New Historicism
Encyclopedia
New Historicism is a school of literary theory
, grounded in critical theory
, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt
, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.
New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas
. Michel Foucault
based his approach both on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining a broad array of documents in order to understand the episteme
of a particular time. New Historicism is claimed to be a more neutral approach to historical events, and to be sensitive towards different cultures
.
H. Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989), noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse; they were:
, has been on understanding Shakespeare
less as an autonomous great author in the modern sense than as a clue to the conjunction of the world of Renaissance theatre
—a collaborative and largely anonymous free-for-all—and the complex social politics of the time. In this sense, Shakespeare's plays are seen as inseparable from the context in which he wrote. See contextualism
, thick description
. Influential historians behind the eruption of the New Historicism are Fernand Braudel
and the Annales School
.
In this shift of focus, a comparison can be made with the best discussions of works of decorative arts. Unlike fine arts, which had been discussed in purely formal terms, comparable to the literary New Criticism, under the influences of Bernard Berenson
and Ernst Gombrich
, nuanced discussion of the arts of design since the 1970s have been set within social and intellectual contexts, taking account of fluctuations in luxury trades, the availability of design prototypes to local craftsmen, the cultural horizons of the patron, and economic considerations—"the limits of the possible" in economic historian Fernand Braudel
's famous phrase. An outstanding pioneer example of such a contextualized study was Peter Thornton
's monograph Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (1978).
and in its political interpretations, New Historicism is indebted to Marxism
. But whereas Marxism (at least in its cruder forms) tends to see literature as part of a 'superstructure
' in which the economic
'base' (i.e. material
relations of production
) manifests itself, New Historicist thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of power
, seeing it not exclusively as class
-related but extending throughout society. This view derives primarily from Michel Foucault
and his work in critical theory
.
In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no 'fixed' literary value
above and beyond the way specific societies read them in specific situations, New Historicism also owes something to postmodernism
. However, New Historicists tend to exhibit less skepticism
than postmodernists and to show more willingness to perform the 'traditional' tasks of literary criticism: i.e. explaining the text in its context, and asking how the text enforces the cultural practices that it depends on for its own production and dissemination.
New Historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called cultural materialism
, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups. Cultural critics also downplay the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and often focus predominantly on the productions of "popular culture." (Newton 1988). [7]
New Historicists analyze text with an eye to history. With this in mind, New Historicism is not “new”. Many of the critiques that existed between the 1920s and the 1950s also focused on literature's historical content. These critics based their assumptions of literature on the connection between texts and their historical contexts (Murfin & Supriya 1998).
New historicism also has something in common with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine
, who argued that a literary work is less the product of its author's imaginations than the social circumstances of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine called race, milieu, and moment. It is also a response to an earlier historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics such as John Livingston Lowes
, which sought to de-mythologize the creative process by reexamining the lives and times of canonical
writers. But New Historicism differs from both of these trends in its emphasis on ideology
: the political disposition, unknown to an author himself, that governs his work.
based idea that the lowest common denominator
for all human actions is power, so the New Historicist seeks to find examples of power and how it is dispersed within the text. Power is a means through which the marginalized
are controlled, and the thing that the marginalized (or, other) seek to gain. This relates back to the idea that because literature
is written by those who have the most power, there must be details in it that show the views of the common people. New Historicists seek to find "sites of struggle" to identify just who is the group
or entity
with the most power.
Foucault's conception of power is neither reductive nor synonymous with domination. Rather he understands power (in modern times at least) as continually articulated on knowledge and knowledge on power. Nevertheless, his work in the 1970s on prisons may have been influential on the New Historicists. In these studies Foucault examined shifts in the mechanisms of power in these institutional settings. His discussions of techniques included the panopticon
, a theoretical prison
system developed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham
, and particularly useful for New Historicism.
Bentham stated that the perfect prison/surveillance system would be a cylindrical
shaped room that held prison cells on the outside walls. In the middle of this spherical room would be a large guard tower with a light that would shine in all the cells. The prison
ers thus would never know for certain whether they were being watched, so they would effectively police themselves, and be as actor
s on a stage, giving the appearance of submission
, even when they are probably not being watched.
Foucault included the panopticon in his discussions on the technologies of power in part to illustrate the idea of lateral surveillance
, or self-policing, that occurs when those who are subject to these techniques of power believe they are being watched. His purpose was to show that these techniques of power go beyond mere force and could prompt different regimes of self-discipline among those subject to the exercise of these visibility techniques. This often meant that, in effect, prisoners would often fall into line whether or not there was an actual need to do so.
Although the influence of such philosophers as French structuralist Marxist
Louis Althusser
and Marxists Raymond Williams
and Terry Eagleton
were essential in shaping the theory of New Historicism, the work of Foucault also appears influential. Although some critics believe that these former philosophers have made more of an impact on New Historicism as a whole, there is a popularly held recognition that Foucault’s ideas have passed through the New Historicist formation in history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture (Myers 1989). It is indeed evident that the categories of history used by New Historicists have been standardised academically. Although the movement is publicly disapproving of the periodisation of academic history, the uses to which New Historicists put the Foucauldian notion of the épistéme amount to very little more than the same practice under a new and improved label (Myers 1989).
Insofar as Greenblatt has been explicit in expressing a theoretical orientation, he has identified the ethnography
and theoretical anthropology
of Clifford Geertz
as highly influential.
. New Historicism denies the claim that society has entered a "post-modern" or "post-historical" phase and allegedly ignited the 'culture wars' of the 1980s (Seaton, 2000). The main points of this argument are that new historicism, unlike post-modernism, acknowledges that almost all historic views, accounts, and facts they use contain biases which derive from the position of that view. As Carl Rapp states: "[the new historicists] often appear to be saying, 'We are the only ones who are willing to admit that all knowledge is contaminated, including even our own'".
Camile Paglia likewise cites "the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley" as an "issue where the PC academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there to punish and expose and to say what they are doing...a piece of crap." Elsewhere, Paglia has suggested that New Historicism is "a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense."
Harold Bloom
criticizes the New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history, and for not paying attention to the details involved in analyzing literature.
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
, grounded in critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a literary critic, theorist and scholar.Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term...
, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s.
New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas
History of ideas
The history of ideas is a field of research in history that deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. The history of ideas is a sister-discipline to, or a particular approach within, intellectual history...
. Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
based his approach both on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining a broad array of documents in order to understand the episteme
Episteme
Episteme, as distinguished from techne, is etymologically derived from the Greek word ἐπιστήμη for knowledge or science, which comes from the verb ἐπίσταμαι, "to know".- The Concept of an "Episteme" in Michel Foucault :...
of a particular time. New Historicism is claimed to be a more neutral approach to historical events, and to be sensitive towards different cultures
Cultural literacy
Cultural literacy is familiarity with and ability to understand the idioms, allusions, and informal content that create and constitute a dominant culture. From being familiar with street signs to knowing historical references to understanding the most recent slang, literacy demands interaction with...
.
H. Aram Veeser, introducing an anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989), noted some key assumptions that continually reappear in New Historicist discourse; they were:
- that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
- that every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
- that literary and non-literary "texts" circulate inseparably;
- that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor expresses inalterable human nature;
- that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.
The study
"Sub-literary" texts and uninspired non-literary texts all came to be read as documents of historical discourse, side-by-side with the "great works of literature". A typical focus of New Historicist critics, led by Stephen OrgelStephen Orgel
Stephen Orgel is Professor of English at Stanford University. Best known as a scholar of Shakespeare, Orgel writes primarily about the political and historical context of Renaissance literature....
, has been on understanding Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
less as an autonomous great author in the modern sense than as a clue to the conjunction of the world of Renaissance theatre
Renaissance theatre
For Renaissance theatre see*Its section in the History of Theatre*English Renaissance theatre*French Renaissance theatre*German Renaissance theatre*Italian Renaissance theatre*Spanish Renaissance theatre*Renaissance TragedyFor place name see...
—a collaborative and largely anonymous free-for-all—and the complex social politics of the time. In this sense, Shakespeare's plays are seen as inseparable from the context in which he wrote. See contextualism
Contextualism
Contextualism describes a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context...
, thick description
Thick description
In anthropology and other fields, a thick description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider....
. Influential historians behind the eruption of the New Historicism are Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
and the Annales School
Annales School
The Annales School is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and...
.
In this shift of focus, a comparison can be made with the best discussions of works of decorative arts. Unlike fine arts, which had been discussed in purely formal terms, comparable to the literary New Criticism, under the influences of Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. He was a major figure in pioneering art attribution and therefore establishing the market for paintings by the "Old Masters".-Personal life:...
and Ernst Gombrich
Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who became naturalized British citizen in 1947. He spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...
, nuanced discussion of the arts of design since the 1970s have been set within social and intellectual contexts, taking account of fluctuations in luxury trades, the availability of design prototypes to local craftsmen, the cultural horizons of the patron, and economic considerations—"the limits of the possible" in economic historian Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
's famous phrase. An outstanding pioneer example of such a contextualized study was Peter Thornton
Peter Thornton
Peter Kai Thornton CBE was a museum curator and writer. He was keeper of furniture and woodwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London between 1966 to 1984, and curator to Sir John Soane's Museum, in Lincoln's Inn Fields between 1984 and 1995...
's monograph Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (1978).
Pre-history
In its historicismHistoricism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
and in its political interpretations, New Historicism is indebted to Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
. But whereas Marxism (at least in its cruder forms) tends to see literature as part of a 'superstructure
Base and superstructure
In Marxist theory, human society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure; the base comprehends the forces and relations of production — employer-employee work conditions, the technical division of labour, and property relations — into which people enter to produce the necessities and...
' in which the economic
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
'base' (i.e. material
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
relations of production
Relations of production
Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital...
) manifests itself, New Historicist thinkers tend to take a more nuanced view of power
Power (sociology)
Power is a measurement of an entity's ability to control its environment, including the behavior of other entities. The term authority is often used for power perceived as legitimate by the social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to...
, seeing it not exclusively as class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
-related but extending throughout society. This view derives primarily from Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
and his work in critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
.
In its tendency to see society as consisting of texts relating to other texts, with no 'fixed' literary value
Value theory
Value theory encompasses a range of approaches to understanding how, why and to what degree people should value things; whether the thing is a person, idea, object, or anything else. This investigation began in ancient philosophy, where it is called axiology or ethics. Early philosophical...
above and beyond the way specific societies read them in specific situations, New Historicism also owes something to postmodernism
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. However, New Historicists tend to exhibit less skepticism
Skepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...
than postmodernists and to show more willingness to perform the 'traditional' tasks of literary criticism: i.e. explaining the text in its context, and asking how the text enforces the cultural practices that it depends on for its own production and dissemination.
New Historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called cultural materialism
Cultural materialism (cultural studies)
Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural materialism makes analysis based in critical theory, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School....
, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups. Cultural critics also downplay the distinction between "high" and "low" culture and often focus predominantly on the productions of "popular culture." (Newton 1988). [7]
New Historicists analyze text with an eye to history. With this in mind, New Historicism is not “new”. Many of the critiques that existed between the 1920s and the 1950s also focused on literature's historical content. These critics based their assumptions of literature on the connection between texts and their historical contexts (Murfin & Supriya 1998).
New historicism also has something in common with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French critic and historian. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism, and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate...
, who argued that a literary work is less the product of its author's imaginations than the social circumstances of its creation, the three main aspects of which Taine called race, milieu, and moment. It is also a response to an earlier historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics such as John Livingston Lowes
John Livingston Lowes
John Livingston Lowes was an American scholar of English literature, specializing in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Geoffrey Chaucer....
, which sought to de-mythologize the creative process by reexamining the lives and times of canonical
Western canon
The term Western canon denotes a canon of books and, more broadly, music and art that have been the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes the "greatest works of artistic merit." Such a canon is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the...
writers. But New Historicism differs from both of these trends in its emphasis on ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
: the political disposition, unknown to an author himself, that governs his work.
Foucauldian basis
New Historicism frequently addresses the critical theoryCritical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
based idea that the lowest common denominator
Lowest common denominator
In mathematics, the lowest common denominator or least common denominator is the least common multiple of the denominators of a set of vulgar fractions...
for all human actions is power, so the New Historicist seeks to find examples of power and how it is dispersed within the text. Power is a means through which the marginalized
Marginalization
In sociology, marginalisation , or marginalization , is the social process of becoming or being made marginal or relegated to the fringe of society e.g.; "the marginalization of the underclass", "marginalisation of intellect", etc.-Individual:Marginalization at the individual level results in an...
are controlled, and the thing that the marginalized (or, other) seek to gain. This relates back to the idea that because literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
is written by those who have the most power, there must be details in it that show the views of the common people. New Historicists seek to find "sites of struggle" to identify just who is the group
Group (sociology)
In the social sciences a social group can be defined as two or more humans who interact with one another, share similar characteristics and collectively have a sense of unity...
or entity
Entity
An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, although it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate.An entity could be viewed as a set...
with the most power.
Foucault's conception of power is neither reductive nor synonymous with domination. Rather he understands power (in modern times at least) as continually articulated on knowledge and knowledge on power. Nevertheless, his work in the 1970s on prisons may have been influential on the New Historicists. In these studies Foucault examined shifts in the mechanisms of power in these institutional settings. His discussions of techniques included the panopticon
Panopticon
The Panopticon is a type of building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched...
, a theoretical prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
system developed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
, and particularly useful for New Historicism.
Bentham stated that the perfect prison/surveillance system would be a cylindrical
Cylinder (geometry)
A cylinder is one of the most basic curvilinear geometric shapes, the surface formed by the points at a fixed distance from a given line segment, the axis of the cylinder. The solid enclosed by this surface and by two planes perpendicular to the axis is also called a cylinder...
shaped room that held prison cells on the outside walls. In the middle of this spherical room would be a large guard tower with a light that would shine in all the cells. The prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
ers thus would never know for certain whether they were being watched, so they would effectively police themselves, and be as actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
s on a stage, giving the appearance of submission
Submission
Submission is the acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the power of one's superior or superiors.Submission may also refer to:* Submission/Submitter , an Islamic organisation...
, even when they are probably not being watched.
Foucault included the panopticon in his discussions on the technologies of power in part to illustrate the idea of lateral surveillance
Surveillance
Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people. It is sometimes done in a surreptitious manner...
, or self-policing, that occurs when those who are subject to these techniques of power believe they are being watched. His purpose was to show that these techniques of power go beyond mere force and could prompt different regimes of self-discipline among those subject to the exercise of these visibility techniques. This often meant that, in effect, prisoners would often fall into line whether or not there was an actual need to do so.
Although the influence of such philosophers as French structuralist Marxist
Structural Marxism
Structural Marxism was an approach to Marxist philosophy based on structuralism, primarily associated with the work of the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students. It was influential in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and also came to influence philosophers, political theorists and...
Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
and Marxists Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts...
and Terry Eagleton
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
were essential in shaping the theory of New Historicism, the work of Foucault also appears influential. Although some critics believe that these former philosophers have made more of an impact on New Historicism as a whole, there is a popularly held recognition that Foucault’s ideas have passed through the New Historicist formation in history as a succession of épistémes or structures of thought that shape everyone and everything within a culture (Myers 1989). It is indeed evident that the categories of history used by New Historicists have been standardised academically. Although the movement is publicly disapproving of the periodisation of academic history, the uses to which New Historicists put the Foucauldian notion of the épistéme amount to very little more than the same practice under a new and improved label (Myers 1989).
Insofar as Greenblatt has been explicit in expressing a theoretical orientation, he has identified the ethnography
Ethnography
Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...
and theoretical anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
of Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until...
as highly influential.
Contemporary Contributions
Dr. Michael Licona, a scholar of New Testament History, describes history, not as absolute certainty but empirical realism. In this concept, he notes that there are varying degrees of certainty.Criticism
New historicism has suffered from criticism, most particularly from the clashing views of those considered to be postmodernistsPostmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
. New Historicism denies the claim that society has entered a "post-modern" or "post-historical" phase and allegedly ignited the 'culture wars' of the 1980s (Seaton, 2000). The main points of this argument are that new historicism, unlike post-modernism, acknowledges that almost all historic views, accounts, and facts they use contain biases which derive from the position of that view. As Carl Rapp states: "[the new historicists] often appear to be saying, 'We are the only ones who are willing to admit that all knowledge is contaminated, including even our own'".
Camile Paglia likewise cites "the New Historicism coming out of Berkeley" as an "issue where the PC academy thinks it's going to reform the old bad path, I have been there before they have been, and I'm there to punish and expose and to say what they are doing...a piece of crap." Elsewhere, Paglia has suggested that New Historicism is "a refuge for English majors without critical talent or broad learning in history or political science. [...] To practice it, you must apparently lack all historical sense."
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
criticizes the New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history, and for not paying attention to the details involved in analyzing literature.
Further reading
- The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary 2004, 4th edn, Oxford University Press,South Melbourne.
- Dixon, C. 2005, New Historicism, viewed 1 January 2011, http://gsw.edu/~english/NewHistoricismSite/NHindex.html
- Felluga, D. 2003, General introduction to New Historicism, viewed 28 April 2006, http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/newhistoricism/modules/introduction.html
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translation of Surveiller et Punir. Vintage, 1979.
- Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. U Chicago P, 1980.
- Hedges, W. 2000, New Historicism explained, viewed 20 March 2006 http://www.sou.edu/English/Hedges/Sodashop/Rcenter/Theory/Explaind/nhistexp.htm
- Licona, Michael. "The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach." IVP Academic, 2010.
- Murfin, R. & Ray, S 1998, The Bedford glossary of critical and literary terms, Bedford Books, St Martins.
- Myers, D. G. 1989, The New Historicism in literary study, viewed 27 April 2006, http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/historicism.html
- Orgel, Stephen. The Authentic Shakespeare. Routledge, 2002.
- Rice, P. & Waugh, P. 1989, Modern literary theory: a reader, 2nd edn, Edward Arnold, Melbourne.
- Seaton, J. 1999, "The metaphysics of postmodernism", review of Carl Rapp, Fleeing the Universal: The Critique of Post-rational Criticism (1998), in Humanitas 12.1 (1999), viewed 29 April 2006, http://www.nhinet.org/seatonr.htm
- Veeser, H. Aram (Ed.). The New Historicism. Routledge, 1989.
External links
- New Historicism from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism