The New Historicists combat empty formalism by pulling historical considerations to the center stage of literary analysis. Following Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, and other cultural anthropologists, New Historicists have evolved a method of describing culture in action. Taking their cue from Geertz's method of "thick description," they seize upon an event or anecdote . . . and re-read it in such a way as to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the behavioral codes, logics, and motive forces controlling a whole society. (xi)
"My own work has always been done with a sense of just having to go about and do it, without establishing first exactly what my theoretical position is" (Stephen Greenblatt 1).
"First, [the new historicism] tries to diminish, or in certain cases to eradicate, distinctions between the `aesthetic object' per se and something called a `historical background,' between one kind of `text' and another . . . . Second, it tries to replace what it sees as a simpler `reflection' model inherent, though in different ways, both in older formalist and in Marxian criticism, with a method which emphasizes the degree to which representation--or a `cultural poetics,' to use Greenblatt's term--itself plays a formative or determining social role" (Vincent Pecora 243).
"In its newer phases, historicism rejects the metaphysics of determinism while cunningly retaining (not without discomfort) a complicated commitment to the principle of causality . . . ." (Frank Lentricchia 231).
". . . most of its adherents and opponents would probably agree that it entails reading literary and nonliterary texts as constituents of historical discourses that are both inside and outside of texts and that its practitioners generally posit no fixed hierarchy of cause and effect as they trace the connections among texts, discourses, power, and the constitution of the subject" (Catherine Gallagher 37).
". . . one of the most powerful themes of this new historicism has been the idea that societies exert control over their subjects not just by imposing constraints on them but by predetermining the ways they attempt to rebel against those constraints, by co-opting their strategies of dissent" (Gerald Graff 168-69).
"A bastard child of a history that resembles anthropological `thick description' and a literary theory in search of its own possible significance, this `new historicism' . . . . is tending to restore context without exploring the boundaries between text and context. In this respect, it is modifying, but not seriously questioning, the premises that have informed post-structuralist textual analysis. And, in so doing, it is obscuring yet more thoroughly the specific character of history and historical understanding" ( Elizabeth Fox-Genovese 213, 222).
Does Greenblatt in any way vary, contradict, or extend Veeser's points? Explain.