Advantages and Disadvantages of New Historicism

Jankiba Rana’s  Assignment

Assignment :Advantages and Disadvantages of New Historicism


Roll No  : 9
M.A.Sem – II
Batch : 2014 – ‘15

Submitted to – Department of English
    Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.  Bhavnagar.










                                                                              New Historicism:
       
·       Introduction:

                                                  The Twenty first century is regarded as the age of globalization transnationalism and telecommunication. Education today is focused to prepare people to be flexible multiskilled dynamic problemsolvers, and creative explorer of resources with the ability to interpret reality from multiple perspectives and bring harmony between knowledge and creative.

                                          Therefore the traditional approaches to teaching literature have been replaced with modern approaches. The modern approaches were introduced at the turn of twentieth century. Initial efforts were mad by formalists and the new critics, who assigning primary importance to the text set up the tradition of close reading.

             Today reader’s response, deconstruction and other deconstructive reader based interpretative theories such as New Historicism, Post structuralism, Maxicism cognitive poetics, feminism post colonialism and post modernism are considered majore interpretative method.

v Meaning and Definition of New Historicism:

                                A simple definition of the New Historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non- literary texts, usually of the same historical period. That is to say New Historicism refuses to privilege the literary texts; instead of the literary ‘fore ground’ and a historical ‘background’ it envisages and practices a mode of a study in which literary and non- literary texts are given equal, weight and constantly inform or interrogate echo there. Petre Berry, “Beginning Theory- An introduction to Literary and cultural Studies.”

New Historicism differs from the old Historicism in large measure not based on the approach but rather on changes in historical methodology, the rise of the so-called New history. The term new history was indebted to the French term nouvelle histoire, itself associated particularly with the historian Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, members of the third generation of the Annales School, which appeared in the 1970s. The movement can be associated with cultural history, history of representations, and histoire des mentalités. While there may be no precise definition, the new history is best understood in contrast with prior methods of writing history, resisting their focus on politics and "great men;" their insistence on composing historical narrative; their emphasis on administrative documents as key source materials; their concern with individuals' motivations and intentions as explanatory factors for historical events; and their willingness to accept the possibility of historians' objectivity.

                      New Historicism is based on the assumption that a literary work is the product of the time, place, and circumstances of its composition. The New Historicists, therefore, reject the autonomy of both an artist and work of art and argue that literary texts cannot be read and understood in isolation. They emphasize that literary texts must be read and interpreted in its biographical, social historical contexts.

·        Origins of New Historicism:

                         The term ‘New Historicism’ was coined by the American critic Stephan Green Blatt. Whose book Renaissance self- Fashioning: From more to Shakespeare (1988). This is usually regarded as the beginning of New Historicism. However, similar tendencies can be identified in work by various critics published during the 1970s. J.W.Lever, The tragedy of State: A study of Jacobean Drama, Published in 1971. This brief and epoch making book challenged conservative critical views about Jacobean Theater, and linked the plays much more closely with the political events of their era than previous critics had done. New Historicism provides critical method of interpretation of a literary work of art; which came, into being as a reacting New Historicism.

Michel Foucault’s views that the discourse of an era, instead of reflecting pre- existing entitle and orders, brings into being the concepts, 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 formations of an era determine what is at the time accounted “knowledge” and “truth”, as well as what is considered to be criminal, or insane or sexually deviant; see Foucault under post structuralism.

                            Harold Bloom criticizes the New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history, and for not paying attention to the details involves in analyzing literature.


·         Historical Background :
o    Developed in late 1970's in response to perceived excesses of New Criticism, which tended to ignore importance of historical context of work of art
·         Assumptions
o    As with traditional historicism, new historicists argue that we cannot know texts separate from their historical context
o    Unlike traditional historicists, new historicists insist that all interpretation is subjectively filtered through one's own set of historically conditioned viewpoints. There is no "objective" history.
o    From Foucault, history is an intersection of discourses that establish an episteme, a dominant ideology.
o    Texts sometimes reveal a resistance to the episteme, rather than reflect it.
o    The real center of inquiry is not the text, but history.
o    Each text is only one example of many types of discourses that reveal history
o    To best understand a text, one should look at all sorts of other texts of the time, including social practice (as a kind of text)
·         Methods
o    Similar to traditional historicism, except that it looks to a greater variety of "discourses": social, political, religious, artistic to help explain the text
o    New Historicists investigate
§  the life of the author
§  social rules found within the text
§  the manner in which the text reveals an historical situation
§  the ways in which other historical texts can help us understand the texts
·         Criticisms of this approach:
o    Since the true center of analysis is history, New Historical critics sometimes don't pay close attention to the actual text.
o    Some historians (as opposed to English professors, for example) criticize the limited sampling of texts used to explain/elucidate the text. Some New Historicists, for example, can be accused of hasty generalizations.
·         What we can gain from applying this approach
o    See comments under traditional historicism
o    In addition to the above, we gain a better understanding of how historical viewpoints are complicated and how they are filtered through our own epistemes.


Traditional Historicism

·         Historical Background
o    Dates from the 19th century, the abuse of this approach in part led to New Criticism. Historical context used to explain and understand the literary text.
·         Assumptions
o    To know a text, one needs to understand its insertion in a particular moment in time, as an expression of a writer influenced by his/her times.
o    History consists in part of consistent world views that are reflected in art
·         Methods
o    Research an author's biographical data, as well as historical works from the time in order to show how the text reflects its time: ideology, social, political, economic beliefs and trends, etc.
·         Criticisms of this approach:
o    Sometimes brings with it simplistic view of history. History is more complicated, involving a swirl of conflicting attititudes. No history is objective. We always understand history from a set of beliefs, values, etc., rooted in our time.
o    In the worst cases it can lead us away from close reading of the text, subordinating the text to a preconception of history. New Critics believed we should first and foremast read the text closely, on its own terms.
·         What we can gain from applying this approach
o    When done by excellent historicists, a deeper understanding of the historical determinants of meaning in a text. Knowing the implied context that permeates a text helps us understand it more fully.



·         Advantages and Disadvantages of New Criticism :


·         Although it is based on poststructuralist thinking, it is written in an easily accessible way. The style and vocabulary of poststructuralist time was avoided.
·        
·         It presents its data and draws its conclusions, if the data can be challenged the way it is propounded in the empirical foundation on which the data is available for analysis.
·         The second advantage is the material itself is often fascinating and completely distinctive in the context of literary studies.
·        
·         The difference between literary and non literary text remains in the minds. That is to say “Uncluttered” (Pared down) feel of the essay, which is resulted from not citing previous discussions of literary work gives them stark and domestic air. The political edge of New Historicist writing is always sharp, but it directly meets with Marxist Criticsm.

                 New Historicism also shares many of the same theories as with what is often called Cultural Studies, but cultural critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups. Cultural critics also downplay the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and often focus predominantly on the productions of "popular culture."

               This shift of focus mirrors a trend in critical assessment of the decorative arts. Unlike fine arts, which had been discussed in purely formal terms under the influences of Bernard Berenson and Ernst Gombrich, nuanced discussion of the arts of design since the 1970s have been set within social and intellectual contexts, taking account of fluctuations in luxury trades, the availability of design prototypes to local craftsmen, the cultural horizons of the patron, and economic considerations—"the limits of the possible" in economic historian Fernand Braudel's famous phrase

                Historicism also often challenged the concept of truth and the notion of rationality in modernity. Modern thinkers held that reason was a universal faculty of the mind that is free of interpretation, that can grasp universal and unchanging truth. Historicism questioned this notion of rationality and truth, and argued for the historical context of knowledge and reason; historicism is an explicit formulation of the historicity of knowledge.

                   It is a new critic method, challenging all kinds of formalism and traditional historicism. This paper mainly discusses how the theory of New Historicism critic is applied in literary. M.H.Abrams puts forward the theory of four essential factors that includes "world, art, writer and reader". By this way, I review in details New Historicism critic's different views on literature and investigate the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of critic method in the western literary criticism of whole century.

               New Historicism critic distinctive writer's subjective position. Writes complete self-fashioning inthe text and language world. They write down the process of self-fashioning and fulfill fashioning of others. On the views of literature, the "intertexuality" is very important. New Historicism critic is deeply influence by Hayden White and Michel Foucault. They place history and literature in the same rank order and broke to traditionally belong to the relation. They find a new way for the study of literature. New Historicism critics pay more attention to politics ideology of literature. They study both subvert and restrain and dig into the essence

                New  Historicism  critic advocate a kind of synthesizing thought mode, and also can be seen the stir to fine course thought. New Historicism critic is many-faced poetry science mode, which transfer from writer center to text center. Meanwhile, this mode exists many flaws. Firstly, it stem from interior methodology and practice contradiction. Secondly, New Historicism critic is apt to studying text synchronic and ignores text development diachronic. Finally, basing on the history limitations, they are short of entirety certainty. Whatever, they urge us to rethink our culture…
Key words: New Historicism critic; views on literature; writer’s subjective position; literature and history; poetry science.

Criticism
                          New historicism has come into conflict with some of the anti-historical tendencies of postmodernism. New historicism denies the claim that society has entered a "post-modern" or "post-historical" phase and allegedly ignited the "culture wars" of the 1980s.The main points of this argument are that new historicism, unlike post-modernism, acknowledges that almost all historic views, accounts, and facts they use contain biases which derive from the position of that view. As Carl Rapp states: "[The new historicists] often appear to be saying, 'We are the only ones who are willing to admit that all knowledge is contaminated, including even our own.’
                       Some complaints sometimes made about New Historicism are that in seems to lessen literature to a footnote of history. It has also been said that it does not pay attention to the antiquate details involved with analyzing literature. New Historicism simply states historical issues that literature may make connections with without explain why it has done this, lacking in-depth knowledge to literature and its structures.