Shakespearean negotiations Pdf Summary Reviews By Stephen Greenblatt

Quick Navigation

Shakespearean negotiations Pdf Summary

Stephen Greenblatt has been at the center of a major shift in literary interpretation toward a critical method that situates cultural creation in history. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England is a sustained and powerful exemplification of this innovative method, offering a new way of understanding the power of Shakespeare’s achievement and, beyond this, an original analysis of cultural process.

READ

Shakespearean negotiations Review

Martin Asiner

4.0 out of 5 stars Stimulating but Not Necessarily Convincing
Reviewed in the United States on November 21, 2015

In Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) Stephen Greenblatt more fully expands on his theory of new historicism with various essays, the most significant being “Invisible Bullets,” “The Circulation of Social Energy,” and “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” These essays emphasize what has since become known as the essence of new historicism which can be summed up as follows: One cannot assume that history and literature provide a totalized narrative that fully accounts for the autonomy of a text. Historical eras are not conveniently divided into self-contained epochs. The term “world view” does not exist in designating an overarching label that describes the culture of any society. Historical “facts” cannot be judged as verifiable facts at all in that most “facts” are little more than subjective interpretations. One cannot draw a clear demarcation between literature and history in that both are mutually constitutive of each other. Just as literary texts and history texts are not autonomous neither is any work of art; all art reflects the mind of an artist who is thoroughly embedded in the conflicting and discordant social strands that we call “culture.” The term “author” improperly gives credit to a uniquely talented individual who uses his autonomous self to create a text that is the fruit only of himself.

The preceding summation aligns closely with the deconstructive tenets of Jacques Derrida and the general post-structuralist/post-modernist theories of writers like Michael Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Greenblatt is a Renaissance scholar who uses Shakespeare as fulcrum as one who wrote his plays knowing that both contemporary and future readers would read these plays not as stand alone texts but as texts that are ineluctably embedded in non-canonical and even trivial sources. Greenblatt is convinced that Shakespeare was typical of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers who took ideas from the various interlocking strands of society about them and re-fashioned and re-shaped them in so powerful a way that future critics simple assume that his writings are the product or an originary literary genius. Greenblatt holds that the Bard’s genius lay primarily in this re-fashioning of pre-existing ideas, customs, habits, and other assorted cultural trivia in a practice that Greenblatt terms “negotiations,” hence the title of his book.

Not all theorists today are convinced of the practicality or even the suitability of a theory that demands that one take the word of Stephen Greenblatt that William Shakespeare really did intend his plays to be taken in a way that reduces them as not much more than a literary appendage to a vastly larger web of interconnected cultural strands of which Shakespeare was but one tiny filament. Greenblatt couches his book with a convincing array of impressive post-structuralist scholarly jargon as he nails down his thesis with many telling points. But the problem here begins with the first line of “The Circulation of Social Energy:” “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” Greenblatt implies a great deal more than he intends. His wish is to open a conduit to the past so that the marginalized voices of the long dead disenfranchised may be heard. Instead many have noted that the voice truly being heard is not the collective voices from the past but the originary voice of Stephen Greenblatt himself. Thus this one-to-many dialogue symbolizes the very concept of forced unity that he wishes to dispel. Still, Shakespearean Negotiations is a superbly written text that deserves to be read even if one feels like contesting it.

About Stephen Greenblatt Author Of Shakespearean negotiations pdf Book

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) Author Of Shakespearean negotiations pdf Book, is a Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture; and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. He honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont.

Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar.

Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as “cultural poetics”; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.