Cultural Study
Unit 2
Welcome readers! This blog post is a response to a thinking activity assigned by Dilip BArad Sir from the Department of English at MKBU. This blog is about New Historicism.
New Historicism
New Historicism, a literary theory influenced by Stephen Greenblatt and Michel Foucault, asserts that understanding literature requires examining both the historical context of the author and the critic. It acknowledges the reciprocal influence between a work of literature and the circumstances of its creation, as well as the impact of the critic's environment, beliefs, and biases on their interpretation.
In the New Historicist approach, literature is scrutinized within a broader historical framework, exploring how the author's era shaped the work and, conversely, how the work reflects the spirit of its time. New Historicists emphasize that a critic's analysis is inevitably influenced by their contemporary cultural context.
For Example , when assessing Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice for potential anti-Semitic undertones. Instead, it insists on evaluating the play within the historical context in which it was written.
Moreover, New Historicists argue that studying the play can unveil cultural history, particularly in terms of power dynamics, social class marginalization, and their dispersion within the work. The reciprocal relationship between studying history and the text is emphasized, revealing insights about both.
The New Historicist also acknowledges that his examination of literature is "tainted" by his own culture and environment. The very fact that we ask whether Shakespeare was anti-Semitic a question that wouldn't have been considered important a century ago, reveals how our study of Shakespeare is affected by our civilization.
New Historicism, then, underscores the impermanence of literary criticism. Current literary criticism is affected by and reveals the beliefs of our times in the same way that literature reflects and is reflected by its own historical contexts. New Historicism acknowledges and embraces the idea that, as times change, so will our understanding of great literature.
By examining the interplay between literature and history, New Historicism has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of both literary works and the societies that produced them. However, it has also faced criticism for its tendency to downplay the individual agency of authors and its potential for overlooking the aesthetic aspects of literature in favor of historical and political considerations.
New Historicism is a literary theory and critical approach to the study of literature that emerged in the late 20th century, particularly in the 1980s. It is closely associated with the work of scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucault, and Hayden White. New Historicism rejects the idea of separating literature from its historical and cultural context, emphasizing the interconnectedness of literature and the social, political, and cultural forces of its time.
A work of art is a part of material practices within society. It states that a work of fiction cannot be totally detached from non-fiction. It further states that a fictional entity is attached to history.
New Historicism fundamentally is defined as a theory that analyzes a text in connection with political and historical realities. Thus New Historicism is the opposite of New Criticism. While New Criticism focused only on the purity of the text, on the other hand, New Historicism rejects the idea of text as an isolated, pure concept.
New Historicism states that a text is not divorced from external agents of influence such as economics, societal influences, and material circumstances. New Historicism also proposes that there is no absolute boundary between fiction and history.
The emphasis of New Historicism is on the external agents surrounding a text. Stephen Greenblatt’s discourse on Shakespeare has led to a breakthrough in the field of New Historicism in which Greenblatt has proposed to rewrite Shakespeare’s legacy through interaction with political, cultural, material, social, economic and historical themes.
For Example , Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, at a certain point was only read as an artistic work. But New Historicism has given a chance to read the play through a post-colonial lens. Some of the scholars associated with New Historicism are Stuart Hall, Raymond William, and Stephen Greenblatt.
Characteristics of New Historicism
Contextualization: New Historicists argue that literary works are embedded in the historical circumstances of their creation and reception. They seek to understand literature by examining the social, political, and cultural contexts that shaped it.
Power Dynamics: New Historicists often explore the power relations inherent in literature and society. They are interested in how power operates, who wields it, and how it is reflected in literary texts. Michel Foucault's ideas about power, discourse, and knowledge have been particularly influential in this regard.
Interdisciplinary Approach: New Historicism draws on insights from various disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. Scholars often use a wide range of historical documents, visual arts, and other cultural artifacts to supplement their literary analysis.
Textuality and Discourse: New Historicists focus on the language and rhetoric of both literary and non-literary texts. They explore how language constructs meaning and how certain discourses contribute to the perpetuation or subversion of cultural norms.
Instability of Meaning: New Historicists reject the idea of fixed or universal meanings in literary texts. They argue that meanings are contingent on historical and cultural contexts and are subject to change over time.
Historical Imagination: The approach encourages readers to engage with the historical imagination of a text, considering how it reflects and responds to the historical moment in which it was produced.
Fragmentation and Multiplicity: New Historicists often embrace the idea that there are multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations of a text. They acknowledge the plurality of voices and perspectives in literature and history.
New historicism - critical approach
New historicism is a critical approach which disrupts the extremity of purely formal and linguistic critical canon and dogmatism of close textual analysis of a work at the expense of extrinsic value embedded implicitly in its intrinsic part. These purely formal approaches lay emphasis on the fact that since text is the ultimate reality with the reader, he need not go beyond that and should try to find out finer meaning by locating the free play of signs and signified or the process of signification to ascertain aesthetic Value.
On the other hand, New Historicists opine that to locate solely linguistic and textual features of a piece of writing is to see one side of the coin, rather a text can find proper interpretation if the conditions of its production are also previewed because “New Historicism is an approach to literary criticism and literary theory based on the premise that a literary work should be considered a product of its time, place and circumstances of its composition rather than as an isolated creation of genius” New historicists consider any texts as cultural construct, whether that text is literary or non literary belonging to other disciplines of knowledge rather than a creation coming into existence due to divine power of genius as S.T. Coleridge suggests in his Biographia Literaria.
Moreover, New Historicism aims at rehistorization of text whether literary and non-literary and ascribes due significance to the cultural condition of its production, meaning, impact, its interpretation and evaluation, that is, a literary text is produced and actualized in cultural conditions, not in vacuum.
It should not be taken as a return to traditional school of Historicism “for the views and practices of the New Historicism differ markedly from those of former scholars who had adverted to social and intellectual history as ‘background’ against which to set work of literature as a independent entity, or had viewed literature as a reflection of the world view characteristic of the period”. Unlike old school of Historicism, New Historicism “operates by fusing ‘linguistic turn’ of post structuralism and deconstruction and a return to historical readings”.
New historicism offers a substantial methodology to study literature as a text as it assimilates linguistic turn of Post Structuralism and indeterminate nature of literary text propounded by deconstructionists which always remain under erasure. These approaches tend to close textual analysis of a work; however, the nexus between New Historicism and these linguistic approaches cannot be undermined because literature also carries its own historicity.
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