New Historicism

Name                  :        Gohil Hetalba I.

Std                       :        M.A. I        Sem :          II

Roll No.              :        8

Topic                   :        New Historicism

Papers                :        Paper No.  8 Cultural Studies

Submitted To     :        Dr. Dilip Barad

                                      Department of English M.K. Bhavnagar

University

v    New Historicism

The term ‘new historicism’ was coined by the American critic Stephen greenbelts whose book renaissance self fashioning from more to Shakespeare (1980) is usually regarded as its beginning.

New historicism has been the accepted name for a mod of literary study that its perfoments appose to the formalism they attribute both of the ‘new criticism’ and to the critical ‘deconstruction’ that followed it what is most distivetive in this mode of historical study is chiefly the consequence of concepts and practices of literary analysis and interpretation and evaluation. New historicists conceive of a literary text as ‘situated’ within the totality of the institutions, social practices & the discourses.

In an oft-quoted phrase, Louis Montrose described the new historicism as “a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.” A number of historicists claim that these cultural and ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce, conform, and propagate the complex pourer structures of domination and subordination which characterize a given society.

We find considerable diversity and disagreements among individual exponents of the new historicism. Many historicists assign the formative period of some basic constructs to the early era of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries new historicists acknowledge that they themselves, like all authors, are “subjectivities” that have been shaped and informed by the circumstances and discourses specific to their era, hence that their own critical writings in great part construct, rather than discover ready-made, the textual meanings they describe and the literary and cultural histories they narrate.

The concepts, themes, and procedures of new historicist criticism took shape in the late 1975s and early 1980s , most prominently in writings by scholars of the English renaissance. New historicist procedures also have parallels in the critics of African, American and other ethnic literatures who stress the role of culture formations dominated by white Europeans in suppressing, marginalizing or distorting the achievements of non-white and non-Europeans people. In the 1990s, various forms of new historicism, and related types of criticism that stress the embeddedness of literature in historical circumstances, replaced deconstruction as the reigning mode of advent-grade critical theory and practice.

v    Definition:-

“New historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period”.

  New historicism refuses to ‘privilege’ the literary text: instead of a literary, foreground and a historical ‘background’ it envisages and practices a mode of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other.

In the definition of new historicism given by the American critic Louis Montrose:-

He defines it as a combined interest in the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’. It involves’ an intensified willingness to read ‘all’ of the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts’ so new historicism embodies’ a paradox, it is an approach to literature in which there is no privileging of the literary. A new historical essay will place the literary text within the ‘frame’ of a non-literary text.

Louis Montrose in the first silence of the essay discussed later. I would like to recent an Elizalathan dream not Shakespeare’s ‘A midsummer night’s dream but one dreamt by Simon Forman on 23 January 1597’. This dramatic openings often cite date and place and have all the force of the documentary, eyewitness account, strongly evoking the quality of lived experience rather than ‘history’ since these historical documents are analyses in their own right, we should perhaps call then ‘contexts’ rather than ‘contexts’. This process is well described by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton in the introduction to their collection of essay new historicism and renaissance drama:

“Where (earlier) criticism had mystified Shakespeare’s as an incarnation of spoken English, it (new historicism) found the plays embedded in other written texts, such as penal, medical and colonial documents.” Read within this archival continuum what they represented was not harmony but the violence of the puritan attack on carnival, the imposition of slavery, the rise of patriarchy the hounding of  deviance, and the crashing of prison gates during what jocular called ‘the age of confinement, at the dawn of cerebral society.’

v    New and old historicism

The earlier approaches made a hierarchical separation between the literary text, which was the object of value, the jeavel, as it were and the historical ‘background’, which was merely the setting, and by definition of less worth.

The practice of giving equal weighting it literary & non-literary material is that the first and major difference between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ historicism.

A second important difference between old and new historicism is encapsulated in the word ‘archival’ in the phrase the phrase the archival continuum.

v    New historicism and Foucault

New historicism is anti-establishment, always implicitly on the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom. Foucault’s pervasive image of the state is that of ‘panoptic’ (all-seeing) surveillance. The pan option was a design for a circular prison.

Discourse is the whole ‘mental set’ and ideology which encloses the thinking of all members of a given society. There is a multiplicity of discourses. Here the state is seen as a monolithic structure and change becomes almost impossible. Foucault’s work looks at the institutions which enable this pourer to be maintained.

A single historical text is sometimes the single witness. The interpretative weight thus placed upon a single document is often very great. Hence, one should not accept admiration of the methods by historians.

v    Advantages and disadvantages

It is founded upon poststructuralist thinking. It presents its data and draws its conclusions. The material itself is often fascinating and wholly distinctive. The political edge of new historicist writing is always sharp, but at the same time it avoids the problems frequently encountered in ‘straight’ Marxist criticism.

New historicism juxtaposes literary material with contemporary non –literary text. They ‘defamiliarise’ the canonical literary text. They focus attention on issues of state power and how it is maintained. They make use in doing so of especially Derrida’s notion that every facet of reality is textures as determined by dominant discursive practices.

v    Example from fairies Queen

In Spenser’s fairies Queen, Elizabeth can project herself as the Queen whose virginity has mystical and magical potency because such images are given currency in court masques, in comedies & pastoral epic poetry. The figure oh Elizabeth stimulates the production and promotion of such work and imagery. Thus, history is textualised and texts are historicized.

v    Cultural Materialism

The British critic graham Holderness describes cultural materialism as ‘a politicized from of historiography’ It can be called the study of historical material within a politicized framework. This term was made current in 1985 when it was used by Jonathan dollinore and Alan sin field as the Sublette of their edited coactions of essay political Shakespeare. The characteristic of cultural materialism are-

(1)             Historical context

(2)             Theoretical method

(3)             Political commitment, and

(4)             Textual analysis

Ø   The emphasis on historical context undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded is the literary text. The word ‘transcendent’ roughly means timeless for example studies of Shakespeare’s plays are proved is be timeless.

Ø   The emphasis on theoretical method signifies the break with liberal humanism and the absorbing of the lessons of structuralism, post-structuralism etc.

Ø   The emphasis on political commitment signifies the influence of Marxist and feminist perspectives and the break from the conservative framework.

Ø   The stress on textual analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored.

The two words in the term cultural materialism are further defined ‘culture’ will include ‘all’ forms of culture while ‘materialism’ signifies the opposite of idealism an idealist belief would be that high culture represents the free and independent play of the talented individual mind

In cultural materialism there is an emphasis on the working of the institutions through which shakpeare is company, the film, industry, the publishers who produce textbooks for school and college, and the national curriculum which lays sown the requirement that specific Shakespeare plays be studied by all school pupils.

Cultural materialism takes a good deal of its outlook from the British left wing critic Raymond Williams. Williams’s intuited the term structures of feelings’

These are concerned with meanings and values as they are lived and felt structure are found in literature. The cultural materialism is much more optimistic about the possibility of change. It involves past to ‘reading’ the present.

v    Difference between cultural materialism and new historicism.

Cultural materialist tend to concentrate on the interventions where by men and women make their own history where as new historicists tent it focus on the less than ideal circumstances in which they do so that is on the ‘power of social and ideological’ structures’ which restrain them.

Cultural materialists see new historicists as cutting themselves off from effective political position by their acceptance of a particular version of post structuralism when new historicists claim that Foucault gives them entry into a non-truth-oriented from of historicist’s study of texts.