Literary theory: New Historicism and Queer Theory

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 17^th and 18^th 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.

ü  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 19^th 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.