Page 54 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 45

Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

preoccupied with ‘the embeddedness of cultural objects in the
contingencies of history’ (Greenblatt, 1990, p. 164). Individual
authors and texts are thus in no sense autonomous. Rather, the
work of art is a product of the ‘negotiation between a creator or
class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared
repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of
society’. These negotiations take place, Greenblatt continues,
through the ‘circulation of materials and discourses’ in the
‘hidden places of negotiation and exchange’ (pp. 158–9).

New historicism and cultural materialism
New historicism clearly shares many of its methodologies and
assumptions with cultural materialism. According to Ryan, they
‘are united by their compulsion to relate literature to history, to
treat texts as indivisible from contexts, and to do so from a polit-
ically charged perspective forged in the present’ (Ryan, 1996,
p. xi). New historicism could, in a sense, be considered as cultural
materialism in a postmodern register, preoccupied with histori-
cising texts and with the workings of power through culture, but
focused on issues of individual subjectivity construction, gender
and the workings of patriarchy, rather than on class and nation.
Where Williams’ cultural materialism had been concerned with
the connections between social class and collective emancipatory
politics, new historicism tends to exhibit the characteristic pre-
occupations of the officially sanctioned forms of political
radicalism within the North American academy: subjectivity
formation, desire, race, gender, queer theory, and so on. These
latter are also analysable in more strictly cultural materialist
terms, however, as Dollimore and Sinfield’s work clearly
suggests (Dollimore, 1991; Sinfield, 1994; Sinfield, 1994a). The
more fundamental differences between cultural materialism and
the new historicism are threefold: first, the theoretical question,
concerning the subversive potential of apparently subversive
texts; second, the political question, concerning the competing
claims of academic professionalism and subordinate subcultures;
and third, the epistemological question, concerning the status of
the ‘referent’ to which texts refer.

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