Literary Theory and Criticism
Assignment
Paper No- 7: – literary
theory and criticism
Literary theory – New Historicism
and Queer theory
New
Historicism
New
historicism, since the early 1980s, has been the accepted name for a mode of
literary study that its proponents oppose to the formalism they attribute
both the New historicism and to the critical deconstruction that followed it.
In
place of dealing with a text in isolation from its historical context, New
historicists attend primarily to the historical and cultural condition of its
production, its meanings, its effects, and also of its later critical
interpretation and evaluations.
This
is not simply a return to an earlier kind of literary scholarship, for the
views and practices of the new historicists differ markedly from those of
earlier scholars who had adverted to social and intellectual history as a
‘background’ against which to set a work of literature as an independent entity,
or has viewed literature as a ‘reflection’ of the worldview characteristic of
a period.
Instead,
a new historicism conceive of a literary text as a ‘situated’ within the
totality of institutions, social practices and discourses that constitute the
culture of a particular time and place, and with which the literary text
interacts as both a product and producer of cultural energies and
codes.
What
is New Historicism?
New Historicism is
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
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
times and circumstances, but that the critic's response to that work is also
influenced by his environment, beliefs, and prejudices.
A
New Historicist looks at literature in a wider historical context, examining
both how the writer's 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 comes
to the question of whether the play shows Shakespeare to be anti-Semitic. The
New Historicist recognizes that this isn't a simple yes-or-no answer that can
be teased out by studying the text. This work must 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, by 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 fact that we
ask whether Shakespeare was anti-Semitic — a question that wouldn't have been
considered important a century ago — reveals how our study of Shakespeare is
affected by our civilization.
New
Historicism, then, underscores the impermanence of literary criticism.
Current literary criticism is affected by and reveals the beliefs of our
times in the same way that literature reflects and is reflected by its own
historical contexts. New Historicism acknowledges and embraces the idea that,
as times change, so will our understanding of great literature.
What
is most distinctive in this mode of historical study is mainly the result of
concept and practices of literary analysis and interpretation that have been
assimilated from various recent post structural theories. Especially
prominent are:
(1)the
views of the revisionist Marxist thinker Louis Althusser that
ideology manifests itself in different ways in the discourse of each of the
semi-autonomous institutions of an era, including literature and also that
ideology operates covertly to form an position the users of language as the
‘subject’ in discourse, in a way that in fact, ‘subjects’ them is ,
subordinates them to the interests of the ruling classes.
(2) Michel
Foucault’s view that the discourse of an era, instead of reflecting
pre-existing entities and orders, bring into being concept, oppositions, and
hierarchies of which it speaks; that these elements are both products and
propagators of ‘power’, or social forces, and that as a result , the
particular discursive formation of an era determine what is at the time accounted
to be ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ as well as what is considered to be criminal,
or insane or sexually deviant.
(3) the
central concept in deconstructive criticism that all texts involves modes of
signification that was against each other, merged with MIKHAIL BAKHTIN’S
concept of the discourse nature of many literary texts, in the sense
that they incorporate a number of conflicting voices that
represent diverse social classes and interests.
(4) Developments
in cultural anthropology, especially Clifford Geertz’s views that
a culture is constituted by distinctive sets of signifying systems, and hi
use of what he calls thick descriptions- the close analysis , or
‘reading’ of a particular social
production or event so as to recover the meaning it has for the people
involved in it, as well as to discover, within the overall cultural system,
the network of conventions, codes, and modes of thinking with
which the particular item with those meaning.
In
an oft- quoted phrase , Louis Montrose described the new historicism as “ a
reciprocal concern with a history of the text and the textuality of history”.
That is, history is conceived to be not a set of fixed , objective facts but,
the literature with which it interacts, a text that interacts, a text that
itself needs to be interpreted.
Any
text, on the other hand, is conceive as a discourse which, although it may
seem to present, or reflect, an external reality, in fact consist of what are
called representations- that is –verbal formations which are the ‘ideological
products’ or ‘cultural constructs’ of the historical
conditions specific to an era. A number of historicists claim also
that these cultural and ideological representations in text serve mainly to
reproduce, confirm and propagate. The complete power structures of domination
and subordination which characterize a given society.
Despite
their common perspective on literary writings as mutually implicative with
all other components of a culture, we find considerable diversity and
disagreement among individual exponents of the new historicism.
The
following proposals , however occur frequently in their writings, sometimes
in an extremes and sometimes in an a qualified form.
All
of them are formulated in opposition to views that, according to new
historicists, were central historical construct in ideological construct in
traditional literary criticism.
Many
Historicists assign the formative period of some basic construct
to the early era of capitalism in the 17th and 18th centuries.
1) Literature
does not occupy a ‘trans- historical’ aesthetic realm which is dependent on
the economic, social, and political conditions specific to an era, nor in
literature subject to timeless criteria of artistic value.
Instead,
a literary text is simply one of many kinds of texts- religious,
philosophical, legal., scientific and so on- all of which are formed and
structured by the particular conditions of a time and place, and
among which the literary text has neither unique status nor special privilege.
A related fallacy of mainstream criticism, according to New
historicists, was to view literary text as autonomous body of fixed
meaning that text cohere to form an organic whole in which all conflicts are
artistically resolved.
On
the contrary, it is claimed, many literary text consists of diversity of
dissonant voices, and these voices express not only the orthodox, but also
the subordinated and subversive forces of the era in which the text was
produced. Furthermore, what may seem to be artistic resolution of a literary
plot, yielding pleasure to the reader; is in fact deceptive, for it is an
effect that serves to cover the unresolved the conflicts of power, class,
gender and diverse social groups that make up the tensions that underline the
surface meaning of a literary text.
2) History
is not a homogeneous and stable pattern of facts and events which
serves as the ‘background’ to the literature of an era,
or which literature can be said simply to reflect, or which can
be adverted to the material conditions that, in a unilateral way
determine the particularities of a literary text.
A
new contrast to such views, a literary text is said by new historicists to be
thoroughly ‘embedded’ in its
context, and in a constant interaction and interchange with other
components inside the network of institutions, beliefs,
and cultural power relationships, practices and products that, in their
ensemble, constitute what we call history.
New
historicists commonly regard even the conceptual ‘boundaries’ by which we
currently discriminate between literature and non- literary text to be a
construct of post- Renaissance ideological formations.
New
historicists acknowledge that they themselves, like all authors, are
‘subjectives’ that have been shaped and informed by the
circumstances and discourses specific to their era, hence that their own
critical writing in great part construct, rather than discover readymade
textual meanings they describe and the literary and cultural histories they
narrate. To mitigate the risk that they all
unquestioningly appropriate text that were written in the past and
present is not coherent, but exhibits discontinuities; breaks and
raptures , by doing so , they hope to ‘distance’ and ‘estrange’ an
earlier text and so sharpen their ability to detect its differences from
their present ideological assumptions.
Some
historicists present their reading of text written in past as
‘negotiations’ between past and present. In this two-way
relationship, the features of a cultural product, which are
identifiable only relative to their differences from the historicist’s
subject-position, in return make possible some degree of insight into the
forces and configurations of power- especially with respect to
class, gender, race and ethnicity- that prevail in the historicist’s present
culture and serve to shape the historicist’s own ideology and
interpretations.
The concept,
themes, and procedures of new historicist criticism took shape into the late
1970s and early 1980s , most prominently in writings by scholars
of English Renaissance.
They
directed their attention especially to literary forms such as the pastoral
and masque, and above all the drama; emphasized the role in shaping a texts
as discussive ‘sites’ which enacted and reproduced the interests
and power of the oppressed, the marginalized, and the dispossessed.
At
almost the same time, students of the English Romantic Period developed
parallel conceptions of the intertextuality of literature
and history, and similar views the ‘representations’ in
literary texts are not reflectors of reality but ‘concretized’ forms of
ideology.
Historicists
of Romantic literature, however, in distinction from most Renaissance
historicists, often name their critical procedures political reading of a
literary text- a reading in which they stress quasi-Freudian mechanism such
as ‘suppression’, ‘displacement’ and ‘substitution’, by which they assert, a
writer’s political ideology inevitably disguises, or entirely elides into
silence and ‘absence’, the circumstances and contradictions of contemporary
history. The primary aim of a political order of a literary
text is to undo these ideological disguises and suppressions in
order to uncover it’s subtext of historical and political
conflicts and operations which are the text’s true, although covert or
unmentioned subject matter.
In
the course of the 1980s, the characteristic viewpoints and practices of new
historicism spread rapidly to all periods of literary study, and were
increasingly represented, described and debated in conferences, books, and
periodical essays.
New
historicists also have parallel’s in the critics of other
ethnic literatures, who stressed the role of culture
formations dominated by white Europeans in suppressing, marginalizing or
distorting the achievements of non white and non European
peoples. In the 1990s , various forms of new historicism, and
related types of criticism that stress the embeddedness of
literature in historical circumstances , replaced deconstruction
as the reigning mode of avant-garde critical theory and
practice.
ü Stephen Greenblatt inaugurated the currency
of the label ‘New Historicism’. In his introduction to a special issue of
Genre, vol. 15 (1982). He prefers, however, to call his crucial enterprise
‘cultural poetics’, in order to highlight his concern with literature the
arts as integral with other social practices that, in
their complex interactions, make up the general culture of an
era.
Greenblatt’s essay
entitled “ Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988)
serves to exemplify the interpretive procedures of the leading exponent of
this mode of criticism.
In
this essay, Greenblatt, brings by reading a selections from Thomas Harriot’s
“ A Brief and time report of the New Found Land of Virginia”,
written in 1588, as a representative Discourse of the English colonizers of
America without its author’s awareness, serves to confirm “
Machiavellian hypothesis of the origin of princely power in force and fraud”.
But nonetheless draws its audience irresistibly towards celebration of that
power.
Greenblatt
then identifies parallel modes of power discourses and counter discourse in
the dialogues in Shakespeare’s Tempest between Prospero the
imperialist appropriates and caliban the expropriated native of
his island, and goes on to find similar discursive configurations
in the texts of Shakespeare’s Henry plays. In Greenblatt’s reading, the
dialogues and events of the Henry plays reveal the degree to which princely
power is based on predation, calculation, deceit, and hypocrisy. At the same
time, the plays do not scruple to record dissonant and subversive voices of
Falstaff and various other representations of Elizabethan subcultures.
Those
counter establishment discourses in Shakespeare’s plays , however , in fact
are so managed as to maneuver their audience to accept and even glorify the
power structures to which the audience is itself subordinated.
Grenblatt
applies to these plays a conceptual pattern, the subversion- containment
dialectic, which has been a central concern of new historicist critics of
Renaissance literature.
Queer
Theory:-
Queer
theory is often used to designate the combined area of gay and Lesbian
studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about
all modes of variance- such as cross- dressing, bisexuality, and
transsexuality- from society’s formative model of sexual identity,
orientations and activities.
The
term ‘queer’ was originally derogatory, used to stigmatize male and female
same – sex love as deviant and unnatural.
Since
the early 1990s , however, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians
themselves as a noninvidious tern to identify a way of life and an area of
scholarly inquiry.
But
lesbians and gay studies began as ‘liberation movements’ for African American
and feminist liberation during the anti –Vietnam war, anti- establishment,
and counter cultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s. since
that time these studies have maintained a close relation to the activists who
strive to achieve, for gays and lesbians, political, legal and economic right
equal to those of the heterosexual majority.
Through
the 1970s , two movements were primarily separatist: gays often
thought of themselves as quintessentially male, which many
lesbians, aligning themselves with the feminist movement as sharing the anti-
female attitudes of a reigning patriarchal culture.
There
has been growing recognition of the degree to which the two groups
share a history as a suppressed minority and possess political and social
aims.
In
the 1970s, researchers for the most part assumed that there was a fixed,
unitary identity as a gay or as a lesbian that has
remain stable through human history.
A
major endeavor was to identify
and reclaim the works of non heterosexual writers from Plato to
Walt Whitman, Oscar Wild, Marcel Proust, Andre Gide, W.H.Auden and James
Baldwin and from the Greek poet Sappo of Lesbos to Virginia
Woolf, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde.
The
list included writers ( William Shakespeare and Christiana Rossetti are also
examples) who represented in their literary works homoerotic subject matter,
but whose own sexuality the available biographical evidence leaves uncertain.
In
the 1980s and 1990s, however- in large part because of the assimilation of
the viewpoints and analytic method of Derrida, Foucault, and other
poststructuralists- the earlier assumptions about a unitary and stable gay or
lesbian identity were frequently put to question, and
historical and critical analyses of sexual differences became increasingly
subtle and complex.
A
number of queer theorist , for example adopted the deconstructive mode of
dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western culture, such as male/
female, heterosexual/ homosexual, and natural/ unnatural, by which a spectrum
of diverse things id forced into only two categories, and in which the first
category is assigned privilege, power and centrality. While the second is
derogated, subordinated and marginalized. In an important essay of 1980, “
compulsive heterosexuality and lesbian existence” Adrienne Rich posted what
she called the “the lesbian continuum” as a way of stressing how far
ranging and the diverse is the spectrum of love and bonding among
women, including female friendship, the family relationship between mother
and daughter, and women’s partnership and social groups, as well as overtly
physical same sex relations.
Later
theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler undertook to invert the
standard hierarchical oppositions by which homosexuality is marginalized and
made unnatural, by stressing the extent to which the ostensible
normativity of heterosexuality is based on the suppression and denial of same
sex desires and relationships.
Queer
reading has became the term for interpretive activities that undertake to
subvert and confound the established verbal and cultural oppositions and
boundaries between male/ female, homosexual/ heterosexual, and
normal/ abnormal.
Another
prominent theoretical procedure has been to undo the “essentialist”
assumption that heterosexual and homosexual are universal and
trans- historical types of human subjects, or identities, by historicizing
these categories- that is by proposing that they are cultural
constructs that emerged under special ideological conditions in
a particular culture at a particular time.
A
central text is the first volume of Michel Foucault’s ‘History of sexuality’
(1976), which claim that , while there had long been a social category of
sodomy as a transgressive human act, the homosexual as a special
kind of human subject or identity, was construction by the medical and legal
discourse that developed in the later part of the 19th century.
In a
further expansion of cultural constructionist theory Judith Butler , In
Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of
identity” (1990), described the categories of gender and of
sexuality as performative, in the sense that the
features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine,
heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen , by
establishing an identity that the second individual assimilates
and the pattern of behavior that he or she proceeds to
enact. Homosexuality, by this view, is not a particular identity that effects
a pattern of action, but a socially pre-established pattern of
action that produces effect of originality in a particular identity. A
fundamental constructionist text , frequently cited in the arguments against
essentialism, is “ One not born a woman” (1981) by Monique Wittig, in The
straight mind and other essays (1992).
A
number of journals are now devoted to queer theory and to lesbian, gay and
transgender studies and criticism, the field has also became the subject of
regularly scheduled learned conferences, and has been established
in the curriculum of the humanities and social
sciences in a great many colleges and universities.
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