Essay on New Historicism

Unit-IV 

NEW HISTORICISM

Introduction

Stephen Greenblatt, coined this term that has come to refer to a set of cultural practices seeking to priorities the historical and cultural context rather than solely text-based readings of literature.

How do the new historicists approach history? Describe.

1. New Historicism/ Cultural poetics

It was the American theorists who gave the term 'New Historicism', while the British, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield and Catherine Belsey called it 'cultural poetics'. New Historicism and cultural poetics are more or less the same. New historicists approach history with the question, 'How has the event that happened been interpreted, and what do these tell us now?

2. New Historicism historicist than historical

New historicists believe that we can at best only have access to the facts of the past. What we do is to interpret these facts from our own point of view, and create a history. There are only different interpretations of facts, and one interpretation is as reliable or not as another objective analysis of the facts is impossible. History does not progress in any linear fashion, so also it does not proceed towards any set goal. New historicism is, therefore, historicist rather than historical.

3. History as Text

New Historicism is interested in history as text that is history as recorded and represented in different documents. There are no single causes that lead to events in a predictable way. Our subjectivity too is shaped by and shapes culture. Social formation and individual identity influence each other.

4. 'Discourses' (systems of thought) are dynamic

According to Foucault, all discourses are social constructs by which power is maintained. In his essay, 'In every society, the production of discourse is controlled, organized, redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its materiality. We accept them as natural, or right, or normal.

5. Subjectivity in History

All history is narrative written according to the point of view held by the historians. Historians are not aware of their leanings and do often think that their history is objective. Therefore, historical events cannot be understood as they are represented in the discourses of those who have written them. They carry with them the prevailing ideology of their time.

6. New historicism helps deconstruction

New historicism deconstructs the traditional distinction between history (thought to be factual) and literature (though to be fictional). History is another text even as literature is: literature is another cultural artefact even as history is and it can tell us something about the social life of the times when they were written, Louis Montrose's famous definition of new historicism is that it centres upon both the historicity of the text and the textuality of history.

7. 'Self-positioning' in historical texts.

New historicists use thick descriptions, which examine a cultural production in order to discover the meanings of the cultural production as well as the social conventions that were responsible for them. It is a search for meanings, not facts. Thus personal and small private issues are foregrounded. Every historical analysis is subjective it views historical issues through a human lens'. This is described as self-positioning.

8. Historicity of texts and the textuality of history.

Modern New Criticism rejects both old historicisms marginalization of history and New Criticism's fetishisation of literature as timeless beyond the realm of history. Literary texts are cultural artefacts like other artefacts which reveal to us the different social systems that operated when the texts were written. A literary text is one social discourse. Text and context are mutually constitutive. Literary texts shape, and are in turn shaped, by historical contexts. Louis Montrose describes the practice of new historicism in a telling phrase: 'a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history'.