Love Quote by Stephen Greenblatt

The line lands with the dry, self-aware snap of a critic catching himself mid-seduction. Greenblatt is both defending and gently mocking the biographical impulse: yes, he’s devoted a life to contextual reading, and yes, he’s just delivered an entire biography, but he refuses to pretend that a writer’s life is the master key to the work. The “spitting in my own soup” idiom is doing a lot of work here. It frames the critic’s caveat as an act of good faith rather than academic hedging: he’s not disowning his craft, he’s policing its excesses.

The subtext is a warning against the readerly shortcut biography can become. A life story offers the comfort of causality: trauma equals theme, affair equals sonnet, patron equals plot. Greenblatt, the signature practitioner of New Historicism, knows better than most how intoxicating context is; he also knows how quickly it turns into a reductive map that flattens art into evidence. That’s why the punchline matters: “even though I’ve just written a biography!” He’s preempting the cynic’s suspicion that all this context is merely a sales pitch for his own project.

Contextually, it’s a late-modern critic’s truce between two camps: the old “intentional fallacy” suspicion of authorial life and the contemporary hunger for origin stories, psychology, and “what really happened.” Greenblatt threads the needle by insisting that biography can deepen attention without replacing it. The joke isn’t self-deprecation for its own sake; it’s a reminder that criticism, at its best, is restraint as much as revelation.