New Historicism

Generally the origin of NH is situated in 1980, when Stephen Greenblatt published his book Renaissance Self Fashioning. The constructedness of culture and its annexation by literary studies are two central points in New Historicism, which is American in origin. It brought to the traditional study of Renaissance, esp., the works of Shakespeare a mixture of Marxixt, and poststructuralist orientations, esp. poststructuralist notions of the self, of discourse and of power. It leans more towards a Foucauldian notion of power, the discourses that serve as vehicles of power, on the construction of identity and so on.

It rejects both the autonomy and individual genius of the author and the autonomy of the individual work and sees texts as absolutely inseparable from their historical context. The author’s role is to a large extent determined by historical circumstances. As prominent historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt said, the literary text is always part and parcel of a much wider cultural, political, social, and economic dispensation.

The literary text is a time and place bound verbal construction and is in one way or other always political. Because it is inevitably involved with a discourse or an ideology it cannot help being a vehicle of power. As a consequence, literature, like any other text, not only reflects relations of power but actively participates in the consolidation and/ or construction of discourses and ideologies. It functions as an instrument in the construction of identities, not only at the individual level but also the group, or the national state. Literature is not simply a product of history, it also actively makes history. Culture according to NH is a construct and they are even willing to grant their own assumptions must also be constructed, and may therefore be deconstructed.

In his book, ‘Renaissance Self- Fashioning’, Greenblatt says that in the 16th century there appeared to be an increased self consciousness about the fashioning the human identity as a manipulable, artful process. An increased awareness of the ways in which the self can be fashioned leads to an increased awareness of how the self is subject to power relations and how it always functions within larger structures that may control such fashioning. This relates to the Poststructuralist notion that the self is always a construction, that our identity is never given, but always the product of an interaction between the way we want to represent ourselves (thru the stories we tell) and our actual presentations, and the power relations we are part of.

So it can be said in the words of John Brannigan that NH is a mode of critical interpretation which privileges power relations as the most important context for all texts. Power works through discourses and like ideology gives the subject the impression that that to comply with its dictates is the most natural thing to do. The NH sees literature as involved in the making of history through its active participation in discursive practices. One example: NH studies autobiography, travel lit, Shakespeare’s plays to examine how the representations of Queen Elizabeth I contribute to the cult of the ‘virgin queen’

NH also shows how power has worked to suppress or marginalize rival stories and discourses. A historical period is seen as a remote culture whose various manifestations – the texts of all kinds- need detailed study to so that power relations and forces operating in that culture may be brought to light. In this way New historicism rejects the traditional distinction between the text and the context.

NH seeks to read literary texts alongside or against other generally neglected contemporary documentary or imaginative texts (eg: to read Hamlet in terms of contemporary law on divorce and inheritance or records of suicide in young women)

Gist: This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault's concept of épistème). 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).

A helpful way of considering New Historical theory, Tyson explains, is to think about the retelling of history itself: "...questions asked by traditional historians and by new historicists are quite different...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?'" (278). So New Historicism resists the notion that "...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).

New historicists do not believe that we can look at history objectively, but rather that we interpret events as products of our time and culture and that "...we don't have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history...our understanding of what such facts mean...is...strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact" (279). Moreover, New Historicism holds that we are hopelessly subjective interpreters of what we observe.

New Historicism (some more points)

 (sometimes referred to as Cultural Poetics) emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, largely in reaction to the lingering effects of New Criticism and its ahistorical approach. "New" Historicism's adjectival emphasis highlights its opposition to the old historical-biographical criticism prevalent before the advent of New Criticism. In the earlier historical-biographical criticism, literature was seen as a (mimetic) reflection of the historical world in which it was produced. Further, history was viewed as stable, linear, and recoverable--a narrative of fact. In contrast, New Historicism views history skeptically (historical narrative is inherently subjective), but also more broadly; history includes all of the cultural, social, political, anthropological discourses at work in any given age, and these various "texts" are unranked - any text may yield information valuable in understanding a particular milieu. Rather than forming a backdrop, the many discourses at work at any given time affect both an author and his/her text; both are inescapably part of a social construct. Stephen Greenblatt was an early important figure, and Michel Foucault's intertextual methods focusing especially on issues such as power and knowledge proved very influential. Other major figures include Clifford Geertz, Louis Montrose, Catherine Gallagher, Jonathan Dollimore, and Jerome McCann.

Key Terms:

Discourse - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "defined by Michel Foucault as language practice: that is, language as it is used by various constituencies (the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do with power relationships between people"

Episteme - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "Michel Foucault employs the idea of episteme to indicate a particular group of knowledges and discourses which operate in concert as the dominant discourses in any given historical period. He also identifies epistemic breaks, radical shifts in the varieties and deployments of knowledge for ideological purposes, which take place from period to period"

Power - [from Wolfreys - see General Resources below] - "in the work of Michel Foucault, power constitutes one of the three axes constitutive of subjectification, the other two being ethics and truth. For Foucault, power implies knowledge, even while knowledge is, concomitantly, constitutive of power: knowledge gives one power, but one has the power in given circumstances to constitute bodies of knowledge, discourses and so on as valid or invalid, truthful or untruthful. Power serves in making the world both knowable and controllable. Yet, in the nature of power, as Foucault suggests in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, is essentially proscriptive, concerned more with imposing limits on its subjects."

Self-positioning - [from Lois Tyson - see General Resources below] - "new historicism's claim that historical analysis is unavoidably subjective is not an attempt to legitimize a self-indulgent, 'anything goes' attitude toward the writing of history. Rather, the inevitability of personal bias makes it imperative that new historicists be aware of and as forthright as possible about their own psychological and ideological positions relative to the material they analyze so that their readers can have some idea of the human 'lens' through which they are viewing the historical issues at hand."

Thick description - a term developed by Clifford Geertz; [from Charles Bressler - see General Resources below]: a "term used to describe the seemingly insignificant details present in any cultural practice. By focusing on these details, one can then reveal the inherent contradictory forces at work within culture. "