Assignment
Name: Dave Nimesh
M.A.Sem- 2
Academic year: 2014-15
Paper No- 7 – literary theory and criticism
Assignment topic: Literary theory – New Historicism and Queer theory
Submitted to: Dr. Dilip Barad,Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University.
- New Historicism
New historicism, since the early
1980s, has been the accepted name for a mode of literary study that its
proponents oppose to the formalism they attribute both the New historicism and
to the critical deconstruction that followed it.
In
place of dealing with a text in isolation from its historical context, New
historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural condition of its
production, its meanings, its effects, and also of its later critical
interpretation and evaluations.
This is not simply a return to an
earlier kind of literary scholarship, for the views and practices of the new
historicists differ markedly from those of earlier scholars who had adverted to
social and intellectual history as a ‘background’ against which to set a work
of literature as an independent entity, or has viewed literature as a
‘reflection’ of the worldview characteristic of a period.
Instead, a new historicism
conceive of a literary text as a ‘situated’ within the totality of institutions,
social practices and discourses that constitute the culture of a particular
time and place, and with which the literary text interacts as both a product
and producer of cultural energies and codes.
What is New Historicism?
New Historicism is a literary
theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted
within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the
critic. Based on the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt and influenced by
the philosophy of Michel Foucault, New Historicism acknowledges not only that a
work of literature is influenced by its author's times and circumstances, but
that the critic's response to that work is also influenced by his environment,
beliefs, and prejudices.
A New Historicist looks at
literature in a wider historical context, examining both how the writer's times
affected the work and how the work reflects the writer's times, in turn
recognizing that current cultural contexts color that critic's conclusions.
For example, when studying
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, one always comes to the question of whether
the play shows Shakespeare to be anti-Semitic. The New Historicist recognizes
that this isn't a simple yes-or-no answer that can be teased out by studying
the text. This work must be judged in the context in which it was written; in
turn, cultural history can be revealed by studying the work — especially, say
New Historicists, by studying the use and dispersion of power and the
marginalization of social classes within the work. Studying the history reveals
more about the text; studying the text reveals more about the history.
The New Historicist also
acknowledges that his examination of literature is "tainted" by his
own culture and environment. The very fact that we ask whether Shakespeare was
anti-Semitic — a question that wouldn't have been considered important a
century ago — reveals how our study of Shakespeare is affected by our
civilization.
New Historicism, then,
underscores the impermanence of literary criticism. Current literary criticism
is affected by and reveals the beliefs of our times in the same way that
literature reflects and is reflected by its own historical contexts. New
Historicism acknowledges and embraces the idea that, as times change, so will our
understanding of great literature.
What is most distinctive in this
mode of historical study is mainly the result of concept and practices of
literary analysis and interpretation that have been assimilated from various
recent post structural theories. Especially prominent are:
(1)the views of the revisionist
Marxist thinker Louis Althusser that
ideology manifests itself in different ways in the discourse of each of the
semi-autonomous institutions of an era, including literature and also that
ideology operates covertly to form an position the users of language as the
‘subject’ in discourse, in a way that in fact, ‘subjects’ them is ,
subordinates them to the interests of
the ruling classes.
(2) Michel Foucault’s view that
the discourse of an era, instead of reflecting pre-existing entities and
orders, bring into being concept, oppositions, and hierarchies of which it
speaks; that these elements are both products and propagators of ‘power’, or
social forces, and that as a result , the particular discursive formation of an
era determine what is at the time accounted to be ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ as
well as what is considered to be criminal, or insane or sexually deviant.
(3) the central concept in
deconstructive criticism that all texts involves modes of signification that
was against each other, merged with MIKHAIL BAKHTIN’S concept of the discourse
nature of many literary texts, in the sense that they incorporate a number of conflicting
voices that represent diverse social classes and interests.
(4) Developments in cultural
anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz’s views that a culture is constituted by
distinctive sets of signifying systems, and hi use of what he calls thick
descriptions- the close analysis , or ‘reading’ of a
particular social production or event so as to recover the meaning it has for
the people involved in it, as well as to discover, within the overall cultural
system, the network of conventions,
codes, and modes of thinking with
which the particular item with those meaning.
In an oft- quoted phrase , Louis
Montrose described the new historicism as “ a reciprocal concern with a history
of the text and the textuality of history”. That is, history is conceived to be
not a set of fixed , objective facts but, the literature with which it
interacts, a text that interacts, a text that itself needs to be interpreted.
Any
text, on the other hand, is conceive as a discourse which, although it may seem
to present, or reflect, an external reality, in fact consist of what are called
representations- that is –verbal formations which are the ‘ideological
products’ or ‘cultural constructs’ of the historical conditions specific to an
era. A number of historicists claim also
that these cultural and ideological representations in text serve mainly to
reproduce, confirm and propagate. The complete power structures of domination
and subordination which characterize a given society.
Despite their common perspective
on literary writings as mutually implicative with all other components of a culture,
we find considerable diversity and disagreement among individual exponents of
the new historicism.
The following proposals , however
occur frequently in their writings, sometimes in an extremes and sometimes in
an a qualified form.
All of them are formulated in
opposition to views that, according to
new historicists, were central historical construct in ideological construct in
traditional literary criticism.
Many Historicists assign the
formative period of some basic construct
to the early era of capitalism in the 17th and 18th
centuries.
1) Literature
does not occupy a ‘trans- historical’ aesthetic realm which is dependent on the
economic, social, and political conditions specific to an era, nor in
literature subject to timeless criteria of artistic value.
Instead,
a literary text is simply one of many kinds of texts- religious, philosophical,
legal., scientific and so on- all of which are formed and structured by the particular conditions of a time and
place, and among which the literary text has neither unique status nor special
privilege. A related fallacy of
mainstream criticism, according to New historicists, was to view literary
text as autonomous body of fixed meaning that text cohere to form an organic
whole in which all conflicts are artistically resolved.
On
the contrary, it is claimed, many literary text consists of diversity of
dissonant voices, and these voices express not only the orthodox, but also the
subordinated and subversive forces of the era in which the text was produced.
Furthermore, what may seem to be artistic resolution of a literary plot,
yielding pleasure to the reader; is in fact deceptive, for it is an effect that
serves to cover the unresolved the conflicts of power, class, gender and
diverse social groups that make up the tensions that underline the surface
meaning of a literary text.
2) History
is not a homogeneous and stable pattern of facts and events which serves as the ‘background’ to the literature of an era, or which
literature can be said simply to
reflect, or which can be adverted to the
material conditions that, in a unilateral way determine the particularities of
a literary text.
A new contrast
to such views, a literary text is said by new historicists to be thoroughly ‘embedded’ in its context, and in a constant interaction and interchange
with other components inside the network
of institutions, beliefs, and cultural
power relationships, practices and products that, in their ensemble, constitute
what we call history.
New historicists commonly regard even the conceptual
‘boundaries’ by which we currently discriminate between literature and non-
literary text to be a construct of post- Renaissance ideological formations.
New historicists acknowledge that
they themselves, like all authors, are ‘subjectives’ that have been shaped and informed by the
circumstances and discourses specific to their era, hence that their own
critical writing in great part construct, rather than discover readymade
textual meanings they describe and the literary and cultural histories they
narrate. To mitigate the risk that they all unquestioningly appropriate text that were written in the
past and present is not coherent, but exhibits discontinuities; breaks and raptures , by doing so , they hope
to ‘distance’ and ‘estrange’ an earlier
text and so sharpen their ability to detect its differences from their present
ideological assumptions.
Some
historicists present their reading of text written in past as
‘negotiations’ between past and present.
In this two-way relationship, the
features of a cultural product, which are identifiable only relative to their
differences from the historicist’s subject-position, in return make possible
some degree of insight into the forces and configurations of power- especially
with respect to class, gender, race and
ethnicity- that prevail in the historicist’s present culture and serve to shape
the historicist’s own ideology and interpretations.
The concept, themes, and procedures of new
historicist criticism took shape into the late 1970s and early 1980s , most prominently in
writings by scholars of English Renaissance.
They directed their attention
especially to literary forms such as the pastoral and masque, and above all the
drama; emphasized the role in shaping a texts as discussive ‘sites’ which enacted and reproduced the interests
and power of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.
At almost the same time, students
of the English Romantic Period developed parallel conceptions of the
intertextuality of literature and history, and similar views the ‘representations’
in literary texts are not reflectors of
reality but ‘concretized’ forms of ideology.
Historicists
of Romantic literature, however, in distinction from most Renaissance
historicists, often name their critical procedures political reading of a
literary text- a reading in which they stress quasi-Freudian mechanism such as
‘suppression’, ‘displacement’ and ‘substitution’, by which they assert, a
writer’s political ideology inevitably disguises, or entirely elides into
silence and ‘absence’, the circumstances and contradictions of contemporary
history. The primary aim of a political order of a literary text is to undo these ideological disguises and
suppressions in order to uncover it’s
subtext of historical and political conflicts and operations which are the
text’s true, although covert or unmentioned subject matter.
In the course of the 1980s, the
characteristic viewpoints and practices of new historicism spread rapidly to
all periods of literary study, and were increasingly represented, described and
debated in conferences, books, and periodical essays.
New
historicists also have parallel’s in the critics of other ethnic literatures, who stressed the role of culture
formations dominated by white Europeans in suppressing, marginalizing or
distorting the achievements of non white and non European peoples. In the 1990s , various forms of new
historicism, and related types of
criticism that stress the embeddedness
of literature in historical
circumstances , replaced deconstruction as the reigning mode of avant-garde critical theory and practice.
ΓΌ Stephen
Greenblatt inaugurated the currency of the label ‘New Historicism’. In his
introduction to a special issue of Genre, vol. 15 (1982). He prefers, however,
to call his crucial enterprise ‘cultural poetics’, in order to highlight his
concern with literature the arts as integral
with other social practices that, in
their complex interactions, make up the general culture of an era.
Greenblatt’s essay entitled “ Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean
Negotiations (1988) serves to exemplify the interpretive procedures of the leading
exponent of this mode of criticism.
In
this essay, Greenblatt, brings by reading a selections from Thomas Harriot’s “
A Brief and time report of the New Found
Land of Virginia”, written in 1588, as a representative Discourse of the
English colonizers of America without
its author’s awareness, serves to confirm “ Machiavellian hypothesis of the
origin of princely power in force and fraud”. But nonetheless draws its
audience irresistibly towards celebration of that power.
Greenblatt
then identifies parallel modes of power discourses and counter discourse in the
dialogues in Shakespeare’s Tempest between
Prospero the imperialist appropriates
and caliban the expropriated native of his island, and goes on to find
similar discursive configurations in the
texts of Shakespeare’s Henry plays. In Greenblatt’s reading, the dialogues and
events of the Henry plays reveal the degree to which princely power is based on
predation, calculation, deceit, and hypocrisy. At the same time, the plays do
not scruple to record dissonant and subversive voices of Falstaff and various
other representations of Elizabethan subcultures.
Those
counter establishment discourses in Shakespeare’s plays , however , in fact are
so managed as to maneuver their audience to accept and even glorify the power
structures to which the audience is
itself subordinated.
Grenblatt applies to these plays
a conceptual pattern, the subversion- containment dialectic, which has been a
central concern of new historicist critics of Renaissance literature.
Queer Theory:-
Queer theory is often used to
designate the combined area of gay and Lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical
writings about all modes of variance- such as cross- dressing, bisexuality, and
transsexuality- from society’s formative model of sexual identity, orientations
and activities.
The
term ‘queer’ was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female same
– sex love as deviant and unnatural.
Since the early 1990s , however,
it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious tern to
identify a way of life and an area of scholarly inquiry.
But lesbians and gay studies
began as ‘liberation movements’ for African American and feminist liberation
during the anti –Vietnam war, anti- establishment, and counter cultural ferment
of the late 1960s and 1970s. since that
time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who strive
to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal and economic right equal to
those of the heterosexual majority.
Through the 1970s , two movements
were primarily separatist: gays often thought
of themselves as quintessentially male, which many lesbians, aligning
themselves with the feminist movement as sharing the anti- female attitudes of
a reigning patriarchal culture.
There has been growing recognition of the degree to which the two
groups share a history as a suppressed minority and possess political and
social aims.
In the 1970s, researchers for the
most part assumed that there was a fixed, unitary identity as a gay or
as a lesbian that has remain stable through human history.
A major endeavor
was to identify and reclaim the works of non
heterosexual writers from Plato to Walt
Whitman, Oscar Wild, Marcel Proust, Andre Gide,
W.H.Auden and James Baldwin and from the Greek poet Sappo of Lesbos to
Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Audre
Lorde.
The list included writers (
William Shakespeare and Christiana Rossetti are also examples) who represented
in their literary works homoerotic subject matter, but whose own sexuality the
available biographical evidence leaves uncertain.
In the 1980s and 1990s, however-
in large part because of the assimilation of the viewpoints and analytic method
of Derrida, Foucault, and other poststructuralists- the earlier assumptions
about a unitary and stable gay or lesbian identity were frequently put to question, and historical and critical analyses of sexual
differences became increasingly subtle and complex.
A number of queer theorist , for
example adopted the deconstructive mode of dismantling the key binary
oppositions of Western culture, such as male/ female, heterosexual/ homosexual,
and natural/ unnatural, by which a spectrum of diverse things id forced into
only two categories, and in which the first category is assigned privilege,
power and centrality. While the second is derogated, subordinated and
marginalized. In an important essay of 1980, “ compulsive heterosexuality and
lesbian existence” Adrienne Rich posted what she called the “the lesbian continuum”
as a way of stressing how far ranging
and the diverse is the spectrum of love and bonding among women,
including female friendship, the family relationship between mother and
daughter, and women’s partnership and social groups, as well as overtly
physical same sex relations.
Later theorists such as Eve
Sedgwick and Judith Butler undertook to invert the standard hierarchical
oppositions by which homosexuality is marginalized and made unnatural, by stressing the extent to which the
ostensible normativity of heterosexuality is based on the suppression and
denial of same sex desires and relationships.
Queer
reading has became the term for interpretive activities that undertake to
subvert and confound the established verbal and cultural oppositions and
boundaries between male/ female,
homosexual/ heterosexual, and normal/ abnormal.
Another prominent theoretical
procedure has been to undo the “essentialist” assumption that heterosexual and homosexual are universal and trans-
historical types of human subjects, or identities, by historicizing these
categories- that is by proposing that
they are cultural constructs that emerged under special ideological conditions
in a particular culture at a particular
time.
A
central text is the first volume of Michel Foucault’s ‘History of sexuality’
(1976), which claim that , while there had long been a social category of
sodomy as a transgressive human act, the
homosexual as a special kind of human subject or identity, was construction by
the medical and legal discourse that developed in the later part of the 19th
century.
In a further expansion of
cultural constructionist theory Judith Butler , In Gender Trouble: feminism
and the
subversion of identity” (1990), described the categories of gender and of sexuality as
performative, in the sense that the features which a cultural discourse
institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse
also makes happen , by establishing an
identity that the second individual assimilates and the pattern of
behavior that he or she proceeds to enact. Homosexuality, by this view, is not
a particular identity that effects a pattern of action, but a socially pre-established pattern of
action that produces effect of originality in a particular identity. A
fundamental constructionist text , frequently cited in the arguments against
essentialism, is “ One not born a woman” (1981) by Monique Wittig, in The
straight mind and other essays (1992).
A
number of journals are now devoted to queer theory and to lesbian, gay and
transgender studies and criticism, the field has also became the subject of
regularly scheduled learned conferences, and has been established in the curriculum of the humanities and social
sciences in a great many colleges and
universities.
