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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

literature’s benign disruptions’ (Gallagher, 1996, p. 53). The lines
of disagreement can be overdrawn: musing on whether sites of
resistance are ultimately cooptable, Greenblatt comments simply
that ‘Some are, some aren’t’ (Greenblatt, 1990, p. 165); confronting
much the same issue, Sinfield concludes that ‘there is no simple
way through, but every reason to go on trying’ (Sinfield, 1994a,
p. 27). They are agreed, in short, that entrapment and dissidence
are both theoretically possible. The difference is one of relative
probabilities, then, but also of intent and purpose and hence,
necessarily, of politics.
Which takes us to our second difference. New historicism has
generally been much more reticent than cultural materialism as
to its politics. So where Dollimore and Sinfield insisted on cultural
materialism’s commitment to the ‘transformation’ of the entire
‘social order’, Gallagher describes the new historicism as ‘a
criticism whose politics are . . . difficult to specify’ (Gallagher,
1996, p. 45). Greenblatt himself famously defined the ‘function
of the new historicism’ as ‘to renew the marvelous at the heart
of the resonant’—a nice turn of phrase, to be sure, but hardly a
political manifesto (Greenblatt, 1990, p. 181). As Wilson has
observed: ‘In the many maps New Historicists drew of them-
selves... “cultural materialism” was noticed and noted as a...
more outspoken, more political,...in “scholarly” terms less
sophisticated, version of the same thing’ (Wilson, 1995, p. 55).
He might well have added that Sinfield’s maps tend to return
the favour. So for Sinfield, the new historicist fascination with
ideological entrapment is not so much a profound insight as
‘tellingly homologous with its own professional entrapment’ in
the higher reaches of the American university system (Sinfield,
1992, p. 290). Citing Williams’ unease at the communal cost of
individual upward social mobility, Sinfield’s ‘preferred altern-
ative’ to academic professionalism has been to ‘work intellectually
. . . in dissident subcultures’ of ‘class, ethnicity, gender and
sexuality’ (p. 294). The ‘best chance for literary and leftist intel-
lectuals to make themselves useful’, he writes, is to commit
themselves to ‘a subcultural constituency’ (Sinfield, 1997, p. xxiv).
The third of our major differences between cultural material-
ism and new historicism is over the epistemological status of the

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