Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz describes his extensive field research spent collecting much information about the cultures he is studying. His “symbolic anthropology” focuses on “Culture” which he defines as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (89). He feels that culture is a system of signs and codes that govern behavior and allows different individuals to communicate. According to Geertz, the function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. In his work he emphasizes the importance of the symbolic (of systems of meaning—as it relates to culture, cultural change, and the study of culture.)
In his work, Geertz focuses on specific cultural practices but does not draw general conclusions about a culture from these specific studies. In his various researches in Southeast Asia and North Africa, Geertz finds individual events, performances and practices to interpret in great detail developing “local knowledge” of the specific occurrence rather than “global knowledge” of the culture as a whole. He uses the term “thick description” of culture to describe his detailed descriptions of a limited aspect of the ideas and practices of a given society at a given time. He compares this technique as a cultural version of the close reading strategies of the New Critics.
Geertz applies “thick description” to the Balinese cockfight. Close observation and extensive interpretation reveals new aspects of Balinese social life that has escaped other scholars who focused of the more mainstream aspects of Balinese society. Geertz makes the following observations about the fight itself:
(1) The fact that he and his wife were almost caught when the police raided the illegal cockfight made the couple more accepted by the villagers since most of them were there too. Fellowship was demonstrated in their cowardly act of running away and teasing became a part of their acceptance.
(2) The cockfight is an obsession of consuming power much like the American ballpark or golf course. It is both cocks and men fighting, and there is a deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their fighting cocks.
(3) It is unusual in Balinese culture in that it is a single sex public activity while all other activities involve participation of both men and women on equal ground.
(4) There is a great deal of roosterish imagery in the language, and men spend a large amount of time grooming, feeding, and discussing their cocks.
(5) The cocks are symbolic expressions of the owner’s self and also expressions of an animal nature that totally revolts the Balinese. This identification with the cock is also that of his ideal self, his penis, and what he most fears and is fascinated by—“The Powers of Darkness.” (420)
(6) A cockfight is a form of blood sacrifice to the appropriate demons to pacify them.
(7) “In the cockfight, man and beast, good and evil, ego and id, the creative power of aroused masculinity and the destructive power of loosened animalism fuse in a bloody drama of hatred, cruelty, violence, and death” (420-421).
(8) “Fighting cocks . . . is like playing with fire only not getting burned” (440). The fights can represent village and kin group rivalries and hostilities, but in play only.
(9) “For the Balinese, the cockfight brings together themes—animal savagery, male narcissism, opponent gambling, status rivalry, mass excitement, blood sacrifice—whose main connection is their involvement with rage and fear of rage, and bending them into a set of rules which at once contains them and allows them play, builds a symbolic structure in which, over and over again, the reality of their inner affiliation can be intelligibly felt” (449-450).
(10) The cockfight allows the Balinese male to see a part of his own life, as an owner and a bettor, and how he reacts to it.
(11) The Balinese man forms and discovers a particular part of his own temperment and his society’s temper at the same time.

Clifford Geertz was one of the first anthropologists to see that insights provided by common language, philosophy, and literary analysis could have a force in social sciences. His research is directed toward frames of meaning within which various peoples live out their lives. His work with marginal cultural events and institutions suggests the possibility of new interpretations of canonical texts and also the addition of the interpretation of marginal literary texts.

Veeser, H. Aram, ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

The essays included in The New Historicism reflect the responses, the heterogeneity, and the contention that surround the study of New Historicism. The theory enables scholars to cross boundaries separating history, anthropology, art, politics, literature, and economics. In Vesser’s opinion, New Historicism “remains a phrase without an adequate referent” (x). It looks at questions such as the “Third world” as signifier, the relationship between feminism and New Historicism, the question of “class” as category, and viability of cultural materialism and demonstrates how New Historicism considers history from a different perspective as it views contested issues of current criticism. In bracketing together the fields of literature, ethnography, anthropology, art, history, and other disciplines and sciences, it allows us to question the complication and the “unavailability of exchanges between culture and power” (xi). The essays in this volume have no definitive answers to questions raised by the theory but establish the whole range of the study into it.
Veeser also establishes these main assumptions of New Historicism:
“1. that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices.
2. that every act of unmasking, critique, and opposition uses methods it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.
3. that literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparately.
4. that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature.
5. finally, as emerges powerfully in this volume, that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe” (xi).
The New Historicists look at historical considerations along with literary analysis.
They try to describe “culture in action” (xi). They also demonstrate many ways that culture and society affect each other and show relationships between texts and other signifying practices. The essays in the book illustrate many unusual connections. The book tries to define, illustrate, and raise questions about New Historicism that often uses a vocabulary of circulation, negotiation, and exchange.
Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montross, and Catherine Gallagher are recognized practitioners of New Historicism, but they also used varied examples. Greenblatt in “Toward a Poetics of Culture” tries to show that the aim of nearly all practices is to show a profit of some kind. He uses such diverse ideas as an open road and the regulated police terrain of Yosemite National Park, aluminum signs regulating an unspoiled landscape, and a stabbing death in New Orleans which he relates to Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Montrose in “The Poetics and Politics of Culture” uses Renaissance texts to give a sense of history. Gallagher in “Marxism and the New Historicism” suggests that criticism should not involve politics but is driven by debate and contest.
Other varied examples are included. Joel Fineman’s “The History of the Anecdote” relates a 17th century criminal trial to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Jon Klancher’s “English Romanticism and Cultural Production” connects Arthur Schlesinger’s New Frontier rhetoric to later anti-war and inner city riots. Jonathan Arac’s “The Struggle for Cultural Heritage: Christina Stead Refunctions Charles Dickens and Mark Twain” discusses Charles Dickens, patriarchy, and literary incest in Christina Snead’s 1940 The Man Who Loved Children. Jane Marcus’ “The Asylums of Antaeus: Woman, War, and Madness: Is there a Feminist Fetishism?” relates the action of the early Suffragettes to Parisian fashion houses. Richard Terdiman’s “Is there Class in this class” uses an ancient Roman tax bracket to parallel the track system in modern high schools. Finally Vincent P. Pecora’s “The Limits of Local Knowledge” makes comparisons between Balinese gambling customs, mass political murder, and the CIA. Examples of history and literary connections are as varied as the people who write about them.
Opposing viewpoints of New Historicism come from the essays of Brook Thomas, Frank Lentricchia, Gerald Graff, Judith Lowder-Newton, Richard Terdiman, and Vincent P. Pecora. Brook Thomas’ “New Historicism and Other Old Fashioned Topics” discusses the fact that one can find as many sorts of new history as one can find historians. Frank Lentricchia, in his essay, “Focault’s Legacy: A New Historicism?” feels that the New Historicists revive liberalism and sentimentalization of arts. He also feels that they fail to show how traces of social circulation are influenced by art and that they give art an improper placement against the “marketplace” of life. In “Co-optation,” Gerald Graff feels that New Historicism seems hostile to American values and places too much value on community norms. Judith Lowder-Newton, in her essay, “History as Usual? Feminism and the New Historicism,” the New Historicists copy and claim early feminist ideas as their own views.
The Feminine-Marxists Richard Terdiman, Vincent Pecora and Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak have their own views. Terdiman feels that New Historicists use critical methods to question and duplicate the authors they suspect of practicing the theory. Pecora feels that too much description hides the world and stops the flow of intelligent viewpoints. Spivak’s “The New Historicism: Political Commitment and the Postmodern Critic” expresses the idea that culture and criticism should challenge each other.
Heyden White in his essay “New Historicism: A Comment” stresses the point that New Historicism leaves no theoretical basis on which to question historical revisions and that there are a variety of approaches in the study of literature and history. Stanley Fish’s essay “Commentary: The Young and the Restless” points out the fact that New Historicism has changed the literature curriculum, has allowed varied texts, and has made students more aware of history and the significance of cultural events. In summary, Fish feels that New Historicism is important because of the major changes it has made in the literary world of criticism.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Towards a Poetics of Culture." The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram
Veeser. New York. Routledge, 1989. 1-13.

In his writing, Stephen Greenblatt seeks to reveal the relationship between texts and their sociohistorical contexts. He assumes that texts not only document the social forces that inform and constitute history and society but also feature prominently in the social processes themselves which form both individual identity and the sociohistorical situation. He focuses on their relationship between.text and context and between art and society.
In the essay, "Towards a Poetics of Culture," he examines the ideas of the Marxist Fredric Jameson and the poststructuralist Jean-Francois Lyotard. In his view a poem should be looked at as poetry as well as looking at the way it is informed by the sociohistorical context and the ways in which it acquires its meaning. Poetry and history are both a part of the creative force that pervades all forms of human activity.
.According to Greenblatt, Jameson attempts to justify a materialist integration of all discourses and doesn't wish. to recognize a separate artistic sphere. The capitalist distinction between poetic and socio-political texts reinforces segregation of private and public, the psychological and the social. Capitalism seems to be the cause of repressing differences.
Also, in Greenblatt's view, Lyotard is primarily interested in the differences in all discourses. The differences are based on the existence of proper names. Lyotard says that capitalism questions the differences trying to coin a single language and a single network. Capitalism causes a false unity and is an agent of totalization.
Greenblatt feels that both these views are inaccurate. He argues against Jameson saying that capitalism causes all discourse to be shared. He argues against Lyotard saying that capitalism contributes to individuality. The differences and organization are both contradictory effects of a capitalistic society. According to Greenblatt, the power of capitalism lies in the fluctuation between difference and totality. The establishment of "distinct discourse domains and the collapse of those domains into one another" (9) characterizes capitalistic societies from the sixteenth century onwards.
The directional changes between totalization and differences and between uniformity and diversity has two consequences regarding textuality. First, discourse changes the confines of the text as a part of all social practice. Second, a given text is not only a fragment of an overall discourse, but it is also subject to the cultural arguments that fashion it and is suspended between the two extremes. Greenblatt hopes to change the division of the economic and non-economic, to show that disinterested and self-sacrificing practices, including art, aim to maximize material or symbolic profit.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, Volume H. Trans. Monique Layton.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

In the original Structural Anthropology, Levi-Strauss argues that many systems of communication. such as kinship, myth, and economics can be analyzed using the structuralist method. He proposes that an analogy can be drawn between language and culture because both are constructed of oppositions, correlations, and logical relations.
Claude Levi-Strauss is widely viewed as the chief leader among critics who 'view structuralism as an interdisciplinary, international theoretical movement. His best known contributions are to the studies of the economics of kinship systems, the structural analysis of myth and of "primitive" knowledge and aesthetics. As a theorist, he changed the relationship between anthropology and linguistics by treating linguistics as a theoretical framework for anthropological inquiry, rather than using it only as a descriptive fieldwork tool.
The second book brings together texts from Levi-Strauss that enable a reader to get a "bird's eye view" of the problems of modern cultures through their historical development and to be introduced to the way structural anthropology tackles these problems and attempts to solve them. Many of the articles were written both before and after the publication of the first book in 1957. The eighteen essays have been selected and ordered to look at the problems but also serve as an introduction to the methods of structural anthropology and a look at the theories of Levi-Strauss.
Part One looks at the past by defining the field of anthropology and the future by putting into perspective the questions proposed. It looks at the origin, scope, and future of social and cultural anthropology. Part Two looks at examples that might help to overcome some theoretical and practical difficulties related to social organization and attitudes linked to kinship systems. It presents two important essays on kinship: "The Meaning and Use of the Notion of Model" and "Reflections on the Atom of Kinship."
Part three looks at mythology and ritual and a theoretical attempt to distinguish between structuralism and formalism. Concrete examples are used to show that variants of one or several myths that can appear different can be reduced to many stages of the same group of transformations, as can the corresponding rituals among the same or among different peoples. He also illustrates the way a myth can decline into legendary tradition, romantic narrative, or political ideology. It also contains the important essays, "The Story of Asdiwal." and "How Myths Die."
Part Four reviews the various problems which contemporary societies face in many areas: literature, fine arts, and urban life. He stresses the humanistic dimension of cultural anthropology. Attention is given to the organization of research and teaching in the human and social sciences and to obstacles against progress. The essay "Race and History" was first published in 1952. The wide prospective of the essay examines the relations between race and history, on one hand, and the question. of nature, and the meaning of progress on the other.
According to Levi-Strauss, the most often used objection to structural anthropology is that its hypothesis cannot be "falsified." He feels that this is not a justifiable criticism since anthropology itself is not an established science. Since anthropology is a human science, he doubts that the criterion of "falsifiability" can be applied to it. With human sciences, there is no discussion about the validity of various hypotheses. Man who studies himself as he practices human sciences will allow his preferences and prejudices to interfere in the way that he defines himself to himself. Philosophical choices, not scientific decisions, will prevent falsification of hypotheses of human sciences. In the study of human sciences, a hypothesis only possesses a relative value if it can account for more facts than the ideas that it replaces.
Levi-Strauss’ essay "Race and Theory" states that cumulative history is caused by the behavior of races and cultures rather than from their nature. It demonstrates a way of life in the cultures, a way of being together. Cumulative history characterizes social organisms made up of groups of societies. Static history resembles an inferior life which relates to isolated societies. Aloneness can afflict a human group preventing it from completely fulfilling its nature. In the author's view, civilization implies a coexistence of cultures offering a maximum of diversity. World civilization is a coalition of cultures, each preserving its originality.
Levi-Strauss feels that all cultural progress is a function of a coalition among the cultures. The societies put together the chances that are meet by each culture in its historical development. This coalition is more productive when it exists among more diversified cultures. In fulfilling diversity requirements to bring about progress, a blending of resources occurs. Over time, since diversity is important, chances of success become less. However, there seems to be two remedies.
The first remedy is for each society to create contrasting features. Each society is composed of a coalition of Groups—religious, professional, and economic, and the social stake is made up of the stakes of all these elements. The example of capitalism and social inequalities demonstrate this solution.
The second remedy consists of introducing, haphazardly, new external partners into the coalition. These stakes would be very different from those characterized by the initial association similar to imperialism and colonialism. In both cases, the remedies enlarge the coalition, either by internal diversification or through the inclusion of new partners. The aim is always to return to the complexity and diversity of the initial situation by increasing the number of players.
Exploitation exists only within a coalition. Contacts and exchanges are produced between dominating and dominated groups. They join their stakes and reduce their differences thus allowing social improvements and the gradual accession of colonized peoples to independence. A third solution would be the appearance of antagonistic political and social powers in the world. Men must collaborate to bring about progress. The collaboration causes a pooling of contributions whose initial diversity made the collaboration necessary.
According to Levi-Strauss, the existing institutions must join mankind and make the regeneration of the extinct diversities as safe as possible. Although they can infect the international body, they must assist the birth of other forms of adaptation. However, these new forms cannot simply reproduce the old forms, but must improve them. Mankind must promote unification while maintaining diversification. The importance of preserving the diversity of cultures is, to Levi-Strauss, the continuation of a dynamic attitude of understanding and promotion of a contribution to a greater generosity of others.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001

Stephen Greenblatt says of William Shakespeare's Hamlet that he "wanted to know where he [Shakespeare] got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter" (4). In this book, Greenblatt studies the history of Purgatory as both a belief and an institution and its many views and changes during the mid-sixteenth century. He looks at the spiritual and social customs that influenced Shakespeare's ideas of death, hell, and punishment. Greenblatt looks at Christian, primarily Catholic theology, but Shakespeare had to endure the various changes in culture that related to Purgatory and still use the idea in a non-offensive manner.
Since there is a great ambiguity of feeling and belief about Purgatory in Shakespeare's early seventeenth century England, that ambiguity is also reflected in Shakespeare's Ghost of King Hamlet and the burial of Ophelia. Greenblatt looks at 17th century human nature and a haunted human memory to give a historical interpretation of beliefs about death and Purgatory.
Originally the belief in Purgatory was a way for Catholics to ease the passage to Heaven for themselves and their dead loved ones. Protestant beliefs and authorities declared the belief false and banned the religious practices that aided the journey. In the past, Purgatory seemed to be a method of negotiating with the dead. Although the Protestant attacks destroyed outward displays of this belief, those attacks did not destroy inner longings and fears promoted by the Catholic Church for years. Greenblatt suggests that Shakespeare changed this human desire to commune with, assist, and be rid of the dead
Greenblatt looks at medieval religion, interprets several apparitions that haunt Shakespeare's heroes, and explores the culture that causes many of these beliefs. He uses primarily Saint Patrick's Purgatory, The Gast of Gy, and the Supplication of Souls, along with requiem masses to establish his views. He studies theological differences, but he also delays a direct literary analysis of Hamlet to establish his argument.
According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare's use of ghost scenes onstage is a sign of deep interest. The dramatic use of ghosts allows Shakespeare to use a number of traditional beliefs: the classical Hades, the popular Hell, the banned domain of Catholic Purgatory, and the common view of uncertainty about the very possibility of ghosts. The figure of the ghost is used often in Shakespeare's plays and raises theological, psychological, and theatrical questions to which he never provides definitive answers. He uses ghosts in different ways illustrating the changing perspectives of the ghost as a figure of false evidence, a figure of history's nightmare, a figure of deep psychic disturbance, and a figure of theater (157).
Again, according to Greenblatt, the inward compulsion of Hamlet to over think the situation is contrary to the act of murder that he wishes to commit to gain his revenge. However, Hamlet's indecisiveness, one of the most debated points of the play, is seen in Hamlet's first response to the Ghost and is in answer to the Ghost's command of "Remember me" (208). At this point the play shifts in emphasis from vengeance to remembrance. (208)
In addition, to the delay because of Hamlet's doubts about the reliability of the Ghost's account of King Hamlet's murder, Hamlet delays his first chance to kill Claudius because he wishes to send Claudius straight to Hell. Death at the moment of confession
would give Claudius the right to go to Heaven. Tudor and Stuart texts allow Shakespeare to use a belief in Purgatory as a "sly jest, a confidence trick, a mistake, ... or a fable or a story" (236), but not as a reality. Shakespeare uses many illusions, but doesn't go far enough. to get into trouble.
However, the second problem is that the souls in Purgatory were saved. The old Hamlet died without last rites and with earthly sins that needed to be burned away, but he could not commit new sins. Purgatory is compatible with a Christian and Catholic call for remembrance, but the call for vengeance is premeditated murder and could only come from Hell. Greenblatt speculates whether the Ghost is actually that of the old Hamlet in Purgatory or in Hell. (237)
The play itself forces together a large number of incompatible accounts of almost everything that matters: sanity and insanity, the primary reason for the delay, Gertrude's innocence, the truth of the account of the old king's murder, the location of the Ghost in Purgatory or Hell. It shows that a Catholic ghost haunts a Protestant Shakespeare. Shakespeare can use the stage to maintain the longings and fears included in negotiating with the dead that had been destroyed by the Protestant attack on the "middle state of souls" (256). Although there is a lack of evidence to show that theatre has added to its use the old system in which spirits solicit prayers and indulgences to gain liberation from the pain of Hell, there are numerous lines in Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe that still refer to Catholic theology and the church's spiritual power to administer punishment for sin.

Response #2

Mark Twain himself was not always successful at business so his occupations included that of riverboat captain, newspaper reporter, and author. Twain himself seem to have his own form of self-fashioning in the writing of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His constant movement across the then vastness of America allowed him to meet all types of Americans and to become familiar with all of their virtues and vices. His movement could be paralleled to that of the river that in the novel represents peacefulness and freedom. Huck’s innocence and goodness is in opposition to the corruptness of the 1884 society in which Twain lived. Twain could also be searching for his own freedom as a writer since his mother and wife were products of a traditional society that opposed personal freedom. The 13-year-old Huck Finn could make observations and comments about society that the adult Twain could not. Greenblatt’s other in this situation could be the falseness of the Victorian American society and an organized religion that condoned slavery and personal vendettas that approved murder. These elements have the power to control Jim’s freedom from slavery, Huck’s freedom from civilization, and Twain’s freedom from society’s restrictions of his writing style, language, and subject.

Response #1

In “Discipline and Punish,” Foucault discusses the prison system and the authority illustrated there as a form of power that could be represented by family, religion, state laws, society, and work. Greenblatt discusses the idea of different authorities and different “others” in existence at the same time. Williams seems to see culture as a study of the dangers involving industry, democracy, class, and art. Work has influenced a class system that produces a number of inequalities that writers express in literature and other forms of artistic practice. We do learn much about a time period from its texts. However, much of what an author writes is a reflection of his/her reaction to the historical aspects of that time. Much of our interpretation of that text is our reaction to the events of our own time period. Yes, I do agree that discourse can shape the application of power.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Tran. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M. I. T.
Press, 1965.

Bakhtin's book traces, through Rabelais's writings, the history of the carnival from medieval times to the Renaissance. Bakhtin declares that Rabelais focused his art on the folk culture found in the common market place and interprets Rabelais's laughter motif, often expressed in images of bodily functions such as eating and defecation, as a reaction against abstract or transcend ent ideas. The book originated as Bakhtin's dissertation and explores how festival or carnival improves the world by weakening certain kinds of hierarchies and allowing new connections. The process is often a story of death and rebirth, where the required death becomes an elaborate production.
In ancient Roman festivals, the king may have already been executed while the Renaissance carnivals only pretend the killing of the king. In the "carnival-like" world of novels, Bakhtin emphasizes that the characters do not always die. Bakhtin was writing in a Russia ruled by Stalin, so he tried to make his carnival mockery at authority unthreatening in an attempt to allow readers to see a tolerant period.
Contrasts are seen with the custom of the common people and the high culture of church and authority. In the period of Rabelais, the elite shared in popular culture. Bakhtin makes three major comparisons in his study. The first view is praise of the poor and reproach of the rich which is similar to the Marxist theory and which allowed Bakhtin’s dissertation to be passed by a communist university. The second view of ridiculing of authority criticized Stalinism indirectly. Thirdly, for Bakhtin "carnival" becomes a reinterpretation of the Christian Passion and Resurrection.
The book uses descriptions of distorted or mutilated bodies. Renaissance carnivals ended the idea of using flesh as enjoyment through deprivation and a parade of bodies too deformed for conventional desire. Bakhtin sees the "regenerative potential" of carnival, as its ability to "combat terror." Carnival atmosphere allows pleasures in mass living and also the possibility of subversion of authority.
Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His World, investigates and compares verbal, pictorial, and gestural sign systems. His goal is to try to find a common link between the medieval and Renaissance cultures represented by the work of Rabelais and the treatment of them as systems of multiform signs. Since laughter in the forms of folk rites and festivities seem to be the connector, Rabelais' signs are directed toward the folk culture of the marketplace of the MiddleAges and Renaissance. Bakhtin goes beyond the culture to use the results for sociological studies.
However, since Bakhtin was writing of a Soviet Union ruled by Stalin, he was not free to say or write exactly what tie wanted. Critics warn the reader to be aware of information that may be left out and may be distorted because of the political reality in the Soviet Union. (Booker 105). Some of Bakhtin's points try to avoid controversy, and he includes many subversive points on Stalinism. Critics believe Bakhtin's description of the rigid, humorless, and authoritarian practices of the medieval Catholic Church are veiled comments on Stalinism. Critics also believe that Bakhtin's commentary on the "intrinsic multiplicity and ideological diversity of language and on the evolutionary nature of history" can be read as responses to Stalinist totalitarian utopianism. (Booker 105)
Bakhtin's carnival is a celebration where normal social boundaries and backgrounds are nonexistent and are totally contradictory to the official world of medieval Catholicism. He emphasizes that Rabelais' use of treatment of the aspects of human life such as sex and excrement give humans the status of physical creatures living in a physical world. According to Bakhtin, this transfer of material from the body's interior to the outside world makes human beings a part of that world. He also emphasizes that placing the functions of the higher part of the body over the lower is similar to systems that classify both bodily functions and literary works. This trend displays the view of social domination of opposed groups by ruling ones.
In the book, Bakhtin depicts the carnival as a suspension from the normal flow of events, a disruption in the ordinary flow of affairs. He suggests that the removal from history provides a perspective from which history can be understood. Bakhtin's view of a characteristic of society is the way it thinks about time and space, and this characteristic is reflected in the literature of that society. He feels that the use of the carnival of Rabelais represents a correspondence to an intense sense of cultural crisis in the early Renaissance cultural context in which Rabelais lived.
In his introduction, Bakhtin explains the division of folk culture into 3 forms: (1) carnival pageants and comic shows of the marketplace (2) oral and written parodies in Latin and in. the vernacular (3) curses, oaths, and popular displays. He describes each, but focuses on the work of Rabelais as "an encyclopedia of folk culture" (58) and also the history of laughter. According to Bakhtin, looking at Rabelais in relation to folk culture reveals the life of the Middle Ages of which. Rabelais was a major part. Looking at the language of laughter of the renaissance also allows a view of the folk humor of other ages.

.Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an.
Investigation)". Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New
York: Monthly Review, 1971. 127-186.

Althusser's main concept is that of "interpellation" or the "hailing of the subject" which is the process through which individuals are formed as subjects by powerful forces working in the interest of the prevailing ideology of a given society. For Althusser, our attitudes form us rather than being formed by us, and "the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects" (171).
According to Althusser, the process of interpellation allows the existing power structure to maintain its control over the general population without using violence or force. This process occurs in subtle-word ways through what Althusser calls "Ideological State Apparatuses," including official culture and such institutions as churches and schools; however, the physical force represented by the “Repressive State Apparatus” of the police and the military backs it up. He sees ideology as a shaping factor in the development of an individual identity. Ideology can be an illusion that hides the truth of social practices and the material context within which these practices are carried out. His goal is to understand and delineate the workings of ideology so that the individual subjects can interact with ideology in more critical and productive ways.
For Althusser, there is a distinction between state power and state control. The power is maintained by repressive structures such as law courts, prisons, police forces, and the army, which all usually operate by external force. The power of the state is maintained subtly by seeming to secure the internal consent of its citizens, using what Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses such as political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family, and art (including literature.) These groupings foster an ideology, a set of ideas and attitudes, which is agreeable to the aims of the state and the political status quo. These beliefs enable the citizen to feel the idea of freedom of choice even when the choice is being imposed on the citizen. Using Althusser's idea of interpellation, democracy makes the citizen feel he has a choice in the kind of government he has. The practice demonstrates that differences between political parties, once in power, are far fewer than the rhetorical differences between them. Any ideological power is more significant than material power.
The most dominant position of an ideological state apparatus in a capitalist social function, in Althusser's view, is the educational apparatus. The result of all state apparatuses is the reproduction of the methods of production, and each contributes in a way that is proper to it. Each apparatus has a dominant theme of interest such as nationalism, morality, and economics. The ideology illustrates the interpolation of individuals as subjects, the mutual recognition of each other, and finally the subject's recognition of himself, and the guarantee that everything really is so and the apparatus functions as long as the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly (181). The Ideological State Apparatuses represent the form in which the ideology of the ruling class must be realized. The ideologies originate from the social classes caught in the class struggle and the conditions of existence, their practices, and their experiences in the struggle (186).
Althusser contrasts ideology (knowledge thoroughly conditioned by politics) with science (direct objective knowledge). The opposition of these two terms causes a special emphasis on culture and literature, which is located between the poles of science and ideology. According to Althusser, the workings of ideology can be detected in art in ways that they cannot in society at large since art is independent from economic forces.

Additional Titles:
H. Aram Veeser, The New Historicism
Mikail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process
Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory
Greenblatt, "Poetics of Culture"
Greenblatt, Shakespeare Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England

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.