BBL5202 Critical Appreciation

New Historicism

Tan Wai Kian

GS52487
Overview
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

● the history of the critic.

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.
Major Figures

● Michel Foucault
● Stephen Greenblatt
● Victor Turner &
Clifford Geertz
Historical criticism seeks to comprehend the social and
cultural dynamics that surround literature work by answering
questions such as:

● The time that the text was written.

● The person who wrote the literature.
● The events that happened at the time the literature was
being written.
● How the literature has evolved with time to the form in
which it is present today.
● What message did it carry to the very first audience of
the literature and what did it mean to the readers.
Stephen Greenblatt
Greenblatt differentiated what he called

the “New Historicism” from both the New Criticism, which

views the text as a self-contained structure,

and

the earlier historicism which was monological and attempted

to discover a unitary political vision.
The earlier historicism, moreover, viewed the resulting
totality or unity as a historical fact rather than the product
of interpretation or of the ideological leanings of certain
groups.

Such a homogenizing procedure allows the unified vision of

historical context to serve as a fixed point of reference
which could form the background of literary interpretation.

New Historicism also challenges the hierarchical distinction

between “literary foreground” and “political background,” as
well as between artistic and other kinds of production.

● It acknowledges that when we speak of “culture,” we are

speaking of a “complex network of institutions, practices,
and beliefs.”
Poetics of Culture (1987), Greenblatt’s essay begins by
noting that he will not attempt to “define” the New
Historicism but rather to “situate it as a practice.”

What distinguishes it from the “positivist historical

scholarship” of the early twentieth century is its openness
to recent theory

Greenblatt demonstrates that the interpretation of literary

texts is always incomplete and that new interpretation can
always be produced.

In Shakespeare Negotiations, Greenblatt perfects his own

distinctive critical style where he discusses the
relationship between these moments and larger phenomena in
Elizabethan culture as a whole
His attention is not on close and careful reading of Shakespeare’s
text and language but on reading of contemporary cultural texts that
illuminates Elizabethan England; a time of great crisis and
uncertainty over religion, politics, and gender.

Greenblatt provides a convenient list of rules that inform his

reading of Shakespeare
Michel Foucault
Foucault observed that the discourse of an era brings into
being concepts, oppositions and hierarchies, which are
products and propagators of power, and these determine what
is “knowledge”, “truth” and “normal” at a given time.

His primary concern has been with power’s relationship to

the discursive formations in society that make knowledge.

Understood power as continually articulated knowledge and

vice versa; that knowledge always endorses the position of
the powerful and that knowledge is created by power
structures.
Notion of Power
● has to address not centralised and legitimate forms of
power but techniques, which have become embodied in
local, regional material institutions.

● should concern itself with the exercise or practice of

power, its field of application and its effects, and not
with questions of possession or conscious intention.
● Power is not a commodity or a possession of an individual, a
group or a class, rather it circulates through the social body,
and is exercised through a net-like organisation in which all
are caught; power is strategic; at the same time ‘intentional’,
yet non-subjective . Therefore analysis begins from micro-level
in order to reveal the particular histories, techniques and
tactics of power directed towards control of the human body

● Power produces knowledge – knowledge produces power

(Power/Knowledge); power is productive and not repressive. It
often produces pleasure. So, we need to start investigation at
what we think is ‘good’, what is pleasurable; what we consider
‘normal’ and proceed from there.

● Power requires resistance. We need to consider resistance to

power as part of the power game.
Victor Turner & Clifford geertz
Perform studies of cultural rituals and theatrical traditions in various
culture -- provide important procedural models.

Geertz performs extensive fieldwork in which he collects large amounts of

data about the culture that he is studying. However, eschews the
tendencies of traditional social science to dehumanize foreign cultures
by viewing them through a totalising theories or reducing them to mere
sets of data for analysis.

Geertz “symbolic anthropology” focuses on “culture”, which for Geertz

means “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in
symbols (a system inherited conception expressed in symbolic forms by
means of communication, perpetuation and developing knowledge and
attitude towards life).
Symbolic anthropology or, more broadly, symbolic and interpretive
anthropology, is the study of cultural symbols and how those symbols
can be used to gain a better understanding of a particular society.

According to Clifford Geertz, humans are in need of symbolic “sources

of illumination” to orient themselves with respect to the system of
meaning that is any particular culture.

Victor Turner, on the other hand, states that symbols initiate social
action and are “determinable influences inclining persons and groups to
action”.

Geertz’s position illustrates the interpretive approach to symbolic

anthropology,

while

Turner’s illustrates the symbolic approach.

For Geertz symbols are “vehicles of
‘culture’”, and he asserts that
symbols should not be studied in
and of themselves, but for what
they can reveal about culture.
Geertz’s main interest was manner
in which symbols shape the ways
that social actors see, feel, and
think about the world.

Throughout his writings, Geertz

characterized culture as a social
phenomenon and a shared system of
intersubjective symbols and
meanings .
Turner’s approach to symbols was very
different from that of Geertz. Turner
was not interested in symbols as
vehicles of “culture”, rather he
instead investigated symbols as
“operators in the social process”.
Symbols “instigate social action” and
exert “determinable influences
inclining persons and groups to
action”.

Turner felt that these “operators,” by

their arrangement and context, produce
“social transformations” which tie the
people in a society to the society’s
norms, resolve conflict, and aid in
changing the status of the actors.
Reference
Booker, M.. “A practical introduction to literary theory and criticism.” (1995).

Hoover, Dwight W. “The New Historicism.” The History Teacher, vol. 25, no. 3, 1992, pp. 355–366. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/494247. Accessed 22 Dec. 2020.

Foucault: Power Is Everywhere.

www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/foucault-power-is-everywhere/.

Hudson, Scott, et al. “Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropologies.” Anthropology, 21 Apr. 2017,
anthropology.ua.edu/theory/symbolic-and-interpretive-anthropologies/.

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Foucault's Influence on New Historicism: Literary Theory and Criticism.”
Literary Theory and Criticism, 21 Oct. 2016,
literariness.org/2016/10/21/foucaults-influence-on-new-historicism/.

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism: Literary Theory and Criticism.”
Literary Theory and Criticism, 1 Mar. 2020,
literariness.org/2017/11/16/stephen-greenblatt-and-new-historicism/.