New Historicism
Name :- Patel Krishna K.
Roll No. :- 16
Semester :- 02
Batch:- 2018 – 2020
Enrolment no. :- 2069108420190035
Email id :- krishnadobariya08@gmail.com
Course :- M.A. English
Paper No. :- 08 Cultural Studies
Topic :- New Historicism
Submitted to :- Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English MKBU
New Historicism:-
New Historicism, since the early 1980s has been the accepted
name for a mode of literary study that its proponents oppose to the formalism
they attribute both to the New criticism and to the critical deconstruction
that followed it. In place of dealing with a text in isolation from its
historical context, new historicists attend primarily to the historical and
cultural conditions of its production, its meaning, its effects, and also of
its later critical interpretations and evaluations. This is not simply a return
to an earlier kind of literary scholarship, for the views and practices of the
new historicists differ markedly from those of earlier scholars who had
adverted to social and intellectual history as a background against which to
set a work of literature as an independententity, or had viewed literature as a
reflection of the worldview characteristic of a period. Instead new historicists
conceive of a literary text as situated within the totality of the
institutions, social practices, and discourses that constitute the culture of a
particular time and place, and with which the literary text interacts as both a
product and a producer of cultural energies and codes.
What is most distinctive in this mode of historical study is
mainly the result of concepts and practices of literary analysis and
interpretation that have been assimilated from various recent poststructural
theorists .
Especially prominent are:
1.
The
views of the revisionist Marxist thinker Louis Althusser that ideology
manifests itself in different ways in the discourses of each of the semi – autonomous institutions of an era,
including literature, and also that ideology operates covertly to form and
position the users of language as the subject in a discourse, in a way that in
fact subjects them that is subordinates them to the interests of the ruling
classes; see ideology under Marxist
criticism, and subject under postmodernism.
2.
Michel
Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era, instead of reflecting
pre-existing entities and orders , bring
the concepts, oppositions and hierarchies of which it speak; that these
elements are both products and propagators of power or social forces and that
as a result the particular discursive formations of an era determine what is at
the time accounted knowledge and truth, as well as what is considered to be
humanly normal as against what is considered
to be criminal or insane, or sexually deviant see Foucault under
Poststructuralism.
3.
The
central concept in deconstructive criticism that all texts involve modes of
signification that war against each other, merged with Mikhail Bakhtin’s
concept of the dialogic nature of many literary texts, in the sense that they
incorporate a number of conflicting voices that represent diverse social classes
and interests – see dialogic criticism.
4.
Recent
developments in cultural anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz’ view that a
culture is constituted by distinctive ssets of signifying systems, and his use
of what he calls thick descriptions the closes analysis, or reading of a
particular social production or event so as to recover the meanings it has for
the people involved in it, as well as to discover, within the overall cultural
system, the network of conventions ,codes and modes of thinking with which the
particular item is implicated and which invest the items with those meanings.
In an oft-quoted phrase, Louis Montrose described the new historicism as
a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the texuality of
history. That is history is conceived to be not a set of fixed, objective facts
but, like the literature with which it interacts, a text that itself needs to
be interpreted. Any text, on the other hand, is conceived as a discourse which,
although it may seem to present, or reflect, an external reality, in fact
consists of what are called representations that is – verbal formations which
are the ideological products or cultural constructs of the historical
conditions specific to an era. Many historicists claim also that these cultural
and ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce, confirm and
propagate the complex power structures of dominations and subordinations which
characterize a given society.
Despite their
common perspective on literary writings
as mutually implicative with all other components of a culture, we find
considerable diversity and disagreements among individual exponents of the new
historicism. The following proposal, however, occur frequently in their
writings, sometimes in an extreme and sometimes in a qualified form. All of
them are formulated in opposition to view that according to new historicists,
were central ideological constructs in traditional literary criticism. A number
of historicists assign the formative period of most such constructs to the
early era of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
1.
Literature
does not occupy a trans – historical, aesthetic realm which is independent of
the economics , social, and political
conditions specific to an era, nor is literature subject to timeless criteria
of artistic value. Instead , a literary text is simply one of many kinds of
texts religious, philosophical ,legal, scientific and so on all of which are
formed and structured by the particular conditions of a time and place, and
among which the literary text has neither unique status nor special privilege.
A related fallacy of mainstream criticism, according to new historicists, was
to view a literary text as an autonomous body of fixed meanings that cohere to
form an organic whole in which all conflicts are artistically resolved. On the
contrary, it is claimed, many literary
texts consist of a diversity of dissonant voices, and these voices express not only the
orthodox, but also the subordinated and subversive forces of the era in which
the text was produced. Furthermore, what may seem to be the artistic resolution
of a literary plot, yielding pleasure to the reader, is in fact deceptive, for
it is an effect that serves to cover over the unresolved conflicts of power,
class, gender, and diverse social groups that make up the tensions that
underline the surface meanings of a literary text.
Some new historicists nonetheless maintain the distinction between
literary and non-literary works, as well as between major and lesser works of
literary artistry.
2.
History is not a homogeneous and stable
pattern of facts and events which serve as the background to the literature of
an era, or which literature can be said simply to reflect or which can be
adverted to as the material conditions that in a unilateral way, determine the
particularities of a literary text. In contrast to such views, a literary text
is said by new historicists to be thoroughly embedded in its context and in a
constant interaction and interchange with other components inside the network
of institutions, beliefs and cultural power relations, practices, and products
that in their ensemble, constitute what we call history. New historicists
commonly regard even the conceptual boundaries by which we currently
discriminate between literature and non-literary texts to be a construct of
post Renaissance but only for mations. They continue to post renaissance
ideological for tactical convenience in conducting critical discussion, and
stress that one must view all boundaries between types of discourse as entirely
permeable to interchanges of diverse elements and forces.
3.
The
humanistic concept of an essential human nature is common to the author of a
literary work, the characters within the work, and the audience the author
writes for, is another of the widely held ideological illusions that according
to many new historicists, were generated primarily by a capitalist culture.
They also attribute to this bourgeois and essentialist humanism the view that a
literary work is the imaginative creation of a free or autonomous author who
possesses a unified , unique and enduring personal identity. In the epilogue of
renaissance self fashioning Stephen
Greenblatt says that, in the course of writing the book, he lost his initial
confidence in the role of human autonomy for the human subject itself began to
seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a
particular society. An area of contest among new historicists is the extent to
which an author, despite being a subject
who is constructed and positioned by the play of power and ideology within the discourse of a particular era, may
retain some scope for individual initiative and agency. A number of
historicists who ascribe a degree of freedom and initiative to an individual
author do so, however not as in traditional criticism, in order to account for
an author do so, however, not as in traditional criticism, in order to account
for an author’s literary invention and distinctive artistry, but in order to
keep open the theoretical possibility that an individual author can intervene
so as to inaugurate radical changes in the social power structure of which that
individual’s own subjectivity and function are themselves a product.
4.
Like the authors who produce literary texts, their
readers are subjects who are constructed and positioned by the conditions and
ideological formations of their own era. All claims, therefore, for the
possibility of a disinterested and objective interpretation and evaluation of a
literary text such as Matthew Arnold’s behest that we see a work as in itself
it really is- are among the illusions of a humanistic idealism. Insofar as the
ideology of readers conforms to the ideology of the writer of a literary text,
the readers will tend to naturalize the text that is interpret its culture
specific and time bound representations as though they were the features of
universal and permanent human and experience.
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
readymade, the textual meanings they describe and the literary and cultural histories they narrate.
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