New Historicism

Name:- Pandya Riva M.
Roll no:-25
Paper:- 8
Topic:- New Historicism
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• New Historicism:-

New historicism is a school of literary theory which consolidates critical theory into easier forms of practice for academic literary theorists of the 1990s. It first developed in the 1980s, primarily though the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the following decade.

New historicism aim simultaneously to understand the work through its cultural context and to understand intellectual history through literature which follows the 1950s displace of History of ideas and refers to itself as a form of “Cultural Poetics”, new historicism concerns itself with extra literary matters-letters, diaries, films, paintings medical treaties- looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text. New historicist seeks “surprising coincidence” that may cross generic, historical and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony or popular culture. H. Aram Veeser introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism noted some keys assumption that continuously reappears in New Historicist discourse. They were:

1. Every human action is actually the effect of a network of material practice.

2. That every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes.

3. Literary and non –literary “texts” are equally valuable.

4. No discourse, imaginative, scientific or archival gives access to unchanging truths not expresses unalterable human nature

5. A critical method and a language to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.

New historians see such cross cultural phenomena as text in themselves. From Hayden White, cultural studies practitioners learned how figural relationships between present and past tropes are shaped by historical discourse from Chifford Geetz, they derived the importance of immersion in a culture to understand its “deep” ways, as opposed to distanced observation Carolyn Porter credits the emergence of American studies. “Sub-literary texts and uninspired non literary texts all came to be read as documents of historical discourse, side by side with “the great works of literature”. A typical focus of New historicist critics led by Stephen Orgel has been on understanding Shakespeare less as an autonomous great author in the modern sense than as a due to the conjunction of the world of Renaissance theater- a collaborative and largely anonymous free – for- all- and the complex social politics of the time.

The New Historicists aim to do two things: first, they want to study how a work of literature reflects its historical and archive hunt won’t just reveal that this thing was written in 1385, but also what it was like to live in that year, and what people (or at least poets) thought and felt at that starriest of historical moments

A New Historicist looks at literature in a wider historical context, examining both how the writer's times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer's times, in turn recognizing that current cultural contexts color that critic's conclusions.

“The text is historical, and history textual”

-Michael Warner phrases

“History is always historicized”

New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissances and Romantic periods and has revised motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing. Much new historicism focuses on the marginalization of subjects such as those identified as witches, the insane, heretics, vagabonds, and political prisoners.

• New Historicism and Old Historicism

New Historicism differs from the old Historicism in large measure not based on the approach but rather on changes in historical methodology, the rise of the so-called New history. The term new history was indebted to the French term nouvelle histoire, itself associated particularly with the historian Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, members of the third generation of the Annals School, which appeared in the 1970s. The movement can be associated with cultural history, history of representations, and histoire desmentalités. While there may be no precise definition, the new history is best understood in contrast with prior methods of writing history, resisting their focus on politics and "great men;" their insistence on composing historical narrative; their emphasis on administrative documents as key source materials; their concern with individuals' motivations and intentions as explanatory factors for historical events; and their willingness to accept the possibility of historians' objectivity.

New historicism and Facault:

There is a popularly held recognition that Foucault’s ideas have passed through the New Historicist formation in history as a succession of épitsèmess or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture (Myers 1989). It is indeed evident that the categories of history used by New Historicists have been standardized academically. Although the movement is publicly disapproving of the periodisation of academic history, the uses to which New Historicists put the Foucauldian notion of the épitsème amount to very little more than the same practice under a new and improved label (Myers 1989).

• Advantages and disadvantages:

Firstly, it is found upon post structuralist thinking. It is written in a far more accessible way. Its present its data and drows its conclusion in a less dense way. Secondly, the material is often fascinating and distinctive in the context of literary studies. Thirdly, 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. Doing new criticism essentially involves the juxtaposition of literary material with non literary text. Literary and non literary texts, reading the former in the light of the latter.

Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” always shows Shakespeare to be anti Semitic. According to historicist work must be judge in the context in which it was written. Studying the history reveals more about text, studying text reveals more about history.

• Cultural Materialism

Cultural materialism is “a politicized form of historiography.”

-Graham Holderness

Raymond Williams coined the term Cultural Materialism. Jonathan Dollimore and Allen Sinfield made current and defined Cultural materialism as “designating a critical method which has four characteristics:-

Historical Context:- what was happening at the time the text was written.

Theoretical Method: -Incorporating older methods of theory—Structuralism, Post-structuralism etc.

Political Commitment:- Incorporating non-conservative and non-Christian frameworks—such as Feminist and Marxist theory.

Textual Analysis:- building on theoretical analysis of mainly canonical texts that have become “prominent cultural icons”.

Materialism: What does this term mean in the context of Cultural Materialism?

Materialism is at odds with idealism. Idealists believe in the transcendent ability of ideas while materialist believe that culture cannot transcend its material trappings.

• Differences between New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

As we have seen and read in Barry, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have a significant overlap. In fact the main difference is politics. There are three main differences:

1. Cultural Materialists concentrate on the interventions whereby men and women make their own history, where New Historicists focus on the power of social and ideological structures which restrain them. A contrast between political optimism and political pessimism.

2. Cultural Materialists view New Historicists as cutting themselves off from effective political

positions by their acceptance of a particular version of post-structuralism.

3. New Historicists will situate the literary text in the political situation of its own day, while the Cultural Materialists situate it within that of our own.

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