Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literature Study. Ed. Frank
Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 225-32.

For most people the term culture means any knowledge or belief of art, morals, law, customs, or ideas that allow a man to successfully live in society. However, Stephen Greenblatt defines culture for the literary scholar as “gestures toward what appear to be opposite things: constraint and mobility” (225).
The constraint factor influences the members in a society to follow certain standards of behaviors, beliefs, and practices that are deemed to be acceptable by the public. Unacceptable practices cause the individual to suffer consequences; therefore, he is constrained by society’s expectations.
Greenblatt also discusses the literary styles of satire and orations as another kind of constraint in its criticism and praise, respectively. of the conformist. These types of writings do not have the same emphasis today as when they were written because the cultural values have changed. Greenblatt says the reader must “reconstruct the boundaries upon whose existence the works were predicated” (226) to understand the work as an expression of its own culture.
To do this, Greenblatt recommends asking the following questions about the work to understand it: (1) Which behaviors and practices does the work enforce? (2) Why might readers of a certain time and space be interested in the work? (3) What are the differences between the reader’s values and the values of the work? (4) What is the social understanding on which the work depends? (5) What freedom of thought might be constrained by this work? (6) What are connections with larger social structures? (226)
The author uses Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and Dickens’ Great Expectations to explain his vision of culture as a “complex whole.” He understands that the study of a particular culture can add to the comprehension of a work of literature from that culture and a careful reading of the literary work can add to the comprehension of the culture from which it was produced.
Greenblatt sees the cultural mobility as an “exchange” in the form of negotiations for receiving material goods, for use in a kinship system, and through narratives of the people. All of these ideas relate to the codes governing human mobility and restraint. Concepts can be traded and shared by different societies. A society can preserve itself through restraints, but it can change and grow through the mobility of exchange.
By asking the cultural questions about a literary piece and trying to understand the changes that the literary work and the culture have experienced, the reader can examine these elements to determine how the growth and changes in a culture have been affected.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare.
Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980.

Greenblatt’s book interprets literature as an important element in the “cultural creation of identity.” The author treats the art of a period as a primary force that causes men and women to be the way they are in a given culture. In this view, art becomes a means of self-fashioning or the power to control identity, one’s own, another person’s, or a group of people.
He examines self-fashioning in Renaissance England by looking at Thomas More’s Utopia, William Tyndale’s English New Testament, the poetry of Thomas Wyatt, Edmond Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and William Shakespeare’s Othello. Each group of three form two groups in which strong opposite responses to community, tradition, and authority cause a third response in which the contrast is repeated and changed. Wyatt is used to illustrate the conflict between More and Tyndale; Shakespeare is the contrast between Spenser and Marlowe.
According to Greenblatt, a self is formed, first, in submission to an “absolute power” or authority, and, second, in relation to the Other, the stranger, a category (the other which is not the authority) is branded by the authority as subversive. As a result, the stranger becomes trapped and deprived of his otherness or destroyed. This entrapment involves a loss of self that enables a dialectical retrieval of the self. Self-fashioning takes place in a double relationship to authority on one hand and to change on the other. The self is governed by the variation between totalization and differentiation.
The book implies that the power to fashion the self is an aspect of the power to control identity, which was done by the state, church , and family in the 16th century. This period in history recognized man’s autonomy but also recognized the adaptability of the self. Since literature, a “cultural artifact,” is an expression of the process of self-fashioning, Greenblatt says it should be defined three ways: (1) as the materialization of the behavior of the author (2) as an expression of codes that govern behavior (3) as a reflection on those codes. Humans fashion, are fashioned, and are aware of being fashioned by discourse.
Greenblatt says that self-fashioning has the following governing conditions:
(1) None of the authors discussed inherits a title, family tradition, or social status that give that writer an identity of a clan or caste. These writers, except Wyatt, are middle-class
(2) Self-fashioning involves submission to an absolute power or authority situated outside self.
(3) Self-fashioning is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile (Other) which must be discovered or invented in order to be attacked or destroyed.
(4) The alien is perceived by the authority either as that which is chaotic or that which is false or negative.
(5) One man’s authority is another man’s alien.
(6) When one authority is destroyed, another takes its place.
(7) There is always more than one authority and more than one alien in existence at a given time.
(8) If both authority and alien are located outside self, they are at the same time inward necessities; both submission and destruction are always already internalized.
(9) Self-fashioning is always in language.
(10) Self-fashioning always involves some experience of threat, some undermining, some loss of self.
Greenblatt says his intentions were to look at the ways these writers created their own performances, to analyze their choices in representing themselves, and in fashioning characters, and to understand the role of human autonomy in construction of identity. He realizes in the writing of the book that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions—family, religion, state—are all intertwined. According to Greenblatt, the human subject becomes the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society. These writers embrace the human subject and self-fashioning, even in suggesting the absorption or corruption or loss of self.
Foucault influenced Greenblatt in explaining the strategies and operations of power in discourse. Greenblatt looks at the totality of power; by undermining and subverting itself, power means to confirm itself. Recurring themes in New Historicism are establishment, stabilization, extension, and subversion of power. Juxtaposition is an often repeated procedure. Foucault, Williams, and Greenblatt deal with power and the subversion of power, and they use comparison and contrast to prove their points.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University
P, 1958.

In the book, Williams argues that the idea of culture developed in response to the industrial revolution and the social and political changes that resulted from it. He believes that the idea of culture and the word itself with its modern uses began at this particular time. He tries to explain how the idea of culture was developed in 18th, 19th, and 20th century writing by looking at such British writers as Edmund Burke, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, F. R, Leavis, and George Orwell. He believes that the earliest ideas developed in opposition to the laissez-faire society of the political economy. He sees the idea of culture as a ”whole way of life” and culture as a separation from society establishing the idea of perfection through the study of the arts. He contrasts the idea of “culture as art” and “culture as a whole way of life’ and seems to prefer the second viewpoint. He attempts to analyze the “structure of feeling” behind the intellectual thought and practice of “culture” and its evolution as a word with several conflicting and contradictory connotations in British society. He says the book is his interpretation of responses to the thoughts and feelings of the writers who have recorded the change. The book is divided into three parts: 19th century thinkers, 19th and 20th century writers, and 20th century writers.
In his introduction, Williams defines five words that he uses to illustrate the changes and shows the changes in the definitions of those words:
(1) The word industry undergoes a change in 1776 from a characteristic to a collective word for manufacturing and productive institutions. The rapid growth in the importance of these institutions creates the new economic system. Many technical changes transform the amount of production therefore changing society.
(2) The word democracy in 1776 came from the Greek word that meant “government by the people.” It is a part of a political vocabulary since the American and French Revolutions and now is used to show the struggle around the world for democratic representation.
(3) The word class in 1772 first meant the change from division or group in schools and colleges to a social sense of class. At first, there were just lower and higher classes then the middle class was added. Then a change developed in the character of the divisions and the attitudes toward them. There was also a change in social structures and social feelings.
(4) At first the word art referred to a human skill to an institution, a set body of activities of some kind. Then it went to the imaginative or creative arts. It developed to the idea of an imaginative truth and described a special person. Arts—literature, music, painting, sculpture, theatre—are now all grouped together and distinguished from other human skills.
(5) The word culture is the tending of the natural growth-process of human training. It first meant a general state of mind. Then it represented a state of intellectual development in society. It described a general body of arts. Now it describes a whole way of life—intellectual, spiritual, material. It can be used as a special kind of map to explore the nature of all other changes. It shows a recognition of moral and intellectual activities from a new kind of society and emphasizes these activities which are appealing to humans to be set over practical social government.
Williams sees English society as a victim of the cultural corruption of the industrial society and the English language changing by the “class-oriented rules of Standard English. He makes three observations in his critical observations of the writers: (1) English society before the 18th century had been caused by “organic” or physical change. (2) These English thinkers had been dealing with the upheaval created by industrialization and democracy. (3) The “culture” had provided these thinkers with a “court of appeal” and a “scale of integrity” for evaluating the “way of life” and “driven impulse” of the new kind of society that had been “reaching for control.”
He tries to defend a “democratic attitude” against “fear and hatred.” He feels that the 1958 democracy of England is “in danger,” that there is a “sullenness” and “withdrawal” which will end in the “unofficial democracy” of the “armed revolt” if these ideas are not dealt with. For Williams “a common culture” is not “at any level an equal culture,” but equality is very important. Societies without it are said “to depersonalize and degrade” and to raise “structures of cruelty and exploitation” that “crippled human energy.”
He tries to teach literature and related cultural forms as the culmination of a social process that involved a series of complex relationships between authorial ideology, institutional process, and generic/aesthetic form. The book shows culture began as ideas of perfections removed from material social life, as an analysis of large-scale changes involving industry, democracy, class, and art. In a class-divided society, “culture” is opposed to business, urban massification, and possessive individualism. For Williams, the idea of “common culture” is based on the creativity of millions of working-men and women included in the collective democratic institutions of trade unions, cooperatives, and other grass-roots resources of self-empowerment.
These are Williams’ views of cultural studies: (1) Culture as social processes and practices must be grounded in social relations of the systems of economics, politics, learning and communication, and generation and culture. (2) The historicizing of all cultural practices and processes stems from a need to grasp the ideology and politics of class-divided societies in late capitalism. (3) The consumptive/consumerist paradigm of capitalism, and the inequalities across ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and locality that it causes should be viewed by an approach based on solidarity. (4) The project of cultural studies is the use of knowledge to advance a democratic interaction of diverse communities with their specific historical experiences. (5) Cultural studies should be used to study all of today’s vital issues.
For Williams, culture is viewed as the basic part of an evolving social process. It is a way of life, the lived texture of any social order. Williams sees communication as an important part of culture because ideas, meanings, experiences, and activities are transmitted through language, in the form of certain communication rules, models, and conventions. Every society is different and creates its traditions and meanings through an ongoing and active process of negotiation and debate.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Tran. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage, 1979.

Foucault himself establishes four rules for the book: (1) punishing an offense is repressive, but has positive effects (2) punishment is a political tactic and a way of exercising power (3) technology of power can be a principle for humanizing the penal system and for the knowledge of man. (4) history of power and object relations can be understood by seeing change of punitive methods on basis of political technology of body.
The prison changed from public punishment to penitentiary and from the penal institution to the entire social body with the following results: (1) a departure from the norm presented a problem for school, court, asylum, prison. This social enemy brought with him danger of disorder, crime, and madness. (2) imprisonment allows recruitment of major delinquents and assures, in the social body, the formation of delinquency on basis of illegalities and the establishment of specified criminality. (3) the power to punish is natural and legitimate in lowering threshold of tolerance to crime. (4) the prison network in various forms with its systems of insertation, distribution, surveillance, and observation has been greatest support of normalizing power (5) the prison-like texture of society assures both the real capture of the body and its constant observation; it is the form of punishment that conforms most completely to the new economy of power and the instrument for the formation of knowledge that the economy needs. Observation of the individual, his consciousness and conduct allows the domination of the prisoner by the one in control (6) extreme solidity of the prison
The book begins with a 1757 public execution by the king of drawing and quartering of the victim. The right to punish is directly connected to the authority of the king. The book proceeds to describe historical movement through which this physical punishment is replaced with what is considered a more humane technique of incarceration. Foucault says this method allows greater sufficiency in control of the general population. In modern world power, this control is a more pervasive technique. The book looks at social and theoretical reasons behind the many changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It discusses “micro-power structures” that developed in western societies since 18th century with a focus on prisons and schools. The work concerns power and the relation between power and knowledge. For Foucault, knowledge and power are inseparable.
The book explores the beginning of the modern prison. Foucault sees a tendency in modern society in which official power depends more on ability to acquire a constant flow of information about activities or subjects of that power. It traces shifts in culture that lead to the prison’s dominance, focusing on body and questions of power. He feels that power comes from knowledge and that modern “prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.” According to Foucault, modern society itself is prison-like. The prison system doesn’t eliminate crime, but establishes a well-identified population of “delinquents” whose crimes can be monitored and kept within limits of acts that are “politically harmless and economically negligible.” Society can define itself by exclusion of this small group.
Foucault has a theory that the reason that the prison system has lasted so long is that it benefits the ruling class that used criminality as a way of preventing confrontations that could lead to revolution. The dynamic groups of the lower class commit crime. Committing crimes is seen as a desire for a change in the social system and a rebellion against the social elite. The ruling class uses the law as a means to diminish the power of the lower class.
The legal system separates the most dynamic of the lowest social class from the rest of society, then forces them together as a group of outcasts, thus making them politically harmless. By marking them as criminals, these outcasts are more easily supervised and can be kept disorganized by moving them in and out of the prison system. The ruling class places a brand on the delinquent class by distinguishing them as a separate group from the normal lower class. This placement maintains the separation of the most dynamic group from the rest of the oppressed people, further restricting the possibility that the lower class could cause social change.
He illustrates the shift in the object of official power from bodies to the minds of the individual subjects and shows the change from physical force to knowledge as the major technique through which such power is exercised. He emphasizes the importance of surveillance and the productive aspects of power.
Foucault tries to draw conclusions about power relationships that inform specific discourses. He feels that these relationships are too complex to be understood completely and the events of history are driven by very complicated interrelationships that cannot be described in simple cause-effect sequences. The author sees history as a form of power that should study and discover the many interconnecting forces that determine what takes place in each culture or society. History should try to explain the development and interconnection of elements that were accepted, changed, or rejected to form truth and set acceptable changes for that time period.
He sees the state as all-powerful, all-seeing. The state has “panoptic,” all-seeing surveillance based on his description of Jeremy Bentham’s circular prison. The system maintains power by circulating its views throughout the body or group. These views or ideology control the thinking of all members of a given society. The operation of power structures is important in family and government. For Foucault, “thought control” implies that different thinking may become “unthinkable.” The book looks at institutions that allow maintaining power such as state punishment, prisons, the medical profession, and legislation about sexuality. Modern society has a “carceral continuum” from the maximum security prison, through secure accommodation, probation, social workers, police and teachers, to the everyday life of home and work. All are connected by the supervision (surveillance, application of norms of acceptable behavior) of some humans by others. He believes that power is internalized by those it disempowers.
The book shows a turn in Foucault’s career to political issues. The book reveals Foucault’s thoughts on how the elite in society dominate and control the rest of society. He believes that no advancement in society has occurred since the Renaissance, only technology has grown, further enslaving the human spirit. He feels that the ideas forced on us by society do not allow us to be unique individuals. His ideas about government’s role in oppressing people’s behavior and true identity have been related to why people commit crime.
The analysis in the book shows how techniques and institutions, developed for different purposes, united to create the modern system of disciplinary power. In believing that knowledge is an instrument of power, Foucault’s point in the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we know.
The examination places the individual in a “field of documentation.” The results of exams are recorded in documents that provide detailed information about the individuals examined and allow power systems to control them (test scores, absentee records, patient’s charts.) On the basis of these records, those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge. The individual becomes a case—a scientific example and an object of care; caring is always an opportunity for control.
The main ideas of the book are grouped according to its four parts:
(1) Torture contrasts violent public torture with a regimented daily schedule of inmates. The intended purpose of public torture is to use the convict’s body to show violence of the original crime and to gain revenge on the convict’s body. The consequences of torture are that the convict gains sympathy and admiration from the public. Another consequence is that public execution often led to riots in support of the prisoner.
(2) Punishment went from public torture to public work gangs. The king’s right to punish became ineffective and uncontrolled. The technology of discipline and the idea of “man as machine” led to shift towards prison.
(3) Discipline develops a new economy and politics for a person’s body. Bodies must be separated according to tasks, as well as for training, observation, and control. Discipline creates new forms of economic, political, and military organizations currently emerging and creates “docile bodies” which can function in factories, ordered Military regiments, and school classrooms. Discipline comes, without force, but through observation and molding of bodies into correct form through observation. Prison allows for constant observation, constant possibility of observation, and is designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether or not he is being observed.
(4) Prison is a part of a larger “carceral system” which has become an example of an all-inclusive institution in modern society which includes schools, military institutions, hospitals, and factories. The prison creates criminals which act as the police’s proxy in surveillance.
Foucault seems to say that power is an important human dynamic that determines relationships to others, and it can be productive. It also refers to ways in which a dominant group exerts its influence over others. My concern in applying these views to literature is what special part of the literature should be looked at. Is it the power aspect, the historical aspect, or something totally different?

My critical theory is New Historicism. My titles are the following:
Hayden White, Metahistory
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture
M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Louis Althusser, "Ideological State Apparatuses"
Said, Orientalism
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Stephen Greenblatt, "Culture"
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I hope to take my exam October 2-6, 2006.