Historicized Renaissance and Critical Models - Towards a Methodology of Negotiation

Historicized Renaissance and Critical Models

&nbsp;&nbsp;Traversing some representative works of New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, and Feminism in the field of the English Renaissance studies, this paper investigates the methodological problematic of the historial criticism of 1980s. Apart from their varying ideological penchants and political orientations that have invited a sizable amount of scrutiny for the last two decades, the "new" historical critics of diverse trends and competing quarters turn out to be of a kind within the purview of their methodological assumptions. In brief, the writings of new historical criticism are implicated in a series of binaries, figured most prominently in the so-called "subversion-containment" debate.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The binarism was transferred, on the one hand, from the discipline of the British social history that the literary scholars heavily draw upon for "sources" and "contexts." The social historians have defined the early modern period as "two-class society," in which the rulers and the ruled, elite and popular cultures existed in conflict with each other, as is often replicated in new historicist writings. Along with the bi-partite social structure, a (false) dichotomy of change and continuity, structure and event, past and present that has informed, and remained unresolved in, historical inquiry finds its way into the new historicism as a form of historical writing. Better known, the binarism also derives from key theoretical concepts such as ideology and culture, structure and agency, power and resistance.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;As an attempt at breaking through these binary conceptions of history and society, this essay seeks to ground an alternative theoretical premise in Stuart Hall’s re-conceptualization of ideology in terms of its "articulation" that refuses to submit to either absolute containment or total subversion of any ideological (textual) instances. In particular, Hall’s concept of "reading positions," with its emphatic enunciation of "negotiated position," provides a viable methodological problematic in which the contestatory, and often unproductive, oppositions between the American new historicism and the British cultural materialism, and among various camps of feminism, are cancelled out to establish a more productive ground for historical criticism and critical history at once.