2. So-called high culture has no essential privilege over "popular" and "mass" culture, nor do the latter more truly reflect society than the former. These very distinctions are a cultural practice and an ideological intervention that must be examined.
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3. Some kind of materialism must be assumed (not necessarily Marxian).
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4. Much of the rigid barrier between the current humanities and social sciences must be dismantled.
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This axiom and its postulates involve a radical restructuring of our understanding of critical practice and indeed of human culture altogether. Posing them as such and basing one's work upon them is an already transgressive practice vis-à-vis the ideology underlying the current division of scholarship into "humanities" and "social sciences."
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A founding assumption of the practice of new historicism, rendered heavily problematic in theory, is nevertheless that the document, proclamation, deed, diary, or private letter provides access in some sense to a less processed, more transparent version of the discursive practices of the period and can thus serve as explanatory context for the "text."
23
In an essay written in the new-historicist mode, my text would open with a historical anecdote drawn from some kind of palpably documentary sourcea letter, memoir, or memorandum to the kingand then proceed to reading it together with a literary text par excellence, deconstructing, as it were, the very dichotomy between the literary and the documentary, showing not that the documentary is literary but that the literary is no less documentary than the document.
24
But when we study the Talmud, this sense of the documentary must be abandoned once and for all. All of the texts available are of the same epistemological status. They are all literature or all documents in precisely the same degree; indeed, they all occur within the same texts, between the same covers. There is literally (virtually) nothing outside of the text.
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Stephen Greenblatt often prefers a different terminology and definition instead of
new historicism,
namely,
cultural poetics,
that is, simply a
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 | | 23. In that sense, "new historicism" has sometimes appeared to be only a much more sophisticated version of the old historical type of literary criticism, which reduced the text to an expression of the "reality" in which it was produced.
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| | 24. Fineman (1989) offers an important and serious investigation of the status of the anecdote in new-historicist writing.
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