New
Historicism and cultural materialism.
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Roll
No: 19
M.A.
SEM: 2
Batch
Year: 2016 – 2018
Enrollment No: 2069108420170026
Email
Id: ravalmital5292@gmail.com
Paper
Name: Cultural Studies
Assignment
Topic: New Historicism and cultural materialism
Submitted
to: Dr. Dilip Barad
Smt. S. b. Gardi
Department of English
M .k. Bhavnagar
University
Introduction:
A term
coined by Raymond Williams and popularized by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan
Sinfield in their collection of essays Political Shakespeare, Cultural
Materialism refers to a Marxist orientation of New Historicism, characterized
by the analysis of any historical material within a politicized framework, in a
radical and subversive manner. Cultural Materialism emphasizes studying the
historical context, looking at those historical aspects that have been
discarded or silenced in other narratives of history, through an eclectic
theoretical approach, backed by the political commitment arising from the
influence of Marxist and Feminist perspective and thus executing a textual
analysis that critiques traditional approaches, especially on canonical texts.
Like
New Historicists, Cultural Materialists also believe in the textuality of
history and the historicity of texts; they are aware of the political agendas
of the text and hence are alert to the ways in which power exerts itself
through implicit workings of ideology within the text. While they believe that
New Historicists generate apolitical readings, in which there is
no question of agency on the part of the marginalized, Cultural
Materialists are consciously political, and aim at transforming the social
order; as they seek readings that focus on the marginalized and the exploited,
and also book at the possibilities of subversion and resistance in both the
text and the interpretive act.
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 text: instead of a literary ‘foreground’ and a historical ‘background’ it envisages and practices a mode of study in which literary and non-literary texts are given equal weight and constantly inform or interrogate each other. The ‘equal weighting; is suggested in the definition of new historicism offered by the American critic Louis Montrose. He defines it as a combined interest in ‘the textuality of history, the historicity of texts’.
A new historicism essay will place the literary text within the ‘frame’ of a non-literary text. Thus, Greenblatt’s main innovation, from the viewpoint of horrifying colonialist policies pursued by all the major European powers of the era’. He draws attention to ‘the marginalization and dehumanizing of suppressed Others’ usually by starting an essay with an analysis of a contemporary historical document which overlaps in some way with the subject matter of the play.
Some difference between New and Old Historicisms:
The practice of giving ‘equal weighting’ to literary and non literary material is the first and major difference between the ‘new’ and the ‘old’ historicism. As perspective of ‘old’ historicism we could cite E. M. W. Tiltyard’s The Elizabethan world picture (1943) and Shakespeare’s History play (1944), books against which new history plays (1944), books against which new historicism frequently defines itself.
A second important different between old and new historicism is encapsulated in the word ‘achieve’ in the phrase ‘the archival continuum’ quoted earlier, for that word indicates that new historicism is indeed a historicist rather than a historical movement. That is, it is interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents, in history- as- text. Historical event as such, it would argue, are irrecoverably lost.
New historicism accepts Derrida’s view that there is nothing outside the text, in the special sense that everything about the past is only available to us in textualised from: it is ‘thrice-processed’, first through the ideology, or outlook, or discursive practices of its own time, then through those of ours, and finally through the distorting web of language itself.
New Historicism and Foucault:
New historicism is resolutely anti-establishment, always implicitly on the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom and accepting and celebrating all form of difference and ‘deviance’. At the same time, though, it seems simultaneously to despair of the survival of these in the face of the power of the repressive state, which it constantly reveals as able to penetrate and taint the most intimate areas of personal life. This notion of the state as all-powerful and all- seeing stems from the post-structuralism cultural his- torin Michel Foucault whose pervasive image of the state is that of ‘panoptic’ surveillance.
Advantages and disadvantages of new historicism:
New historicism is undoubtedly great, for a variety of reason.
(1)It is founded upon post stucturalist thinking, it is written in a far more accessible way, for the most part avoiding post-structuralism’s characteristically dense style and vocabulary. It presents its data and draws its conclusion, and if it is sometimes easy to challenge the way the data is interpreted, this is partly because the empirical foundation on which the interpretation rests is made openly available for scrutiny.
(2) The material itself is often fascination and is wholly distinctive in the context of literary studies.
(3) The political edge of new historicist writing is always sharp, but at the same time it avoids the problems frequently encountered in ‘straight’ Marxist criticism: it seems less overtly polemical and more willing to aloe the historical evidence its own voice.
Example of new historicism:
Louis Montrose’s essay ‘A midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabeth culture: Gender power, from’ appeared originally in the American journal Representations, the ‘house magazine’ of the new historicism, and is reprinted in Wilson and Dutton. His overall thesis is that the play ‘creates the culture by which it is created, shapes the fantasies by which it is shaped’.
Another example of new historicism is, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels third voyage “Laputa”. “Laputa” means the whore. It shows the gynecology and power in Gulliver’s Travels.
Cultural materialism:
The British critic Graham Holderness describes cultural materialism as ‘a political form of historiography’. The term ‘cultural materialism’ was made current in 1985 when it was used by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield as the subtitle or their edited collection of essays political Shakespeare. They define the term in a forward as designating a critical method which has four characteristics:
1) Historical context: what was happening at the time the text was written.
2) Theoretical method: Incorporating older methods of theory—Structuralism, Post-structuralism etc...
3) Political commitment: Incorporating non-conservative and non-Christian frameworks—such as Feminist and Marxist theory.
4) Textual analysis: building on theoretical analysis of mainly canonical texts that have become “prominent cultural icons.”
The two words in term ‘cultural materialism’ are further defined: ‘culture’ will include all form of culture. That is , this approach does not limit itself to ‘high’ culture forms like the Shakespeare play. ‘Materialist’ belief is that culture cannot ‘transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it’. These comments on materialism represent the standard beliefs of Marxist criticism, and they do perhaps point to the difficulty of making a useful distinction between a ‘straight’ Marxist criticism and cultural materialism.
In this way, Cultural Materialism is an offshoot of Marxist criticism.
History, to a cultural materialist, is what has happened and what is happening now. In other words, Cultural Materialists not only create criticism of a text by contextualizing it with its own time period, but with successive generations including our own. Cultural Materialism bridges the gap between Marxism and Post-Modernism.
Some things that Cultural Materialist might look at when analyzing Shakespeare:
·
Elizabethan Drama during its own time period
·
The publishing history of Shakespeare through the ages
·
That weird movie version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo D. in it
·
The tourism and kitsch surrounding Shakespeare today
Raymond
Williams Raymond Williams added to the outlook of Cultural Materialism by employing “structures of feeling.” These are values that are changing and being formed as we live and react to the material world around us. They challenge dominant forms of ideology and imply that values are organic and non-stagnant.
Cultural Materialism embraces change and gives us different (changing) perspectives based on what we chose to suppress or reveal in readings from the past.
How is cultural materialism different from new historicism?
(1)In a net distinction Dollimore and Sinfield quote Marx to the effect that ‘men and women make their own history but not in conditions of their own choosing’: Cultural materialists, they say, tend to concentrate on the interventions whereby men and women make their own history, whereas new historicists tend to focus on the less than ideal circumstances in which they do so, that is, on the ‘power of social and ideological structures’ which restrain them.
(2) Cultural materialists see new historicists as cutting themselves off from effective political positions by their acceptance of a particular version of post-structuralism, with its radical skepticism about the possibility of attaining secure knowledge.
(3) A third important difference between new historicism and cultural materialism is that where the former’s co-texts are documents contemporary with Shakespeare, the latter’s may be programme notes for a current Royal Shakespeare company production, quotation of Shakespeare by a Gulf war pilot, or pronouncements on education by a government minister.
Example of cultural materialism:
An example of an informal variant of this approach is Terence Hawkes’s essay ‘Telmah’. This is the forth piece in the book, each one being canted on the work of one of the major Shakespearian critics of the early part of the century, within an overall strategy of looking at how Shakespeare is mediated and processed to us. In this chapter the critic is John Dover Wilson, best known for his 1930s book what Happens in Hamlet?.
Conclusion:
New historicism essentially involves the juxtaposition of literary material with contemporary texts. It was much influenced by Foucault, whose discursive practices are frequently a reinforcement of dominant ideology. On the other hand cultural materialism, owes much to Raymond Williams, whose ‘structures of feeling’ contain the seeds from which grows resistance to the dominant ideology.
Works sited:
http://cultmatnewhist.blogspot.in/
Wikipedia.
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