Questions: New Historicism and Cultural Poetics

Question 1

A New Historicist essay opens by describing a 16th-century legal case about indigenous land rights before turning to an analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest. What is the methodological purpose of this opening?

• A. To provide historical background so the reader can understand the play's setting
• B. To show that Shakespeare read and was influenced by this specific legal document
• C. To demonstrate that the same cultural assumptions about power and property organize both texts, making them illuminate each other — context constitutes meaning, not merely surrounds it
• D. To contrast legal discourse with literary discourse to show how differently each period treated similar subjects

Answer: (C)

The anecdote opening is a methodological statement, not decoration or source study. Greenblatt is not arguing influence — he is arguing that both texts share the same cultural circulation of social energy about power, personhood, and property. Reading them together makes each strange in productive ways. The juxtaposition argues that the boundary between literary and non-literary texts is a critical construction: both participate in making and distributing cultural assumptions, and neither can be fully understood in isolation.

Question 2

New Historicism's concept of 'subversion and containment' argues that:

• A. The powerful always successfully crush subversive movements before they can take root
• B. Literature is the primary vehicle by which dominant power structures spread their ideology
• C. Cultural challenges to power are often absorbed and neutralized by the very structures they seem to threaten — not through conspiracy, but as a structural dynamic of how systems reproduce themselves
• D. Economic forces ultimately determine which forms of cultural subversion succeed or fail

Answer: (C)

The containment argument is subtle and frequently misread. It does not claim subversion is impossible or that the powerful conspire to silence dissent. It observes that power structures can absorb challenges — the theatre stages rebellion and heresy, giving them a controlled outlet that ultimately reinforces the social order that sanctions performance. This is a structural dynamic, not an intentional plot. Crucially, Greenblatt's argument is controversial even within New Historicism because it can seem to deny the possibility of effective subversion.

Question 3

New Historicism treats literary texts as a reflection of the economic base that produces them.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This describes Marxist literary criticism (base-superstructure theory), not New Historicism. Greenblatt explicitly abandons the determining hierarchy of Marxism. In New Historicism, there is no 'base' — only a cultural field in which power, knowledge, law, art, and commerce all circulate and act on each other without any single level being determinant. Literature is an active participant in making cultural formations, not a symptom to be explained by underlying economic relations.

Question 4

New Historicism treats non-literary documents (legal texts, pamphlets, medical records) as having equal analytical status to literary works.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

True. This is one of New Historicism's most distinctive moves. By treating literary and non-literary texts symmetrically, Greenblatt challenges the boundary that traditional literary criticism drew around the 'literary canon.' A colonial legal document and a Shakespeare play are both participants in the same cultural circulation; neither is merely context for the other. This radical intertextuality extends beyond canonical literature to any contemporary document that shares the same cultural energy.

Question 5

What does Greenblatt mean by 'the circulation of social energy,' and why does this concept require reading literary and non-literary texts together?

Model answer: Social energy refers to the cultural power, assumptions, and meaning-structures that move through a society's texts, institutions, and practices — no single text generates this energy alone, and no text is untouched by it. Literary texts don't simply reflect or receive this energy; they help produce, distribute, and sometimes transform it. Reading literary works alongside legal documents, pamphlets, and records reveals how the same assumptions about power, identity, and property organize apparently unrelated discourses. Without the non-literary texts, we see the literary work as autonomous; with them, we see it embedded in a living cultural system.

This tests whether students can articulate why the method requires the juxtaposition, not just describe what New Historicists do. The concept of circulation is what makes New Historicism more than 'adding historical context' — it reconceives texts as active participants in cultural production rather than passive symptoms of an age.