5 - Epilogue: from text to work?

Summary

I have tried in this book to offer a more skeptical account of the place of literature in Renaissance culture and society. I have wanted to participate in the materialist criticism associated with the New Historicism, but also to question previous Renaissance New Historicist work that still seemed to me to give literature a special power over – or place in – economic, social or political structures. This project, however, has also seemed to me problematic in terms of its implications for the present. For while this book has shared the New Historicism's skepticism of idealist claims about literary pleasure and autonomy, it has not offered in their stead an affirmative rationale for literary study, in the way a more confident New Historicist emphasis on literature's political centrality might. Moreover, my demystifying account of literature as a form of cultural capital might seem belated or be side the point, since it is not clear that Renaissance literature or its study are presently idols so strong as to require breaking. Nor, for those for whom “the classics” are counters in struggles that those texts and their interpretation do not really control, can scholarly argument be assured much iconoclastic power. For such texts and the academic who ministers to them already lack real authority – as Stanley Fish suggests in his story of a newspaper editor who, protesting new readings of Shakespeare, praised Shakespeare's “deathless prose.”