New Historical and Cultural Criticism Flashcards
(30 cards)
New Historicism’s principal question
New historicist would read an historical paper and ask themselves “What does this account tell us about the political agendas and ideological conflicts of the culture that produced and read the account in the year that it was made?”
Traditional historians see history as
A series of events that have a linear, causal relationships; They believe that history is progressive.
There are no facts, there are only
Interpretations
History to new historicists
Cannot be understood simply as a linear progression of events. At any given point in history, any given culture may be progressing in some areas and regressing in others. Individuals and groups of people may have goals, but human history does not.
Impossibility of objective analysis
New historicism explanation of how there are no facts, only interpratations
Saying of how all events are produced, by new historicism
All events are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge.
Subjectivy / Selfhood
Is shaped by and shapes the culture into which we were born; a lifelong process of negotiating our way, consciously and unconsciously, among the constraints and freedoms offered at any given moment in time by the society in which we live.
Michael Foucault
Power circulates in all directions, to and from all social levels, at all time. And the vehicle by which power circulates is a never ending proliferation of exchange
Forms of exchange to create power
(1) the exchange of material goods through such practices as buying and selling, bartering, gambling, taxation, charity, and various forms of theft; (2) the exchange of people through such institutions as marriage, adoption, kidnapping, and slavery; and (3) the exchange of ideas through the various discourses a culture produces.
Discourse
A social language created by particular cultural conditions at a particular time and place, and it expresses a particular way of understanding human experience.
Draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology.
Discourse
Can there be just one discourse?
No, there is a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses
Discourse assiociations of power
Discourses wield power for those in charge, but they also stimulate opposition to that power.
How does new historicists make historical analysis?
Through deconstructive criticism; it considers literary texts cultural artifacts that can tell us something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings, operating in the time and place in which those texts were written.
Rhetorical strategies
The stylistic devices by which texts try to achieve their purposes
Master Narrative
A narrative told from a single cultural point of view that, nevertheless, presumes to offer the only accurate version of history. New historicists try to stop it.
Thick description
attempts, through close, detailed examination of a given cultural production to discover the meanings that particular cultural production had for the people in whose community it occurred and to reveal the social conventions, cultural codes, and ways of seeing the world that gave that production those meanings. Thus, thick description is not a search for facts but a search for meanings. It focuses on the personal side of history (traditions) as much as or more than on such historical topics as military campaigns and the passage of laws.
Self-positioning
To be as forthright as possible about their own psychological and ideological positions relative to the material they analyze so that their readers can have some idea of the human “lens” through which they are viewing the historical issues at hand.
Literary texts for new historicists
cultural artifacts that can tell us something about the interplay of discourses, the web of social meanings, operating in the time and place in which the text was written. And they can do so because the literary text is itself part of the interplay of discourses, a thread in the dynamic web of social meaning.
Difference of Cultural Materialism to New Historicism
Cultural criticism tends to be much more politically oriented than new historicism. argues that working‑class culture has been misunderstood and undervalued. The dominant class dictates what forms of art are to be considered “high” (superior) culture
Cultural work
The ways in which they shape our experience by transmitting or transforming ideologies.
Culture for cultural materialism
, a culture is a collection of interactive cultures, each of which is growing and changing, each of which is constituted at any given moment in time by the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, occupation, and similar factors that contribute to the experience of its members.
The text is absolutely inseparable from
its historical context.
Cultural products are not simply the product of history,
they also actively make history
