Stephen Greenblatt

(Redirected from Stephen Jay Greenblatt) American scholar (born 1943)

Stephen Greenblatt
Greenblatt in 2004
Born	Stephen Jay Greenblatt (1943-11-07) November 7, 1943 (age 81) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation	Writer professor
Language	English
Education	Yale University (BA, PhD) Pembroke College, Cambridge (MPhil)
Subject	New Historicism, Shakespeare, Renaissance
Notable awards	National Book Award for Nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize
Spouse	Ellen Schmidt (1969–1996) Ramie Targoff (1998–)
Children	3

Stephen Jay Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943) is an American literary historian and author. He has served as the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University since 2000. Greenblatt is the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Greenblatt is one of the founders of new historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nine weeks. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2012 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

Life and career

Education and career

Greenblatt was born in Boston and raised in Newton, Massachusetts. After graduating from Newton High School, he was educated at Yale University (BA 1964, PhD 1969) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (MPhil 1966). Greenblatt has since taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University. He was Class of 1972 Professor at Berkeley (becoming a full professor in 1980) and taught there for 28 years before taking a position at Harvard University. He was named John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities in 2000. Greenblatt is considered "a key figure in the shift from literary to cultural poetics and from textual to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s."

Greenblatt is the founder and faculty co-chair of Harvard's branch of the Scholars at Risk (SAR) program. SAR is a U.S.-based international network of academic institutions organized to support and defend the principles of academic freedom and to defend the human rights of scholars around the world. Greenblatt was a long-term fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. As a visiting professor and lecturer, Greenblatt has taught at institutions including the École des Hautes Études, the University of Florence, Kyoto University, the University of Oxford and Peking University. He was a resident fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1987), the American Philosophical Society (2007), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008); he has been president of the Modern Language Association.

In February 2022, Greenblatt was one of 38 Harvard faculty to sign a letter to The Harvard Crimson defending Professor John Comaroff, who had been found to have violated the university's sexual and professional conduct policies. After students filed a lawsuit with detailed allegations of Comaroff's actions and the university's failure to respond, Greenblatt was one of several signatories to say that he wished to retract his name from the letter.

Family

Greenblatt is an Eastern European Jew, an Ashkenazi, and a Litvak. His observant Jewish grandparents were born in Lithuania; his paternal grandparents were from Kaunas and his maternal grandparents were from Vilnius. Greenblatt's grandparents immigrated to the United States during the early 1890s in order to escape a Czarist Russification plan to conscript young Jewish men into the Russian army.

In 1998, he married literary critic Ramie Targoff, whom he has described as his soulmate.

Work

Greenblatt has written extensively on Shakespeare, the Renaissance, culture and New Historicism (which he often refers to as "cultural poetics"). Much of his work has been "part of a collective project", such as his work as co-editor of the Berkeley-based literary-cultural journal Representations (which he co-founded in 1983), as editor of publications such as the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and as co-author of books such as Practicing New Historicism (2000), which he wrote with Catherine Gallagher. Greenblatt has also written on such subjects as travelling in Laos and China, story-telling, and miracles.

Greenblatt's collaboration with Charles L. Mee, Cardenio, premiered on May 8, 2008, at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While the critical response to Cardenio was mixed, audiences responded quite positively. The American Repertory Theater has posted audience responses on the organization's blog. Cardenio has been adapted for performance in ten countries, with additional international productions planned.

He wrote his 2018 book Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics out of anxiety over the 2016 US presidential election.

New Historicism

Greenblatt first used the term "New Historicism" in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth I's "bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare's Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the "mutual permeability of the literary and the historical". New Historicism is regarded by many to have influenced "every traditional period of English literary history". Some critics have charged that it is "antithetical to literary and aesthetic value, that it reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical, that it denies human agency and creativity, that it is somehow out to subvert the politics of cultural and critical theory that it is anti-theoretical". Scholars have observed that New Historicism is, in fact, "neither new nor historical." Others praise New Historicism as "a collection of practices" employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature by considering it in historical context while treating history itself as "historically contingent on the present in which constructed".

As stated by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, the approach of New Historicism has been "the most influential strand of criticism over the last 25 years, with its view that literary creations are cultural formations shaped by 'the circulation of social energy'." When told that several American job advertisements were requesting responses from experts in New Historicism, Greenblatt remembered thinking: "'You've got to be kidding. You know it was just something we made up!' I began to see there were institutional consequences to what seemed like a not particularly deeply thought-out term."

He has also said that "My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago".

Greenblatt's works on New Historicism and "cultural poetics" include Practicing New Historicism (2000) (with Catherine Gallagher), in which Greenblatt discusses how "they anecdote ... appears as the 'touch of the real'" and Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987), in which Greenblatt asserts that the question of "how art and society are interrelated," as posed by Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, "cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance". Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the introduction to the Norton Shakespeare are regarded as good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices.

New Historicism acknowledges that any criticism of a work is colored by the critic's beliefs, social status, and other factors. Many New Historicists begin a critical reading of a novel by explaining themselves, their backgrounds, and their prejudices. Both the work and the reader are affected by everything that has influenced them. New Historicism thus represents a significant change from previous critical theories like New Criticism, because its main focus is to look at many elements outside of the work, instead of reading the text in isolation.

Shakespeare and Renaissance studies

Greenblatt's work contextualizes Shakespeare against the English Renaissance as a whole, believing "that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare." In particular, as he states in "King Lear and Harsnett's 'Devil-Fiction'," Greenblatt believes that "Shakespeare's self-consciousness is in significant ways bound up with the institutions and the symbology of power it anatomizes". His work on Shakespeare has addressed such topics as ghosts, purgatory, anxiety, exorcists and revenge. He is also a general editor of the Norton Shakespeare. This New Historicism opposes the ways in which New Criticism consigns texts "to an autonomous aesthetic realm that Renaissance writing from other forms of cultural production" and the historicist notion that Renaissance texts mirror "a coherent world-view that was held by a whole population," asserting instead "that critics who to understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing must delineate the ways the texts they were linked to the network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constituted Renaissance culture in its entirety". Greenblatt's work in Renaissance studies includes Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), which "had a transformative impact on Renaissance studies".

Norton Anthology of English Literature

Greenblatt joined M. H. Abrams as general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature published by W. W. Norton during the 1990s. He is also the co-editor of the anthology's section on Renaissance literature and the general editor of the Norton Shakespeare, "currently his most influential piece of public pedagogy."

Political commentary

Although it does not refer to Donald Trump directly, Greenblatt's 2018 book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power, is considered by literary critics in leading newspapers as criticism of the Trump administration.

Honors

1964–66: Fulbright scholarship
1975: Guggenheim Fellowship
1983: Guggenheim Fellowship
1989: James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association (Shakespearean Negotiations)
2002: Honorary D.Litt., Queen Mary College, University of London
2002: Erasmus Institute Prize
2002: Mellon Distinguished Humanist Award
2005: William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre, Washington, D.C.
2006: Honorary degree, University of Bucharest, Romania
2010: Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale University
2011: National Book Award for Nonfiction, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
2011: James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
2012: Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
2016: Honorary Ph.D. in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory, from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
2016: Holberg Prize for outstanding scholars for work in the arts, humanities, social sciences, law or theology
2024: Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts

Lectures

Clarendon Lectures, University of Oxford (1988)
Carpenter Lectures, University of Chicago (1988)
Adorno Lectures, Goethe University Frankfurt (2006)
Campbell Lectures, Rice University (2673 )
Sigmund H Danziger Jr Lecture, University of Chicago (2015)
Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series, Syracuse, New York (2015)
Mosse Lecture Series, Humboldt University (2015)
Humanitas Visiting Professorship in Museums, Galleries and Libraries, University of Oxford (2015)
Shakespearean Futures Panel and Keynote Presentation, Pequot Library Association (2023)

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (May 2018)

Books

Greenblatt, Stephen (1965). Three modern satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-00508-0.
— (1973). Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-01634-5.
— (2005) . Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-30659-9.
— (1989). Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-06160-6.
— (2007) . Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-415-77160-3.
— (1992). Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-30652-0.
—, ed. (1992). Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: Modern Language Association of America. ISBN 978-0-87352-396-7.
with Cohen, Walter; Howard, Jean; Maus, Katharine Eisaman, eds. (2008) . The Norton Shakespeare (2nd ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-92991-1.
with Gallagher, Catherine (2001). Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-27935-0.
— (2002). Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-10257-3.
— (2004). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-05057-8.
— (2005). The Greenblatt Reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-1566-7.
— (2010). Shakespeare's Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-30667-4.
— (2011). The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06447-6.
— (2017). The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-24080-1.
— (2018). Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393635751.
– with Adam Phillips (2024), Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, Yale UP, ISBN 978-0300276367

Essays and reporting

Greenblatt, Stephen (April 2, 2015). "Shakespeare in Tehran". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved October 9, 2016.
— (June 19, 2017). "The invention of sex : St. Augustine's carnal knowledge". Annals of Culture. The New Yorker. Vol. 93, no. 17. pp. 24–28.
— (July 10, 2017). "If You Prick us". Annals of Culture. The New Yorker. Vol. 93, no. 20. pp. 34–39.

Notes

Rachel Donadio (January 23, 2005). "Who Owns Shakespeare?". The New York Times. Retrieved March 2, 2012.
"The 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winners". Retrieved March 25, 2014.
"2011 National Book Award Winner, Nonfiction". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 25, 2014.
^ Miller, Lucasta (February 26, 2005). "The human factor". The Guardian. Retrieved October 7, 2015.
"Greenblatt Accepts Tenure: Prof. Will Join English Dept". The Harvard Crimson. December 14, 1996. Retrieved October 7, 2015.
Vincent Leitch, ed. (2001). Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton. p. 2250. ISBN 978-0-393-97429-4.
Wu, Sarah (December 14, 2016). "A Safe Haven for Scholars at Risk". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved February 23, 2022.
"MLA: Widening the lens". Times Higher Education. December 20, 2002. Retrieved February 23, 2022.
"Chronicle of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 1978–2006". Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Retrieved October 7, 2015. 2001 ... Stephen Greenblatt, Humanities, Harvard, is appointed a Non-Resident Permanent Fellow.
"Stephen Greenblatt Contemplates the Enduring Power of Lucretius and his Dangerous Ideas". April 2, 2013. Retrieved October 7, 2015. A lecture by Stephen Greenblatt, RAAR '10, took place Wednesday evening under an auspicious full moon at the Villa Aurelia.
"APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 14, 2021.
Greenblatt, Stephen (May 2003). "Presidential Address 2002: "Stay, Illusion". On Receiving Messages from the Dead". Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. JSTOR 1261517.
"38 Harvard Faculty Sign Open Letter Questioning Results of Misconduct Investigations into Prof. John Comaroff". www.thecrimson.com. The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved February 8, 2022.
"3 graduate students file sexual harassment suit against prominent Harvard anthropology professor". www.bostonglobe.com. The Boston Globe. Retrieved February 8, 2022.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n18/stephen-greenblatt/the-inevitable-pit%7Ctitle=The Inevitable Pit|work=London Review of Books|date=September 21, 2000|
"The Inevitable Pit: Stephen Greenblatt writes about his family and the New World". London Review of Books. Retrieved December 9, 2012.
"What can Macbeth teach us about President Trump's next move?" by Eliot A. Cohen, The Washington Post, May 3, 2018
"Stephen Greenblatt interview: on Shakespeare, Trump and his new book about the 'strong men' who lead the world" by Bryan Appleyard, The Times, May 20, 2018 (subscription required)
^ Greenblatt, Stephen (2005). The Greenblatt Reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1–3. ISBN 978-1-4051-1566-7.
^ Cadzow, Hunter; Conway, Alison; Traister, Bryce (2005). "New Historicism". Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Retrieved March 2, 2012.
Vickers, Brian (1994). Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 215. ISBN 978-0300061055.
"Greenblatt Named University Professor of the Humanities". Harvard University Gazette. September 21, 2000. Archived from the original on February 8, 2012. Retrieved March 2, 2012.
Greenblatt, Stephen (2002). Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-691-10257-3.
David Richter, ed. (1988). The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Boston: Bedford Books. p. 1295. ISBN 978-0-312-10106-0.
Donadio, Rachel, The New York Times, January 8, 2006, "Keeper of the Canon"
Ken Gewertz (February 2, 2006). "Greenblatt Edits 'Norton Anthology'". Harvard University Gazette. Archived from the original on February 8, 2012. Retrieved March 2, 2012.
Callow, Simon (June 20, 2018). "What Would Shakespeare Have Made of Donald Trump?". The New York Times. Retrieved July 12, 2019.
McCrum, Robert (July 1, 2018). "Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power by Stephen Greenblatt review – sinister and enthralling". The Guardian. Retrieved July 12, 2019.
Cohen, Eliot A. (May 3, 2018). "What can Macbeth Teach us about President Trump's next move?". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 12, 2019.
"Greenblatt". ORDEN POUR LE MÉRITE (in German). Retrieved November 26, 2024.
Online version is titled "How St. Augustine invented sex".
Online version is titled "Shakespeare's Cure for Xenophobia".

External links

v t e Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
1962–1975	The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore White (1962) The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman (1963) Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter (1964) O Strange New World by Howard Mumford Jones (1965) Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale (1966) The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture by David Brion Davis (1967) Rousseau and Revolution, vol. 10 of The Story of Civilization, by Will and Ariel Durant (1968) So Human an Animal by René Dubos / The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer (1969) Gandhi's Truth by Erik Erikson (1970) The Rising Sun by John Toland (1971) Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 by Barbara W. Tuchman (1972) Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald / Children of Crisis vols. 2 and 3 by Robert Coles (1973) The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1974) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (1975)
1976–2000	Why Survive? by Robert N. Butler (1976) Beautiful Swimmers by William W. Warner (1977) The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan (1978) On Human Nature by E. O. Wilson (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1980) Fin-de-siècle Vienna by Carl Emil Schorske (1981) The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1982) Is There No Place on Earth for Me? by Susan Sheehan (1983) The Social Transformation of American Medicine by Paul Starr (1984) The Good War by Studs Terkel (1985) Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas / Move Your Shadow by Joseph Lelyveld (1986) Arab and Jew by David K. Shipler (1987) The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1988) A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan (1989) And Their Children After Them by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson (1990) The Ants by Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson (1991) The Prize by Daniel Yergin (1992) Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills (1993) Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick (1994) The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner (1995) The Haunted Land by Tina Rosenberg (1996) Ashes to Ashes by Richard Kluger (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (1998) Annals of the Former World by John McPhee (1999) Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower (2000)
2001–2025	Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix (2001) Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter (2002) "A Problem from Hell" by Samantha Power (2003) Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2004) Ghost Wars by Steve Coll (2005) Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins (2006) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (2007) The Years of Extermination by Saul Friedländer (2008) Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon (2009) The Dead Hand by David E. Hoffman (2010) The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011) The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt (2012) Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King (2013) Toms River by Dan Fagin (2014) The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015) Black Flags by Joby Warrick (2016) Evicted by Matthew Desmond (2017) Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr. (2018) Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold (2019) The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin / The Undying by Anne Boyer (2020) Wilmington's Lie by David Zucchino (2021) Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott (2022) His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (2023) A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (2024)

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