Page 57 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

referent. As Ryan observes, new historicism consciously defined
itself in opposition to older historicisms, which claimed to
‘ground their accounts of literature in a factual historical reality
that can be recovered and related to the poems, plays and novels
that reflect it’ (Ryan, 1996, p. xiii). So Greenblatt insists that:
‘methodological self-consciousness is one of the distinguishing
marks of the new historicism in cultural studies as opposed to a
historicism based upon faith in the transparency of signs and
interpretive procedures’ (Greenblatt, 1990, p. 158). Neither
Dollimore nor Sinfield—nor Williams nor Eagleton—ever
believed in the transparency of either signs or interpretive proce-
dures. Nor did they believe anything so foolish as that literature
either does or should ‘reflect’ reality. But all four agree that signs
do sometimes have referents and that texts can be used both to
represent and misrepresent other extra-textual ‘realities’. The kind
of analysis conducted by Williams in The Country and the City, or
by Eagleton in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, where literary text
and historical context are productively compared, in part so as
to test the extent to which the texts misrepresent their contexts,
tends to be precluded by the remorseless ‘textualism’ of new
historicist criticism. This isn’t so much a matter of judging the
truth or falsity of the textual representation—although this is by
no means entirely irrelevant—as of understanding how textual-
ity performs ideology. Such strategies are much less readily
available to a theoretical position as determinedly post-
structuralist as the new historicism. For, as Ryan observes, ‘new
historicism turns history into a text and treats all texts as literary
texts susceptible to the same interpretive techniques . . . The post-
structuralist price of the return to history is the evaporation of
the world that produced all these words’ (Ryan, 1996, p. xiv).

CULTURAL STUDIES: FROM HOGGART TO HALL

While cultural materialism and new historicism were mainly
concerned to apply ‘post-culturalist’ forms of analysis to literary
studies, the roughly equivalent approach to the study of popular
culture was that developed, in the first place, as ‘Cultural Studies’

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