Montrose, Louis. “New Historicisms.” Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language Association, 1992. 392-417.(Flores's notes)

392 “the writing and reading of texts . . . are now being construed as historically determined and determining modes of cultural work”
“. . . individual subjectivities and collective structures are mutually shaped”
393 the discourses of poststructuralism share a “problematization of those processes by which meaning and value are produced and grounded; a shift from an essential or immanent to a historical, contextual, and conjunctural model of signification; and a general suspicion of closed systems, totalities, and universals”
395 “The emergent social-political-historical orientation in literary studies is characterized by an antireflectionist perspective on cultural work, by a shift in emphasis from the aesthetic analysis of verbal artifacts to the ideological analysis of discursive practices, and by an understanding of meaning as situationally and provisionally constructed.”
“on the one hand, the social is understood to be discursively constructed; and on the other, language use is understood to be necessarily dialogical, to be socially and materially determined . . .[as Jameson states] ‘history is inaccessible to us except in textual form’”
396 Derrida avers that deconstructive practices are “also and first of all political and institutional practices,” particularly the [in Montrose’s words] “specific ideological force of those discourses that seek to reduce the work of discourse to the mere reflection of an ontologically prior, essential or empirical reality”
398 “the newer historical criticism could claim to be new in refusing unexamined distinctions between ‘literature’ and ‘history,’ between ‘text’ and ‘context,’ in resisting a tendency to posit and privilege an autonomous individual—whether an author or work—to be set against a social or literary background”
400 “In other words, critique of the Geertzian mode of analysis concentrates on the ways in which a cultural poetics suppresses or subsumes a cultural politics”
Objection to some NH implied premise of objects of study simply related by cultural contingency or determinism, emphasizing structural relations at the expense of sequential processes (401)
401 “Certain examples of new-historicist work imply that a culture is a shared system of symbols expressive of a cohesive and closed . . . ideology. . . . [including] the methodological assumption of tropological rather than causal relations among new hitoricism’s objects of study. . . and the apparent incompatibility of the cultural paradigm with the dynamics of ideological resistance, conflict, and change.” (401-02)
402 containment vs. subversion debate summarized
403 but emphasis on containment tends to misread Greenblatt and esp. Foucault’s assertion of multiple sites of power and resistance, often local resistance
404 Montrose: “my own position has been that a closed and static, monolithic and homogeneous notion of ideology must be replaced by one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual” ([similar to Raymond Williams’s recognition of dynamic relations among residual and emergent, oppositional and alternative values])
405 M. cites Dollimore’s emphasis on context of articulation and the effects of social process as necessary to determining whether something is subversive in its reception
408 in reviewing NH as contested term/practice, M. mentions productive work of those with a “poststructuralist sensitivity to both the instability and the instrumentality of representation.”
409 “Inhabiting the discursive spaces currently traversed by the term new historicism are some of the most complex, persistent, and unsettling problems that professors of literature attempt to confront or to evade—among them, the conflict between essentialist and historically specific perspectives on the category of literature and its relations with other discourses; the possible relations between cultural practices and social, political, and economic institutions and processes; the consequences of poststructuralist theories of textuality for historical or materialist criticism; the means by which ideologies are produced, sustained, and contested; the operations that construct, maintain, destabilize, and alter subjectivity through the shifting conjunctures of multiple subject positions.”
410 “The poststructuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies I characterize chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textualities of histories.”(see M’s elaboration on this statement)
411 M. on the ideology of form and form of ideology to address the “reciprocally constitutive and transformative relation between the discursive and material domains”—in short, figuration is materially constitutive of society and history (412)
412 problem of history vs structuralist/poststructuralist formalism (objectivist determinism/subjectivist freeplay) “Subject, both a grammatical and a political term, has come into widespread use not merely as a fashionable synonym for the individual but precisely as a means of emphasizing that individuals and the very concept of the individual are historically constituted in language and society” (412-13)
413 “I believe that we should resist the reductive tendency to formulate our conceptual terms in binary oppositions; rather, we should construe them as joined in a mutually constitutive, recursive, and transformative process.”
414 “the processes of subjectification and structuration are both interdependent and ineluctably historical . . . . collective structures may enable as well as constrain individual agency. . . . my invocation of the term subject is meant to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand, it shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action, endowing them with subjectivity and with the capacity for agency; and, on the other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within—it subjects them to—social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency, that ultimately exceed their comprehension and control” (414-15)
415 “In any situation of signification, the theoretical indeterminacy of the signifying process is delimited by the historical specificity of discursive practices, by the constraints and resources of the reading formation within which that signification takes place.”
416 importance of articulating the humanities as a site of “intellectually and socially significant work in the historical present”

New Historicism (Flores)
Here are some key assumptions of new historicist theory and practice as summarized by H. Aram Veeser (qtd. in CTP 115) and Steven Lynn (Texts and Contexts 131):
1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
2. that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
3. that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably;
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature;
5. that a critical method and language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe;
6. that history is knowable only in the sense that all texts are knowable--that is by interpretation, argument, speculation;
7. literature is not simply a mirror of historical reality; history in fact isn’t a mirror of historical reality. Literature is shaped by history, and even shapes history; it is also distorted by history, and is even discontinuous with history.
8. Historians and critics must view “the facts” of history subjectively; in fact, the “facts” must be viewed as their creation.
Such premises invite you to explore how a specific literary text represents a particular cultural (social, political, economic, class, religion, gender--ideology) perspective that may be peculiar to its historical context. In his essay “Culture,” Stephen Greenblatt suggests that we ask these questions:
a. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
b. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
c. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
d. Upon what social understandings does the work depend?
e. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
f. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?

Finally, in your analysis you could draw upon (or respond to) Greenblatt by explaining, distinguishing, and illustrating the concepts of “mobility,” “constraint,” and “exchange [circulation]” in relation to a particular poem.

Louis Montrose’s “New Historicisms” essay is too complex to summarize here, but among his concerns is the characterization of new historicism as “an academic site of ideological struggle between containment and subversion. This struggle may be reduced to the following scenario. Critics who emphasize the possibilities for the effective agency of individual or collective subjects against forms of domination, exclusion, and assimilation have energetically contested critics who stress the capacity of the early modern state, as personified in the monarch, to contain apparently subversive gestures, or even to produce them precisely in order to contain them” (Redrawing the Boundaries 402). Montrose wants to move beyond the containment/subversion binary opposition to understand how these concepts are mutually complicit, and to suggest that while our subjectivity/identity produced by discourse and material forces and relationships, we may also discover facets of individual agency and the capacity for resistance: “Thus my invocation of the term subject is meant to suggest an equivocal process of subjectification: on the one hand, it shapes individuals as loci of consciousness and initiators of action, endowing them with subjectivity and with the capacity for agency; and, on the other hand, it positions, motivates, and constrains them within--it subjects them to--social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency, that ultimately exceed their comprehension or control” (Montrose 414-15).