NEW CRITICISM
• During the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, New
Criticism was the dominant approach to literary
analysis.
• New Criticism regards a literary text as an artifact
with an existence of its own, independent of and
not necessarily related to its author, its readers,
the historical time it depicts, or the historical
period in which it was written.
• A text's meaning emerges when readers scrutinize
the text alone.
• What New Criticism did not provide for Greenblatt
and other critics was an attempt to understand
literature from a historical perspective. In a New
Critical analysis, the text was what mattered,
not its historical context.
• In addition, Greenblatt believed that questions
concerning the nature and definition of
literature were not encouraged.
OLD HISTORICISM
This view assumes that historians can write
objectively about any given historical time period,
person, event, or text and are able definitively to state
the objective truth about that person, era, occurrence,
or text.
In this methodology, history serves as a background to
literature.
NEW HISTORICISM
That historians can articulate a unified and internally
consistent worldview of any given people, country, or era
and can reconstruct an accurate and objective picture of
any historical event are key assumptions that Cultural
Poetics or New Historicism challenges.
Cultural Poetics—often called New Historicism in
America and Cultural Materialism in Great Britain—
declares that all history is subjective, written by people
whose personal biases affect their interpretation of the
past.
Cultural Poetics claims that it provides its adherents
with a practice of literary analysis that:
• Highlights the interrelatedness of all human activities.
• Admits its own prejudices.
• Gives a more complete understanding of a text than
does the old Historicism and other interpretative
approaches.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPLMENT
In the inaugural issue, D.A. Miller, a leading New Historicist,
published his essay "Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police,
Family and Bleak House"
Louis Montrose published his essay "Shaping Fantasies," reiterating
and expanding upon Miller's declaration that literary texts are seats of
power.
Jonathan Goldberg
“James I and the Politics of Literature” asserted that
different historical eras develop different "modes of power," with
each epoch viewing reality differently, including conflicting
concepts of truth.
New Historicists claim, literature should be read in relation
to culture, history, society, and other factors that help
determine a text's meaning.
In his article “Towards a Poetics of Culture.(1987)” Greenblatt
asserts that art and society are interrelated, but no scholar can
use just one theoretical stance (or school of criticism) to
discover this complex web of interrelationships.
Deconstruction, Marxism, Feminism, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis began to challenge the assumptions of New Criticism.
Rejecting New Criticism's claim that the meaning of a text can be
found mainly in the text, post structural theorists had been developing a
variety of theoretical positions about the nature of the reading process,
the part the reader plays in that process, and the definition of a text or the
actual work of art.
From the Marxist scholars—Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin,
Raymond Williams, and others—they learned that history is shaped by
the people who live it, and they accepted the Marxist idea of the
interconnectedness of all life.
• Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, critics such as
Catherine Gallagher, Jonathan Dollimore, Jerome
McGann, Stephen Greenblatt, to name a few, voiced their
concerns that the study of literature and its relationship to
history has been too narrow.
• Viewing a text as culture in action, these critics blur
the distinction between an artistic production and any
other kind of social production or event.
Cultural Poetics:
1) Cultural Materialism.
2) New Historicism.
CULTURAL MATERIALISM
• Marxist in its theories and political and cultural in its
aims.
• Believing that literature can serve as an agent of change,
cultural materialists declare that a culture's hegemony
is unstable.
NEW HISTORICISM
• New Historicism is the name given to the
American branch of Cultural Poetics.
• One of its originating voices, Greenblatt, along
with a host of other scholars, believes that one's
culture permeates both texts and critics.
Michel Foucault
Unlike the old historicism, this New
Historicism, or Cultural Poetics, asserts that an
intricate connection exists between an aesthetic
object—a text or any work of art—and society,
while denying that a text can be evaluated in
isolation from its cultural context.
History cannot be explained as a series of causes and effects
controlled by some mysterious destiny or an all-powerful deity.
Foucault asserts that the abrupt and often radical changes
that cause breaks from one episteme to another are neither good
nor bad, valid nor invalid. Similar to the discourses that help
produce them, different epistemes exist in their own right; they are
neither moral nor immoral, but amoral.
Clifford Geertz
There exists "no human nature independent
of culture," culture being defined by Geertz as "a set of control
mechanisms— plans, recipes, rules, instructions," for governing
behavior.
Each person must be viewed as a cultural artifact.
Texts, History, and Interpretation
Cultural Poetics scholars center history, declaring that any
interpretation of a text would be incomplete if we do not consider the
text's relationship to the discourses that helped fashion it and to which
the text is a response.
A text becomes a battleground of competing ideas among the
author, society, customs, institutions, and social practices that are
all eventually negotiated by the author and the reader and influenced
by each contributor's episteme.
For a Cultural In our search to attach
Poetics critic, everything meaning to our actions,
we do is interrelated to Cultural Poetics critics
and within a network of believe that we can never
practices embedded in be fully objective because
our culture. No act is we are all biased by
insignificant; cultural forces.
everything is important.
WHAT CULTURAL POETICS REJECTS
• Monological interpretations of a given culture, people, or
historical era can accurately demonstrate that culture's beliefs and
values.
• A historian can establish the "norms" and the "truth" of any
social order.
• A writer or a historian can be totally objective.
• Autonomous artifacts, including literary texts, can or do exist.
• Literature is shaped only by historic moments, and that history
serves as merely a background for literary study.
• Only one correct interpretation of a text exists.
WHAT CULTURAL POETICS DOES
AND ACCEPTS
• It intentionally smudges the line between history and
literature, believing that text (literature) and context
(history) are the same and that literature has no history of its
own but is ensconced in cultural history.
• It admits that definitive interpretations of a text are
unattainable because relevant material is too far spread to
gather exhaustively; we can never recover the original
meaning of anything because we cannot hear all the voices
that contributed to the event.
• It recognizes that power affects literature as deeply as
it does history.
• It believes that texts, like all forms of discourse, help
shape and are shaped by social forces.
• Literature is shaped by historical moments while also
shaping the individual reader or listener to these texts.
QUESTION FOR ANALYSIS
1.What kinds of behavior or models of practice does
this work reinforce?
2.Why might readers at a particular time and place
find this work compelling?
3.Are there differences between your values and
the values implicit in the work you are reading?
4.On what social understanding does the work
depend?
5.Whose freedom of thought or movement might
be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
6. What are the larger social structures with which
these particular acts of praise or blame might be
concerned?
7. What authorial biographical facts are relevant to the
text?
8. What other cultural events occurred surrounding the
original production of the text? How may these events
be relevant to the text under investigation?
OLIVER TWIST
CHARLES DICKENS
1. What behaviors and social structures does Dickens’ Oliver
Twist reinforce or critique, and how does he achieve this
through Characterization and plot?
2. What aspects of Dickens’ Oliver Twist might have made it
compelling to Victorian audiences, and how do these aspects
differ from contemporary reader?
3. Which characters in Dickens’ Oliver Twist experience
limitations on their freedom?
4. What aspects of Charles Dicken’s life and experiences
are reflected in the themes and characters of Oliver Twist?
5. What aspects of Charles dickens use praise and blame in
Oliver Twist to highlight social injustices and the
complexities of morality?
Activity 1. Read and answer the following question
below. (½ crosswise)
1. Summarize the key events in Oliver Twist’s journey and identify one
significant life lessons the novel conveys about overcoming adversity the
or the importance of human kindness, supporting your answer with
specific examples from the text.
2. Compare and Contrast Dickens’ use of Chronological narrative versus non-
chronological narrative techniques (e.g., flashbacks, foreshadowing) in Oliver
Twist, explaining how each choice affects the reader’s understanding of the
Novel themes and character development .
Learning Competency: Distinguishes between and among techniques in selecting and
organizing information ( EN 11/12RWS-III-2
