Stephan Greenbalt
Stephen Greenblatt, in full Stephen Jay Greenblatt, (born
November 7, 1943, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.), American scholar who was
credited with establishing New Historicism, an approach to literary criticism
that mandated the interpretation of literature in terms of the milieu from
which it emerged, as the dominant mode of Anglo-American literary analysis by
the end of the 20th century. Stephan Greenbalt He was considered to be among the preeminent
scholars of Renaissance literature in the late 20th and early 21st centuries
and was particularly noted for his analyses of William Shakespeare’s works.
Greenblatt, the son of a lawyer and a housewife, was raised in Newton,
Massachusetts. He attended Yale University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree
in English in 1964.
His undergraduate thesis was published as Three Modern
Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (1965). A Fulbright scholarship enabled
him to attend the University of Cambridge, where he earned a further bachelor’s
degree (1966) and a master’s degree (1969). Greenblatt then returned to Yale,
where he completed his doctorate in English (1969). His thesis was published in
expanded form as Sir Walter Ralegh: Stephan Greenbalt The Renaissance Man and His Roles (1973).
Following his graduation, Greenblatt became an assistant professor at the
University of California at Berkeley, where he eventually attained a full
professorship in 1979. The next year he published Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare, a treatise on the creation of identity in opposition
to cultural factors. In 1982 he cofounded Representations, a wide-ranging
journal of culture.
The prevailing mode of literary analysis during Greenblatt’s
early years in academia, largely under the lingering influence of New
Criticism, pointedly divested literary works of their historical context,
instead exhorting formal analysis of the works themselves. However, influenced
by, among other factors, lectures given by French philosopher and historian
Michel Foucault that emphasized cultural explanations for ostensibly monolithic
concepts such as “love,” Greenblatt began to articulate an approach to literary
criticism that accounted for external cultural and historical factors. In a
1982 essay he deemed this approach “new historicism” (using a phrase coined by
Wesley Morris in 1972). He later expressed a preference for the term “cultural
poetics.” Greenblatt continued to expound on that approach in Shakespearean
Negotiations:
The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England
(1987)—in which he famously asserted his desire to “speak with the dead”
authors he studied. Further publications included Learning to Curse: Essays in
Early Modern Culture (1990) and Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New
World (1991). In 1997 Greenblatt became Harry Levin Professor of English at Harvard
University, which three years later named him John Cogan University Professor
of the Humanities. In Practicing New Historicism (2000), Greenblatt and
coauthor Catherine Gallagher mounted a rigorous defense of New Historicism in
response to charges that it lacked definition, casting it as an empirical means
of interpretation rather than a dogmatic theory. Greenblatt’s Hamlet in
Purgatory (2001) delved into Shakespeare’s representations of ghosts against
the background of the Protestant rejection of the Roman Catholic concept of
purgatory. He documented the life and times of Shakespeare in Will in the
World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), and he assessed the influence
of the 1417 rediscovery of On the Nature of Things, a poem by Lucretius (1st
century BCE) containing early suggestions about atomic structure, in The
Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011). The latter work received particular
acclaim and won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The Rise and
Fall of Adam and Eve (2017) focuses on the biblical origin story. In 2018
Greenblatt published Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.
Greenblatt replaced M.H. Abrams as general editor of the
Norton Anthology of English Literature for its eighth edition (2005); he vastly
increased the number of female writers included in the compendium. He was also
general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997; 2nd ed. 2008). He edited
numerous other compilations and anthologies, including Cultural Mobility: A
Manifesto (2009). In 2003 he collaborated with playwright Charles Mee on
Cardenio, a play that reimagined a lost work by Shakespeare with that name
(known only from historical references). The play then became the basis of a
project whereby translated versions were interpretively staged and performed by
theatre companies worldwide. The original version was staged in 2008 at the
American Repertory Theatre in Massachusetts. Greenblatt was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1987) and the American Academy of Arts
and Letters (2008). He served on the executive council of, and was vice
president (2000–01) and president (2002) of, the Modern Language Association.
In 2016 the Norwegian government awarded Greenblatt the Holberg Prize in honour
of his body of work.
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