ENGL1800 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: New Historicism, Print Culture, Stephen Gosson
Self-fashioning: Greenblatt
• Subjectivity (what you can change) not the same as identity (what you are)
• People became self-reflective on what their identity was
• Invention of the printing press – wider spread of ideas
• Internet is our version of the printing press
• Religious change – blows open individual relationship to God
• What it eas to be a self
• Structure the passage from abstract to concreate
• Trying to be that person – acting out those ideas
• Literature functions: is itself an act in the world, author themselves as the subject, wants
change
• Expressed how people are meant to behave, sometime challenges those ideas (eg Jane Eyre)
• Codes of behaviour – can accept, challenge or attempt to change
Self-Fashioning:
• Way of thinking about subjectivity – nor for or against but understanding how it works
• 16th century
• Requires an audience
• ‘euies ad Othe (against whom to position) who is not able to fashion an identity (eg
women as mothers)
• Theatre
• Personal Essay
• Lyric Poetry
• New sense on inwardness (thinking and feeling and what we actually do)
• Literature as social practice rather than mere texts
• Both encodes and critiques new identity formations
• Power – accept the way, who, and how does to replicate
• Interpretation: where it belongs, cultural context
Early Modern:
• 1485-1700
• Rise of vernacular and print culture
• Moment of origin of ideas for individual/ nation/ modernity
Whats Ne?
• Fixed, purpose-built structures, weekly basis
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