Abstract
New Historicism is the most innovative critical movement that came into existence in 1980 because of the critical manifesto of Stephen Greenblatt, who coined the term to propound new critical methods for interpreting Renaissance texts. This paper provides an intensive analysis and appraisal of New Historicism as a literary-critical approach, tracing its origins, key tenets, relationship with Post Structuralism and Foucauldian discourse theory, and its offshoot Cultural Materialism. The essay argues that New Historicism offers a pluralistic, interdisciplinary mode of criticism that integrates the historicity of text and the textuality of history.
Keywords: New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, Cultural Poetics, Foucault, Cultural Materialism, intertextuality, power relations
Introduction
New Historicism, the most innovative critical movement, came in existence in 1980 because of the critical manifesto of Stephen Greenblatt, “an award winning literary critic, theorist and scholar” who coined this very term New Historicism for the first time with an intention to propound new critical methods for interpreting the Renaissance texts. This term occurs in his treatise The Power of Forms and the Forms of Power in the Renaissance. He himself refers to the genesis of this critical trend in his essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture” when he worked on a project: “A few years ago I was asked by Genre to edit a selection of Renaissance essays and I said ok. I collected a bunch of essay and then, out of a kind of desperation to get introduction done, I wrote that the essays represented something I called ‘new historicism’” (Greenblatt). Though this critical canon got its official grounding in 1980s but new historical insights could be sensed in critical essays of the late 1970s: ”[…] the grand breaking text was the 1980s publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s, Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. This book was followed in 1983 by the founding of the Journal Representation, initiated by Greenblatt and several of his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley, where The Journal is still published” (Murray 806-809). Besides Stephen Greenblatt, major new historicists are Jonathan Goldberg, Jean Howard, Edward Pechter, Catherine, Louis Advain Montrose and D.A. Miller at U.C, San Diego.
In twentieth century various critical theories and movements came in a sequel of one another like New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction with their specific premise of linguistic aspects of a work of art. New criticism emerged as a revolt against historical and biographical approaches to literature by turning the readership from history to text with a notion of “close textual analysis” (Ryan 128). Akin to New Criticism, formalism also approached to cultivate the canon of artistic technique at the expense of content and propounded that form is to be emphasized as the chief criterion of aesthetic value, hence it also focuses on the form of the text. Both the movements were concerned with the text “as an autonomous entity” (Das 169). Structuralism also sees ‘text as an objective structure’ with its science of signs as relational entities activating various codes and conventions quite independent of author, reader and external reality. Deconstruction was also based on the text and made it “volatile by propagating the indeterminacy of meaning and advocating the ‘free play’ of signifiers without a center (Das 189). All these approaches consider literature only as text which is autonomous and has nothing to do with culture and society in which it originates. In fact, New Historicism came as a wider reaction to all these purely linguistic, textual and formal approaches, however, considering it as a complete rejection of all these approaches cannot be justified rather its emergence is a corrective for all these critical canons to fill the pitfalls of these approaches by providing with an appropriate methodology to study literature.
New Historicism and Post Structuralism
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. 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” (“Stephen J. Greenblatt” Wikipedia). 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.
As regards the nexus of New Historicism with Post Structuralism, New Historicism tends to adopt the fundamental methodology of Post Structuralism which in its own turn came to react against structuralisms’ pretension of scientific objectivity. Though Post Structuralism covers the philosophical deconstruction of Derrida along with psychoanalytical theories of Lacan and Kristeva yet it also borrows from the historical and cultural critique of Michel Foucault and the cultural-political writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. Since Post Structuralism conjoins the textual aspect of study stressing the linguistic signs with instability of meanings attached to them, but linguistic signs and text cannot be actualized and interpreted in cultural vacuity. Post Structuralism provides a valid ground to New Historicism to incorporate social studies as knowledge product and hence New Historicism can be considered as an extension of Post Structuralism. This reciprocal relation between Post Structuralism and New Historicism reminds the catchphrase of Louis Montrose: “‘The historicity of the text and textuality of history.’ Text, he insists, (as do all New Historicist Critics) are embedded in particular histories, since we only access those histories in language” (Abrams 183).
Foucault and Power Relations
New Historicists, greatly influenced by Michel Foucault’s concept of discursive analysis of Power relation, come to give another strategy of political reading of the texts. The power relations get reflected through discourses which do not find overt manifestations but implicitly expressed in the text. New Historicists are “influenced by the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault who focused upon the intricately structured power relations in a given culture at a given time to demonstrate, how that society controls its member through constructing and defining what appears to be universal.” It implies that New Historicists “aspired to a politics of culture” which is covertly manifested in a text because power structure is administered by the state. “The state’s control of its citizenry was internal rather than external. The state subjected its people by creating them as subjects, devising fixed categories under which people could be described and thus controlled. This was the conjunction Foucault evoked as Power Knowledge” (Murry 806-809).
Such categories as sane / insane, homosexual / heterosexual, male / female, slave / freed are controlled and regulated by ‘Power Politics’ through indirect ideological pressures of micro-discursive forces of disciplinary powers. Literature influences and is influenced by these micro-forces running parallel in the society of which it is a product and hence controls and also in turn is controlled by them as an operator of power and operated by the same power. The New Historicists have drawn upon Foucauldian tenet of discursive nature of literature which is a cultural construct; however, a complete harmony in society is illusory because constant but repressed struggles keep on running parallel between powerful and powerless in the society. In literature, the suppressive and marginalized voices against dominant power structure and stricture is heard implicitly, meaning thereby, text does not display the dominant and overt history, however hidden history or histories are intertwined in literature.
Thick Description and Cultural Poetics
Apart from Foucauldian influence on New Historical critical canon, the impact of famous anthropologists Clifford Geertz cannot be undermined because New historicists begin to take texts as thick descriptions of culture. Geertz believes that with the help of a single event in the given cultural scenario, an ethnographer generalizes the whole working of a culture. A literary artist too like an ethnographer belongs to a particular era. Though he perceives very small part of it yet on the basis of his ‘synthetic faculty,’ offers the complete picture of the scenario which gets manifested in the literary text. This is the main reason that “Cultural Poetics’ is sired by Stephen Greenblatt and ‘thick description’ can be taken as another name for Cultural Poetics.” It is to be taken into account that Greenblatt himself coined the term New Historicism, but he then thought about it for the second time and admitted that he used New Historicism inadvertently and would prefer ‘Cultural Poetics’ to it.
New Historicists do not treat text devoid of its literary qualities, though they suggest that there is no distinction between literary and historical texts. Through its literary attributes, a literary text renders aesthetic pleasure which is the focal purpose of any literary texts. Moreover, New Historicists also suggest that since literary text embodies numerous voices and is discursive in nature, hence, an innovative process of reading is but a quintessential methodology to be adopted and that best method is of dismantling the text which is the prominent feature of deconstruction. This validates the fact that after dismantling the texts the multiplicity of meaning be put forth “to present a number of independent and often conflicting voices. In the same way New Historicist contends that a work is not an autonomous body of fixed meanings, but represents a diversity of dissonant voices and unresolved conflicts in a specific culture” (Ukkan 22-33).
Cultural Materialism
Cultural materialism, another offshoot of New Historicism is the British Counterpart and was popularized by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield when they edited Political Shakespeare (1994). Cultural materialism is described as ‘a politicized form of historiography’ (Krishnaswamy 85). The major influence is that of Raymond William and its principles are like Marxism, notably that culture and cultural artifacts such as literature cannot ‘transcend’ the material conditions of its production and economic contexts of its circulation. Among cultural materialists are Alan Sinfied Catherine Belsey and Jonathan Dollimore. As regards ‘Cultural Materialism,’ it propounds that a literary text is the product of culture, in which it is consumed and circulated. If it is purely idealistic, it cannot appeal the reader and its circulation would be hampered.
The main premise of New Historicists is to highlight the subversive forces of marginalized community of the society like female, bourgeoisie and ethnic communities of Non-European origin. It may be assumed that New Historicism shares the tenet of Marxism as it tries to find out the conflict between the suppressed and the dominant like that of Capitalist and Proletariat. New Historicists’ main motive is to find out the subversive voices in literary text so that society may be awakened regarding the exploitation of marginalized community.
Conclusion
To conclude, it can be assumed that this critical approach takes into account the intrinsic as well as extrinsic approaches and can be assumed to be as ‘interdisciplinary mode of criticism.’ Louis Montrose suggests that New Historic mode of study takes into account ‘the historicity of the text and textuality of history,’ meaning thereby that words, structure and form are the primary things for the reader’s disposal, however, the content plays a very significant role to give aesthetic delight to the reader, meaning thereby, that fairy tale elements in a text cannot draw the attention of the serious reader of the text because it is devoid of its historicity. New Historicism might have gained momentum in its popularity as a new approach, but it is being criticized because it has certain limitations like the lack of intellectual coherence and a systematic way to pave the way of a reader and critic to study a text at hand. In fact, this critical approach encompasses within its methodological folds such critical tenets as adopted by Marxism, Historical and Psychological approaches, hence it came as a corrective and a pluralistic method of study. With the emergence of this New Historicism, interdisciplinary critical approach has acquired a pulpit and that it has not reached its climax as yet rather moving ahead, assimilating newer than new methods of literary study with the passage of time.
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