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Contexts of Interpretation |
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It is hard to explain the recent popularity of the so-called New Historicism in Anglo-American modern language studies except as an exaggerated reaction to some of the exaggerations of Deconstruction, which preceded and accompanied it. Deconstruction, for its part, had succeeded in supplanting New Criticism and imposing itself not only by virtue of its intrinsic merits and by a particularly felicitous starting-position within American academic politics, but also because in certain crucial regards it could be seen to satisfy some of the very same criteria which New Criticism had established as valid over the course of several decades. Both critical approaches practised especially refined and subtle varieties of close reading in preference to external contextualizations (history, biography, psychology, etc.). Both focused upon a relatively small canon of great works (for the most part Romantic and so-called pre- and post-Romantic), and both tended to discover within these works structures of paradox and irony. This continuity of taste and method subtended, permitted, and to a certain extent defused the differences between the two methods: Deconstruction's enlargement of the canon to include not only lyric poetry but also great novels and works of philosophy (for the most part, again, Romantic and so-called pre- and post-Romantic), and its reinterpretation of repetition no longer as a sign and instrument of organic closure, but instead as an uncontrolled symptom of the obsessive failure to attain closure. If New Criticism had thought it could dispense once and for all with the category of intention, Deconstruction discovered itself compulsively returning over and over again to its starting point in the problematization of that very same category. |
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As happens so often in intellectual history, New Historicism moved to usurp Deconstruction's dominance by rehearsing some of the same strategies which Deconstruction had applied with such success against New Criticism. If Deconstruction had enlarged the canon to include fiction and philosophy, New Historicism went on to include virtually any text whatsoever, not disdaining historiography (understood as just one more text) and public and private documents, or even advertising and the artifacts of popular culture. Now, however, the category of literariness, which had fortified the bastion of New Criticism's and Deconstruction's smaller canon, would clearly no longer do. Instead, the concept of ideology had to be deployed so as to bridge the differences between literary and non-literary texts. The real but secondary differences in method between the two schools were well illustrated by those which separated their two French inspirers: if Derrida represented one extreme of programmatically syntagmatic or metonymic exploration of purely internal contextualizations, leaping nimbly from one part of a text to another without seeming to trouble himself to explain his method or to seek external warrants for his claims, Foucault championed entirely paradigmatic or metaphorical studies of largely external contextuali- |
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