation

• Critics might reject Lewis’s claim that identity politics leads to “a cycle of fragmentation” (p. 17).
• This view undermines the political realities of marginalized groups, suggesting that their struggles are distractions from the “main” class struggle.

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🟣 📏 Dogmatic Marxist Framework

• Lewis’s tone at times is rigidly ideological, favoring Leninist class politics as the only legitimate form of literary-political analysis.
• This could alienate scholars who seek more pluralistic or hybrid theoretical approaches (e.g., combining feminism, postcolonial theory, or queer theory with Marxism).

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🟤 📉 Neglect of Institutional Realities in Academia

• Lewis critiques New Left academics for entering the academy, yet offers no practical alternative for how intellectuals should function in institutional spaces.
• His dismissal of academic work as “radical chic” (p. 15) may seem cynical and dismissive of genuine pedagogical labor.

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⚫ 🎯 Lack of Engagement with Evolving New Historicism

• By 1991, New Historicism had already diversified. Lewis does not sufficiently engage newer or more politically committed variations of the approach.
• His critique is largely based on a selective reading of Gallagher, without fully addressing scholars like Jameson or Greenblatt’s later work.

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🔶 🤝 Missed Opportunity for Theoretical Synthesis

• Lewis insists on a clear division between Marxism and New Historicism, but misses chances for synthesis, such as integrating discourse analysis into historical materialism.
• Critics might argue that bridging rather than polarizing these traditions could be more productive.