Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)

The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics

by Richard Strier

Taking Wittgenstein's "Don't think, but look" as his motto, Richard Strier argues against the application of a priori schemes to Renaissance (and all) texts. He argues for the possibility and desirability of rigorously attentive but "pre-theoretical" reading. His approach privileges particularity and attempts to respect the "resistant structures" of texts. He opposes theories, critical and historical, that dictate in advance what texts must―or cannot―say or do.

The first part of the book, "Against Schemes," demonstrates, in discussions of Rosemond Tuve, Stephen Greenblatt, and Stanley Fish among others, how both historicist and purely theoretical approaches can equally produce distortion of particulars. The second part, "Against Received Ideas," shows how a variety of texts (by Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and others) have been seen through the lenses of fixed, mainly conservative ideas in ways that have obscured their actual, surprising, and sometimes surprisingly radical content.

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strier has long been one of the most talented reviewers and critics of other Renaissance scholars. To say this is not to scant his own abilities as a critic, merely to locate what seems to be his greatest strength. This volume of essays is divided into two parts, the former of which plays to this greatest strength. In it, Strier argues for looking at texts without preconditioned responses. The four essays there add up to something like a review of Renaissance literary scholarship from Empson (who is to Strier something like Orwell is to Hitchens) through the newest of the New Historicists. The range of erudition and the ability to spot the flaws in positions and arguments are really impressive. The second half of the book consists of four essays designed to exemplify Strier's critical program of looking at texts free of preconceptions. They are of varying success. The first, on Herbert's "Church-Porch" is pretty electric stuff (though to imply the essay is only on this poem is to suggest that Strier's writing and footnotes aren't everywhere saturated with his very wide reading). Strier demonstrates that the often dismissed opening poem to Herbert's great devout work actually reflects courtier ideology. The contradiction between the young orator and the later divine is highlighted by the awkward transition one has to undergo in crossing from the church-porch (speaking here of content) into the Temple itself. The second essay on Donne's Satire III never quite comes into focus. Much of the effort there (particularly in the footnotes--Strier is a footnoter worth watching carefully) seems to be to reject the arguments posed by another Chicago scholar, Joshua Scodel, writing on the same poem. I happen to have read Scodel's essay, and for my money, his take is more convincing and focused, even now, than what Strier manages to get up to here. The third essay on Shakespeare's King Lear is a tour de force and easily the best thing in the volume. In it, Strier convincingly demonstrates that Shakespeare, contrary to received opinion, entertained and portrayed genuinely radical ideas about the limits of obedience. That word, radical, is one of Strier's favorites--it crops up as a kind of shimmering good. Why this should be so is never quite clear. The final essay is a real let-down. Strier is out of his field, arguing that Nahum Tate's later adaptation of Lear is in fact a work of great worth and NOT a piece of Tory propaganda responding to the Exclusion crisis. While the former assertion is convincingly argued for, the latter fails completely. Much of the problem has to do with insufficient attention to social and historical context. Nevertheless, the volume as a whole as very strong argument for the epigram taken from Wittgenstein--"Don't think, look!" What Strier means by this is that the critic needs as much as possible to see what is actually on the page rather than allowing a filter composed of theory or common knowledge to determine what she sees. Based on the better essays in this volume, it is good advice.