Lecture 2: Traditional Criticism Vs. New Historicism

Objectives

ü  -to draw the difference between traditional and New Historicism theories

ü  -to investigate literary texts through New Historicist perspectives

ü  -to show the impossibility of obtaining the meaning of a text from its historical context only

 

Introduction

 

   New Historicism is a school of literary theory that first developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic and Harvard English Professor Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s. In his seminal volume Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988), noted scholar Stephen Greenblatt set the foundation for New Historicism, a mode of cultural inquiry that would change the direction of literary theory in the final two decades of the twentieth century. Greenblatt was, perhaps, the first to question the linear, unbiased, and progressive view of history. It is an approach to literary criticism and literary theory based on the premise that literary work should be considered as a product of the time, place, and historical circumstances of its own composition rather than as an isolated work of art or text.

The Difference between Traditional and New Historicism Theories

 

  Traditional historicism claims that the meaning of a text is established by its historical context. Readers can obtain the meaning of a text from publicly held understandings that can be found in the historical record. Traditional historicism assumes that works are explained by their immediate historical contexts.  The researchers of this trend are arguing that the work is a sort of artifact frozen in historical time, much like an object retrieved from a dig in Mesopotamia or Egypt. (Herman 34)  Hence the work cannot transcend its moment. Surprisingly, it is quite odd when one begins to realize that the essential quality of the art is its ability to communicate rather profoundly with audiences in any historical time without the aid of historical scholarship. Another aspect of the traditional historian is the idea that works of art would conform to the norms and forms of their historical period. However, in fact, it is the tendency of major art to be innovative and therefore to break with established norms and forms, if not with the commonplace horizon of ordinary thinking that is advanced by the artist’s contemporaries. Indeed, history shows us that the last people who could have understood Shakespeare, for instance, very well would have been their contemporaries. But one can see Shakespeare’s works in contemporary theatres when people, art critics, and the media are stimulating great joy. 

  Although Traditional and New Historicism are often debated together, the only relationship between the two of them is opposition. They both ask different questions. Their approaches to history are based on very different views of what history is and how we can know it. Traditional historians ask, “What happened?” and “What does the event tell us about history?” In contrast, new historicists ask, “How has the event been interpreted?” and “What do the interpretations tell us about the interpreters?” For most traditional historians, history is a series of events that have a linear, causal relationship: event A caused event B, event B caused event C, and so on (Tyson 278).  Traditional historians believe that they are competent, through objective analysis, in discovering the facts about historical events.  Those facts, in their vision, can sometimes reveal the spirit of the age, that is, the worldview held by the culture to which those facts refer. Indeed, it can not be denied that some traditional historical accounts have offered a key concept that would explain the worldview of a given historical population. (Tyson 283) Finally, traditional historians generally believe that history is progressive and that the human species is improving over the course of time, advancing in its moral, cultural, and technological accomplishments.

    Unlike traditional historians, the New Historicists argue that history is discontinuous and that there is no coherent world picture at any given time (no Elizabethan World Picture, as traditional historicism has argued) because history is a site of conflicting social, political, and cultural processes, which are expressed as material practices, of which literary production is but one. All material practices turn out to be established in terms of resistance and power, but it is how resistance and power are strategized and deployed that matters.

 

   It is a movement that argued the literary text shouldn’t be viewed as a privileged object at the center of a totalizing rational context, but that the text is itself a context among many different contexts that are neither totalizing nor rationally configured as a whole, given how contradictory and conflicted they often are in relation to one another. New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the historic moment that created it. Specifically, New Historicism is “...a practice that has developed out of contemporary theory, particularly the structuralist realization that all human systems are symbolic and subject to the rules of language, and the deconstructive realization that there is no way of positioning oneself as an observer outside the closed circle of textuality” (Richter 1205).  Unlike the traditional historicists, the New Historicists, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher among them, were open to the idea that literary and non-literary texts were equal in terms of being material practices of power and resistance. What the New Historians shared with their predecessors, however, is the idea that the author traffics in shared social/cultural meanings which are being used, in the New Historical understanding, for the sake of renegotiating social values by means of entering a stream of ongoing social discourses that are part and parcel of the public sphere.

   New historicists don’t believe they have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history. We may know, for example, that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, and that it was the English who managed to create the thirteen colonies. But our understanding of what such facts mean, of how they fit within the complex web of competing ideologies and conflicting social, political, and cultural agendas of the time and place in which they occurred is, for new historicists, strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact. In other words, what traditional historians consider facts; New Historians believe in interpretations of facts. For new historicists, there is no such thing as historical facts per se; rather all apparent historical facts are open to interpretation due to their inherently textual nature. Hence, there is no such thing as an absolute or fully accurate historical account. Even when traditional historians believe they are sticking to the facts, the way they contextualize those facts (including which facts are deemed important enough to report and which are left out) determines what story those facts will tell. From this axiomatic, there is no such thing as a presentation of facts; there is only interpretation. Furthermore, new historicists argue that reliable interpretations are, for a number of reasons, difficult to produce.

   The first and most important reason for this difficulty, New Historicists believe, is the impossibility of objective analysis. (Tyson 283) Like all human beings, historians live in a particular time and place, and their views of both current and past events are influenced in innumerable conscious and unconscious ways by their own experiences within their own culture. Historians may believe they’re being objective, but their own views of what is right and wrong, what is civilized and uncivilized, what is important and unimportant, and the like, will strongly influence the ways in which they interpret events.

    According to historicists, history cannot be understood simply as a linear progression of events. At any given point in history, any given culture may be progressing in some areas and regressing in others. New historicists ultimately view history as being anything but a linear, direct, and discrete series of events but, instead, as a series of subjective and fractured events which exist only through the medium of text. (Herman 35) New historicist literary theorists, then, attempt to place their interpretation of literary texts firmly within their historical contexts, with special attention being given to the marginalized aspects of a text’s historical context and setting. History, for them, isn’t a neat array or a ceremony into a continually evolving future, as many traditional historians have believed. It’s more like an improvised dance consisting of an infinite variety of steps, following any new route at any given moment, and having no particular goal or destination. Individuals and groups of people may have goals, but human history does not. (Tyson 284)

   Similarly, while events certainly have causes, new historicists argue that those causes are usually multiple, complex, and difficult to analyze. One cannot make simple causal statements with any certainty. In addition, causality is not a one-way street from cause to effect. In other words, all events—including everything from the creation of an artwork to a televised murder trial to the persistence of or change in the condition of the poor—are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge.

    In a similar manner, our subjectivity, or selfhood, is shaped by and shapes the culture into which we were born. For most new historicists, our individual identity is not merely a product of society. Neither is it merely a product of our own individual will and desire. Instead, individual identity and its cultural milieu inhabit, reflect, and define each other. Their relationship is mutually constitutive (they create each other) and dynamically unstable. Thus, the old argument between determinism and free will can’t be settled because it rests on the wrong question: “Is human identity socially determined, or are human beings, free agents?” For new historicism, this question cannot be answered because it involves a choice between two entities that are not wholly separate. Rather, the proper question is, “What are the processes by which individual identities and social formations—such as political, educational, legal, and religious institutions and ideologies—create, promote, or change each other?” For every society constrains individual thought and action within a network of cultural limitations while simultaneously enabling individuals to think and act. Our subjectivity, then, is a lifelong process of negotiating our way, consciously and unconsciously, among the constraints and freedoms offered at any given moment in time by the society in which we live. (Tyson 284)

Typical questions:

ü  What language/characters/events present in the work reflect the current events of the author’s day?

ü  Are there words in the text that have changed their meaning from the time of the writing?

ü  How are such events interpreted and presented?

ü  How are events’ interpretation and presentation a product of the culture of the author?

ü  How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the day?

ü  How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the same period?

ü  How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations? What does the literary work suggest about the experience of groups of people who have been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented by traditional history?

Conclusion

 

   Personal experience and historical events are closely related to each other in a way that historical events influence the writer’s personal experience and the personal experience of the characters in the novel represents historical events.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1993). Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977; Homo Academicus, 1984; The Field of Cultural Production

Foucault, Michel. (1977). The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, 1970;  Language, Counter-memory, Practice

Geertz, Clifford. (1992). The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973; “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”

Greenblatt, Stephen. (1980)  Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare

Rapaport, Herman. (2011). The Literary Theory Toolkit A Compendium of Concepts and Methods. Wiley Blackwell, Ltd.

Tyson, Lois. (2006). Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Routledge

Veeser, Aran. (1989). Ed. The New Historicism. New York: Routledge,