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New Historicism
Name : Riddhi Mau
Semester : 2
Batch :2016-2018
Roll No : 21
Paper no : 8
Unit No : 1
Submitted To ; M.K.Bhavnagar University ,
department of English
Assignment Topic : New Historicism
Topic : Briefy discuss new Historicism
O.....What is New Historicism ?
New Historicism is 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 history of the critic . Based
on the literary criticism of stephen Greenblatt and influenced by the
philosophy of michel foucault , New historicism acknowledges not only that a
work of literature is influenced by its author’s time and circumstances , but
that the criti’s response to the work is also influenced by his environment
beliefs, and prejudices.
A new historicical looks at
literature in a wider historical context, examining both how the writer’s time
affected the
A new Historicist looks at
literature in a wider historical 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.
For example: when studying Shakespeare’s
Merchant of Venice, one always come to the question of whether the play shows Shakespeare
to be anti-Semitic. The new Historicist recognizes can be eased out by studying
the text . This work maul be judged in the context in which it was written , in
turn , cultural history can be revealed by studying the work-especially , say
new Historicists , be studying the use and dispersion of power and the
marginalization of social classes within the work. Studying the history reveals
more about the text: studying the text reveals more about the history.
The new Historicist also
acknowledges that his examination of literature is ‘’tainted’’ by his own
culture and environment. The very anti-Semitic a question that wouldn’t have
been considered important a century ago-affected by our civilization.
New Historicism, then,
underscores, the impermanence of literary criticism . Current literary
criticism is affected by and reveal, the belifs of our times in the same way
that literature reflects and is effected by its own historical contexts new
historicism acknowledges and embraces the idea that , as times change, so will
our understanding of grcal literature.
O.....New Historicism
What about Laputa? How can new
historicism help us answer the question raised a few pages ago ?
In “The Flying Island and
Female anatomy: gynecology and Power in Gulliver’s Travels” Susan Bruce offers
a reading of Book 3 that makes some new historicist sense out of Swift’s use of
Laputa. Bruce ties together some seemingly disparate events of the year 1727,
soon after the book wea published, including relations between
eighteenth-century midwives and physicians and a famous scandal involving a “
monstrous birth” that rocked the Royal Court.
Bruce examines a four-volume
commentary on Gulliver’s Travels by one corolimi die Marco, in which the author
gives a fairly dry account of his observations until he gets to the episode in
Book IV, “ A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms “ in which Gulliver captures rabbits for
food. At that point, did march launches into a tirade:
But here I must observe to you, Mr.
Dean, en passant that Mr. Gulliver’s Rabbits were wild Coney’s, not tame
gutless ones, such as the consummate native affronted of Stand’s has palmed
upon the publics to be generated in Body of the Woman at Goodling in Surrey .
St. Andre having , by I know not what kind of fatality, insinuated himself
among the foreigners, obtained the post of anatomist – Royal.
Laputa is a gigantic trope of
the female body : the circular island with a round chasm at the center, through
which the astronomers of the island descend to a domelike structure of the “
Fandom Gangue “ or “ astronomer’s cave”. Laputa has at its center a giant
lodestone on which the movement of the island depends. The floating physical structure
of Likuta is like a uterus and vagina ; Gulliver and the Aleutians’ are able to
enter this cavity at will and control not only the movements of the lodestone
and island , but also the entire society. As Bruce remarks, “ It is this which
engenders the name of the ialand : in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the
achievement of male control over female body itself renders that body the
whore: Laputa”
Thus in “A Voyage to Laputa “control
of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality,
reflecting the contemporary debates of Swift’s day. One final historical note:
a pamphlet published in 1727 was purportedly written by “ Lemuel Gulliver,
Surgeon and Anatomist to the kings of Lilliput and Blefescu, and Fellow of the
Academy of sciences in Balnibarbi” It is entitled The Anatomist Dissected ; or
the Man-Midwife finally brought to Bed. Its subject is Mary Tuft, the “ rabbet-woman”
“ If the 1970 could be called the Age of Deconstruction “ writes Joseph
Litvak “ some hypothetical survey of late twentieth-century criticism might
well characterize the 1980as as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the
Recovery of the Referent”
“ The text is Historical, and
history is textual “
Frederic Jameson “Always
Historicize “. As a return to historical scholarship, new historicism concerns
itself with extra literary matters – letters diaries, films, paintings, medical , and
treatises- looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text.
H.Aram Veeser, introducing an
anthology of essays, The New Historicism (1989), noted some key assumptions
that continually reappear in New Historicism; they are:
1. That
every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
2. That
every act of unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and
risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
3. That
literary and non-literary “texts” circulate inseparably;
4. That no
discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths, nor
expresses inalterable human nature;
5. That a
critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism
participate in tha economy they describe.
O.... New
Historicism versus Old Historicism
“ World views
magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called progress”as
though all Elizabethans, for example, held views in common . The new
historicism rejects this periodization of history in favor of ordering history
only through the interplay of forms of power. Stephen Greenblatt , a
Renaissance scholar and founding editor of the journal Representations, may be
credited with the coining of the term “ new historicism.” Greenblatt identifies
major influence on his thought from Jameson ,Foucault, and Jeanety as related
to institutionalized practices.
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