Name: Trivedi Hezal K.
Roll No: 35
PG Reg. No. PG15101040
M.A. – English Regular, Semester-2
Year: 2016
Course No. 7 -C: The cultural studies
Unit-1 – Cultural
Studies:
Assignments Topic- New
Historicism and Cultural Materialism
Submitted to: S.B. Gardi
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
(Gujarat – India)
New historicism:
The term ‘new historicism’ was coined by the American critic Stephen
Greenblatt whose book renaissance self-fashioning: from more to Shakespeare
(1980) is usually regarded as its beginning.
A simple definition
of the 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”.
That is to say, new historicism refuse (at least ostensibly) to
‘privilege’ the literary text: instead of literary ‘foreground’ and a
historical ‘background’ it envisages and practise a mode of study in which
literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or
interrogate each other. This ‘equal weighting’ is suggested in the definition of
new historicism offered by the American critic Louis Montrose: he
defines it is a combined interest in ‘the textuality of history, the historicity
of text’.
Typically a new historical essay will place the literary text within the
‘frame’ of non-literary text. Thus greenblatt’s main innovation, from the
viewpoint of literary study, was to juxtapose the plays of the renaissance
period with ‘the horrifying colonialist policies pursued by all the major
European power of the era’. Greenblatte himself refer to the appropriated
historical document as the ‘anecdote’, and the typical new historicist essay
omits the customary academic preliminaries about previously published
interpretations of the play in question and begins with a powerful and a dramatic
anecdotes, as signalled, for instance, by Louis Montrose, in the first sentence
of the essay discussed later: ‘I would like to recount an Elizabethan dream
-not Shakespeare’s A midsummer Night’s Dream but one dreamt by Simon Forman on
23 January 1597’.
New and old historicism – some differences:
· New historicism
v History has very affects on people;
it is subjective to people’s feeling and emotions, making it blased.
v New historicism follows the principal
that text is “culture in action” and is constantly moulded and shaped by the
culture that surrounds it.
v New historicism looks at history as a
fluctuating interpretive aspect rather than a strong component of literature.
v Parallel reading.
v A historicist movement. Interested in history
as represented and recorded in
written documents – history as text.
v The aim is not to represent the past
as it really was, but to present a new reality by re – situating it.
· Old historicism:
v Before the 1980s, people believed
that historical information taken from novels was completely accurate, without
any bias.
v Old historicists believe that if they
look into the historical context of the book, they will achieve a better
understanding of the text.
v Old historicism relies on the historical
setting to interpret the novel.
v Hierarchical
v A historical movement: creates a
historical framework in which to place the text.
v “The words of the past replace the
world of the past.
New historicism and
Foucault:
New historicism is resolutely anti-establishment implicitly on the side
of liberal ideals of personal freedom and accepting and celebrating all forms
of difference and ‘deviance’. This notion of the state as all-powerful and
all-seeing stems from the post-structuralist cultural historian Michel Foucault
whose pervasive image of the state is that of ‘panoptic’ (meaning ‘all-seeing’)
surveillance. The panoptic was a design for a circular prison conceived by the
eighteenth century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham: the design consisted of tiered ranks of
cells which could all be surveyed by a single warder positioned at the centre
of the circle. The panoptic state, however, maintains its surveillance not by
physical force and intimidation, but by the power of its ‘discursive practices’
( to use Foucault’s terminology – ‘discursive’ is the adjective derived from
the noun ‘discourse’) which circulates its ideology throughout the body
politic.
On the other hand politic power
operates in and suffuses so many spheres, the possibility of fundamental change
and transformation may to seem very remote. Foucault’s work looks at the institutions
which enable this power to be maintained, such as state punishment, prison, the
medical profession and legislation about
sexuality. Foucault makes a less rigid distinction than is found in Althusser
between ‘repressive structures’ and ‘ideological structures’.
Advantage and disadvantage of new
historicism:
However, the appeal of new
historicism is undoubtedly great, for a variety of reason. Firstly, although it
is founded upon post structuralism thinking, it is written in a far more accessible
way, for the most part avoiding post structuralism’s characteristically dense style
and vocabulary. It present its data and draws its conclusion, and if it is
sometimes easy to challenge the way the
data is interpreted, this is partly because the empirical foundation on which
the interpretation rests is made openly
available for scrutiny. Secondly, the material itself is fascinating and is
wholly distinctive in the context of literary studies. These essay look and
feel different from those produced by any other critical approach and
immediately give the literary student the new territory is being entered. Particularly,
the ‘uncluttered’ ‘pared - down’ feel of the essays, which results from not
citing previous discussion of the literary work, gives them a stark and
dramatic air. 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: it seems less overtly polemical and more willing
to allow the historical evidence its own voice.
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.
Cultural materialism:
The British critic Graham Holderness describes cultural
materialism as ‘a politicised from of historiography’. The term ‘cultural
materialism’ was made current in 1985 when it was used by Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan sinfield (the best – known of the cultural materialists)
as the subtitle of their edited collection of essay political Shakespeare. They
define the term in a foreword as designing a critical method which has four
characteristics. It combines an attention to:
1)
Historical
context,
2)
Theoretical
method,
3)
Political
commitment, and
4)
Textual
analysis.
To comment briefly on each of this: firstly, the emphasis on
historical context ‘undermines the transcendent significance traditionally
accorded to the literary text’. Here the word ‘transcendent’ roughly means
‘timeless’. The position taken, of course, need to face the obvious objection
that if we are today still studying and reading Shakespeare then his plays have
indeed proved themselves ‘timeless’ in the simple sense that they are clearly
not limited by the historical circumstances in which they were produced. The
aim of culture materialism is to allow the literary text to ‘recover its
histories’ which previous kinds of study have often ignored.
Secondly, the emphasis on theoretical method signifies the
break with liberal humanism and the absorbing of the lessons of structuralism,
post-structuralism, and other approaches which have become prominent since the
1970s.
Thirdly, the emphasis on political commitment signifies the
influence of Marxist and feminist perspective and the break from the
conservative-Christian framework which hitherto dominated Shakespeare
criticism.
Finally, 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. That is, this approach does not limit itself to ‘high’
culture forms like the Shakespeare play. ‘Materialism’ signifies the opposites
of ‘idealism’: an ‘idealist’ belief would be that high culture represents the
free and independent play of the talented individual mind; the contrary
‘materialist’ belief is that culture cannot ‘’transcend the material forced and
relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and
political system, but nor can it be independent of it”. These comments on
materialism represent the standard beliefs of Marxist criticism, and they do
perhaps point to the difficulty of making a useful distinction between a
‘straight’ Marxist criticism and cultural materialism.
Thus, in cultural materialism there is an emphasis on the
functioning of the institutions through which Shakespeare is now brought to us
– the royal Shakespeare company, the film industry, the publishers who produce
textbooks for school and college, and National Curriculum, which lays down the
requirement that specific Shakespeare plays be studies by all school pupils.
Cultural materialism takes a good deal of its outlook from
British left – wing critic Raymond Williams. The result is that cultural materialism
is much more optimistic about the possibility of change and is willing at times
to see literature as a source of oppositional values. Cultural materialism
particularly involves using the past to ‘read’ the present, revealing the
politics of our own society by what we choose to emphasise or suppress of the
past. A great deal of the British work has been about undermining what it sees
as the fetishistic role of Shakespeare as a conservative icon within British
culture. This form of cultural materialism can be conveniently sampled in three
‘new accents’ books.
Difference between new
historicism and cultural materialism:
Political optimism vs. Political pessimism: cultural
materialists tend to concentrate on the interventions whereby men and woman make
their own history. New historicist tends to focus on the less than ideal
circumstances in which they do so. On the ‘power of social and ideological
structures’ which restrain them.
Cultural
materialists see new historicists as cutting themselves off from effective
political positions by their acceptance of a particular version of post –
structuralism, with its radical scepticism about the possibility of attaining.
Secure knowledge. The new historicist defence against this is that being aware
of in – built uncertainly of all knowledge doesn’t mean that we give up trying
to established truths, we simply move forward conscious the dangers and
limitations involved.
Conclusion:
New historicism and cultural materialism implies that all
works of literature are affected by their respective times and that these same things
don’t necessarily change from the present.
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