Historicism and Cultural Studies in Literary Theory

Chapter 9: Historicism and Cultural Studies

New Historicism

• New Historicism: 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 critic.

New Historicism is based on the literary criticism of Stephen Greenblatt. New historicists see literary studies through a lens ranging from New Criticism to Deconstruction. 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 their environment, beliefs, and prejudices. New historicists examine how the writer’s times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer’s times.

Comparing Old and New Historicism

Old Historicism: Hierarchical

• A historical movement that creates a historical framework in which to place the text.
• Investigates the historical, social, and cultural world of the author, asserting that these elements are always interconnected with the literature of their time period.

New Historicism: Parallel Reading

• A historicist movement interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents—history as text.
• The aim is not to represent the past as it really was, but to present a new reality by re-situating it.
• According to historicists, a work must be judged in the context in which it was written.
• Studying the history reveals more about the text; studying the text reveals more about the history.
• Advantages: It is written in a far more accessible way than post-structuralist theory and presents its data and draws its conclusions in a less dense way.
• It pays more attention to ideology; the critic understands that there is no objective history and that ideology plays a role in the work of both the critic and the author the critic is analyzing.

Cultural Studies and Cultural Materialism

• Cultural studies can include the heritage of weaving together literary studies with the study of culture, cultural history, Marxism, and the working class that emerged through the writing of Raymond Williams and Cultural Materialism.
• Cultural Materialists not only create criticism of a text by contextualizing it with its own time period, but also with successive generations, including our own.
• Cultural Materialism bridges the gap between Marxism and Post-Modernism.
• Cultural Materialism embraces change and gives us different, changing perspectives based on what we choose to suppress or reveal in readings from the past.
• It is a literary criticism that places texts in a socio-political or historical material context in order to show that canonical texts—Shakespeare supremely—are bound up with a repressive, dominant ideology, yet also provide scope for dissidence.
• It examines ideas and categorizes them as radical or non-radical according to whether they contribute to a historical vision of where we are and where we want to be.

Foucault’s Theory of Power and Discourse

• Michel Foucault believed that knowledge is always a form of power.
• He taught us that knowledge can be gained from power: producing it, not preventing it.
• Through observation, new knowledge is formed.