Assignment #8: New Historicism

New Historicism / Cultural Poetics...

(p.s., this is #8 out of 12 total!!! As much fun as I'm having, i'll be glad to have a bit more summertime...)

_-_-_-_-_-_-_

Summertime beckons, and as much as I enjoy lit theory - I must confess that I want to wrap it up soon. I mean, I get it. Structuralism aside, I'm now into "safe" territory in that many of the remaining theories I have to examine will be simple reviews. Or so I hope. It's really gorgeous outside today...

Anyway, New Historicism is yet another theoretical approach with which I identify. I grew up in the house of an armchair historian, who complained when my 8th grade history teacher inserted the subject of "women" into the curriculum. This rather scary memory reminds me that New Historicism, although seemingly common sense, is actually a revelatory way of reassessing what we know, how we know it, and how this guides our understanding of literature (and, well, the world). However, many people are (still) not comfortable accepting this premise!

The historicism which dominated literary theory before the 1940's attempted to link the academic disciplines of literature and history through explicit / covert links to events, or by providing background information sufficient enough to illustrate how the text encapsulated an era's zeitgeist (Ryan 128).

New Historicism believes that history is a narrative - a collection of stories that a culture tells itself about itself. It is not comprised of facts, but rather various subjective interpretations. What we may accept as "true" or "natural" accounts of the past only seem "natural" because our culture has successfully imprinted them as such into our worldview. It is furthermore an inherent bias for traditional historians to consider history as a linear, causal and progressive chain of events based on the objective observation of facts - because in truth, much of "the facts" are hidden, obscured, or unknowable because they were not included, ignored, downplayed or cut out, particularly if they failed to conform to the mainstream values of the culture.

Literature is one of many manifestations of the discourses which circulated during a particular era. A NH critic practising 'thick description' attempts to interpret texts as a cultural artifact which "can tell us... about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meaning, operating int eh time and place in which these texts were written" (Tyson 287). An author writes within a particular framework of social conventions, cultural codes and worldviews - history is therefore not a separable entity from literature, and vice versa. Foucault is often celebrated within NH criticism for reminding us that language and discourses convey human experience in a subjective manner, whether consciously or unconsiously. The author (and individual, for that matter) 'negotiates' the "contraints and freedoms offered at any given moment in time by the society in which we live" (284). Ryan notes that Foucault also encouraged a move away from the Marxist-macro issues of economics and politics and towards a recognition of the micro-narrative - how individuals themselves constitute meaning in a culture, and are likewise subject to the meaning created for them by society.

Ryan insists that for the NH critics, there is no such thing as a monolithic sense of history - that their job is in fact to "trace out the multiple and complexly interconnected histories that make up an age" (130). He quite beautifully writes that "mimesis or literary representation is itself a social relation of production in that it is connected to status hierarchies, resistances, and conflicts elsewhere in the culture" (131). Therefore, historical research is necessary in order to flesh out our understanding of an era - Stephen Greenblatt's focus on representations of power with Shakespeare's "Henry" plays illustrate often that even instances of subversion operate to reinforce the play's ultimate bow to monarchical power.

I might have mentioned cultural poetics in the title of this post, but ultimately it's a whole other - though connected subject. Tyson only writes that the principles are basically the same, but that CP takes on a more politically active dimension, seeking to change social conditions. This makes sense, as most of the CP folk I know are interested in theorizing about and empowering what has traditionally been maligned as "low" or "popular" culture - making them more typically rooted to the present than the distant past.