Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture

by Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt argued in these celebrated essays that the art of the Renaissance could only be understood in the context of the society from which it sprang. His approach - 'New Historicism' - drew from history, anthropology, Marxist theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis and in the process, blew apart the academic boundaries insulating literature from the world around it. Learning to Curse charts the evolution of that approach and provides a vivid and compelling exploration of a complex and contradictory epoch.

Genres: History, Essays, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Fiction, Philosophy

280 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1990

About the author

Stephen Greenblatt (Ph.D. Yale) is 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.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, how can scientific writing about early modernity be so fun, insightful, and compelling?!

[Matt McCormick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you will pick-up a book and immediately realize your half-as-smart as you thought you were. That's my take away from Greenblatt's collection of essays.
I opened it because of Greenblatt himself and because I am interested in Renaissance history, art and science. One of the great books in my "Favorites" pile is The Swerve, How the World Became Modern. I know understand that Greenblatt chose to speak slowly and simply so I could understand it. All kidding aside there is a real difference between a book written by an intellectual for the public and one written for her/his peers. Learning to Curse falls into the latter group.
To enjoy this collection, the reader needs a pretty deep understanding of early modern English and French literature and a fairly immense vocabulary. If you immediately grasp the following, this book is for you:
“The attempted universalization is not the result of mere blunder or of overwhelming hermeneutic ambition, for there exist, after all, complex forms of self-consciousness and highly discursive parenthood in the West long before the sixteenth century” (page 137)
So I gave the book a four because I believe no author should suffer from her/his reader’s lack of understanding. Greenblatt made me a fan with The Swerve and through a handful of YouTube lectures.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book certainly accomplishes the intent outlined in the description. The book is worth the read and very memorable.

[Reece · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Greenblatt last year, and do not even remember where I heard the name. I recall wanting to have a better working knowledge of Shakespeare’s time to better formulate my opinions of his works – for without understanding any of the context of his time, it would always feel disingenuous for me to actually possess strong opinions on the playwright. Hence, my negative rating of Hamlet has not yet been checked up on with a reread, since I still feel there is much to learn before I commit myself again to the work. All the same, Greenblatt’s work, Tyrant, helped me to better appreciate Shakespeare, and more importantly, to better understand him. His approach, New Historicism, felt like the context-focused literary critique I’ve been searching for the past few years, and this collection of essays transformed that feeling into something far stronger.

Learning to Curse captures the academic sense of wonder with seemingly menial objects – at the time of writing in 1990, what historians would call obscure artifacts or texts that exist in the shadow of greater, more isolated pieces. To me, though, this practice of calling anything simultaneous historical and obscure has seemed strange for some time now, namely due to the fact that nothing exists in isolation, let alone the productions of people, such as works of art or literature. This mythologizing and heroizing of distinctly human productions, or relationships between producer and consumer, always felt flat-out naïve, childish, and anti-academic to me, and yet it is the anti-intellectual plague that riddles the bookshelves of millions. Just this summer, I read Felix Markham’s Napoleon, a mythos of Napoleon moreso than a history of him. I also read Will Durant’s Lessons of History, which is perhaps the worst book I’ve read in years. In both cases, the authors attempt to either essentialize (and therefore, delegitimize the historical context of their study by removing it from the focus and placing it into an anti-historical, universal lens which better suits pseudointellectuals, undergraduate students, and the vastly misinformed) or to isolate (also delegitimizing their work by paradoxically removing it from its respective historical constraints and circumstances which historical events are tied down by). While Tolstoy was not entirely modern in his approach, he should be continuously awarded for his forward sightedness in lambasting against these anti-intellectuals (I won’t even use the term historian, since Will Durant himself never was one – he was merely a pretentious and arrogant fool who dressed up in the garments of a historian, which is even more ironic as he seems to fashion historians less as people than as ideals [typical of a philosophy student to get lost in what doesn’t exist], and believed himself to be credible when his practice and methodology prove to be anything but state of the art for his period). And the approach against this anti-intellectualism and academic arrogance is what helps Greenblatt to feel so original, fresh, and intelligent.

In Learning to Curse, Greenblatt exposes the failing logic of his contemporary critics while reaffirming the principles of New Historicism as a practice, and not as doctrine. His approach to method rather than frame of mind is the sign of a man who is down to earth, and understands that to better grasp at the truth of literary texts and their contexts, it requires a scientific approach rather than a misguided logic. His defenses are appropriate and refreshing, and this collection of essays puts his practice into a light that, for anyone who cares to understand literature, is a necessity. This is among the best books I’ve read this year, and Greenblatt’s eye for detail as well as his honesty makes him a Shakespearean critic who, contrary to the practices of others in the same field, lauds the intangible ideal of “genius” less than many others who fall prey to academic buzzwords.

I'll also add that some folks are critical of Greenblatt for not being "concrete" enough. Is your society, as well as the way it functions with respect to certain classes and aesthetics, concrete? Are the norms, practices, etc. concrete for you in your day and age? Sure, you have statistics on virtually everything in the modern day, and perhaps that is where the bias arises, but such is not a universal constant of human civilization. This is obviously the case, so why do some of the readers place the blame of untenable social practices on the author who is educating you on how these social practices can be gleaned in the English Renaissance, difficult as it may be? I am sure some of the folks critical from this perspective did not pay enough attention to the book, or simply didn't care enough in the first place to question their own mental constructs of what it means to be "concrete." Epistemology is subtly at the center of this collection of essays, and most of those who are critical did not figure that out. Greenblatt's practice is rooted in the material conditions of the subjects being studied, and to misconstrue his practice as not being rooted in material artifacts is to misunderstand it entirely.

[Martin Rundkvist · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Stephen Greenblatt’s critical essays on the relationship between literature and social reality, my reaction isn’t “He’s right” or “He’s wrong”. I just find his concerns abstruse to the point of unimportance. I don’t care. Just tell me something concrete about the 16th century.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired Jun 9, 1998
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec

[Astrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent essays if you want to learn about how violence shapes our societies and beings. I couldn't have imagined how a historian could do such a profound job.
The essay about "King Lear" is an eye-opener about reasons and structures of intergenerational conflicts and a culture of coercion.
The one about the peasant wars in Germany shows how abominable violence is justified (Martin Luther disgusts me even more now), as does the essay about the contacts and communication between the Spanish conquistadores and the First Nations population in South America.
Truly enlightening.

[T. Tokunaga]

Learning to Curse is not really the easiest read because his prose is uncannily visual as well as highly academic, but it's worth the effort of using both sides of the brain.

I can say that it's all about viewing/ looking. It's not really about scientific categorization but simply "looking at the surviving evidences and searching for what were behind them" as far as my understanding of the last essay in this book can be trusted. He looks at a variety of artifacts, ranging from some clerical writing to Midsummer Night's Dream or King Lear, and from colonialism in 'Learning to Curse' to Norman Mailer's journalism in 'To a Poetics of Culture.' A really rich in its variety, this book is actually a little bit short of consistency in contents, so I reduced one star.

However, the next focus wouldn't be about looking/ viewing. It's already under the huge influence of visual culture which was getting prevalent especially in Regan era which was largely examined in 'To a Poetics of Culture.' In my personal feeling, he's coming short of more oral/ audible aspects of culture, which is a big component of plays as it was often said that you "hear a play."

Still it's a great book, so I should pay respect to Greenblatt and give it a four star review in this elementary level of my studies.