Stephen Greenblatt - Literary Interests, Influences and Personal Favourites

Literary Interests, Influences and Personal Favourites

Greenblatt’s scholarly interests are listed as “Shakespeare; Early Modern Literature and Culture; Literature of Travel and Exploration; Religion and Literature; Literature and Anthropology; Literary and Cultural Theory” on his faculty profile. His critical work is deeply indebted to "Foucauldian and Marxist theories of history". In one interview, Greenblatt stated that the book which most influenced his life and career as a writer was Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Though he hated the book, it made him aware that some books have the power to challenge one’s beliefs. He lists Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, William Shakespeare’s Complete Works and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina among his favourite works (Greenblatt, Interview). Some of his favourite films are M, The Third Man and Shakespeare in Love (Greenblatt, Interview). He enjoys classical music, including Verdi's opera Don Carlo and Mozart's opera Così fan tutte, but does not listen to music while writing.

"At a certain point I passed from the naïve to what Schiller calls the sentimental—that is, I stopped reading books of marvels and began reading ethnographies and novels—but my childhood interests have survived in a passionate curiosity about other cultures and a fascination with tales".

"My students... have had a profound influence upon everything I have written. And at the center of my intellectual life at Berkeley is the group of colleagues who have... shared ideas, argued, criticized, and given of themselves with remarkable generosity".