New historicism

07/17/2023 2
• Most of us raised to think about history in the traditional way would
read an account of a Revolutionary War battle written by an
American historian in 1944 and ask, if we asked anything at all,

• 1.“Is this account accurate?”

• 2.or “What does this battle tell us about the ‘spirit of the age’ in
which it was fought?”

07/17/2023 3
• In contrast, a new historicist would read the same account of that battle and
ask,

• 1.“What does this account tell us about the political agendas and ideological
conflicts of the culture that produced and read the account in 1944?”

• 2.“At the time in which it was fought, how was this battle represented (in
newspapers, magazines, tracts, government documents, stories, speeches,
drawings, and photographs) by the American colonies or by Britain (or by
European countries),

• 3. and what do these representations tell us about how the American

Revolution shaped and was shaped by the cultures that represented it?”

07/17/2023 4
 • Traditional historians ask,

• 1.“What happened?”
• 2.and “What does the event tell us about history?”

• In contrast, new historicists ask,

• 1.“How has the event been interpreted?”

• 2.and “What do the interpretations tell us about the interpreters?”

07/17/2023 5
 linear, causal, objective analysis
• For most traditional historians, history is a series of events that have a linear,
causal relationship: event A caused event B, event B caused event C, and so
on.

• Furthermore, they believe we are perfectly capable, through objective

analysis, of uncovering the facts about historical events, and those facts can
sometimes reveal the spirit of the age, that is, the world view held by the
culture to which those facts refer.

• spirit of the age, the world view held by the culture to which those facts refer.

07/17/2023 6
• Indeed, some of the most popular traditional historical accounts have
offered a key concept that would explain the worldview of a given historical
population, such as

• the Renaissance notion of the Great Chain of Being—the cosmic hierarchy

of creation, with God at the top of the ladder, human beings at the middle,
and the lowliest creatures at the bottom—

• which has been used to argue that the guiding spirit of Elizabethan culture
was a belief in the importance of order in all domains of human life.

07/17/2023 7
• You can see this aspect of the traditional approach in history classes that study past events in terms
of the spirit of an age, such as the

• 1. Age of Reason or
• 2. the Age of Enlightenment,

• and you can see it in literature classes that study literary works in terms of historical periods, such as

• 1.the neoclassical,
• 2.romantic, or
• 3.modernist periods.

07/17/2023 8
 history is progressive
• Finally, traditional historians generally believe that history is
progressive, that the human species is

• 1. improving over the course of time,

• 2. advancing in its moral, cultural, and technological
accomplishments.

07/17/2023 9
most basic facts of history

• New historicists, in contrast, don’t believe we have clear access to any but the
most basic facts of history. We can know, for example, that George Washington
was the first American president and that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.

• But our understanding of

• 1. what such facts mean,

• 2. of how they fit within the complex web of competing ideologies and conflicting
social, political, and cultural agendas of the time and place in which they occurred
is, for new historicists, strictly a matter of interpretation, not fact.

07/17/2023 10
which facts are deemed important enough to report and which are left out
• Even when traditional historians believe they are sticking to the facts,
the way they contextualize those facts (including which facts are
deemed important enough to report and which are left out)
determines what story those facts will tell.

• From this perspective, there is no such thing as a presentation of

facts; there is only interpretation. Further‑ more, new historicists
argue that reliable interpretations are, for a number of reasons,
difficult to produce.

07/17/2023 11
• The first and most important reason for this difficulty, new historicists
believe, is the impossibility of objective analysis.

• Like all human beings, historians live in a particular time and place,
and their views of both current and past events are influenced in
innumerable conscious and unconscious ways by their own
experience within their own culture.

07/17/2023 12
• Historians may believe they’re being objective, but their own views of
what is right and wrong, what is civilized and uncivilized, what is
important and unimportant, and the like, will strongly influence the
ways in which they interpret events.

• For example, the traditional view that history is progressive is based

on the belief, held in the past by many Anglo-Euro‑ pean historians,
that the “primitive” cultures of native peoples are less evolved than,
and therefore inferior to, the “civilized” Anglo-European cultures.

07/17/2023 13
• As a result, ancient cultures with highly developed art forms, ethical
codes, and spiritual philosophies, such as the tribal cultures of Native
Americans and Africans, were often misrepresented as lawless,
superstitious, and savage.

• Another reason for the difficulty in producing reliable interpretations

of history is its complexity. For new historicists, history cannot be
understood simply as a linear progression of events.

07/17/2023 14
• At any given point in history, any given culture may be progressing in
some areas and regressing in others. And any two historians may
disagree about what constitutes progress and what doesn’t, for these
terms are matters of definition. That is, history isn’t an orderly parade
into a continually improving future, as many traditional historians
have believed. It’s more like an improvised dance consisting of an
infinite variety of steps, following any new route at any given
moment, and having no particular goal or destination. Individuals and
groups of people may have goals, but human history does not.

07/17/2023 15
• Similarly, while events certainly have causes, new historicists argue
that those causes are usually multiple, complex, and difficult to
analyze. One cannot make simple causal statements with any
certainty. In addition, causality is not a oneway street from cause to
effect.

07/17/2023 16
• Any given event—whether it be a political election or a children’s
cartoon show—is a product of its culture, but it also affects that
culture in return. In other words, all events—including everything
from the creation of an art work, to a televised murder trial, to the
persistence of or change in the condition of the poor—are shaped by
and shape the culture in which they emerge.

07/17/2023 17
individual identity /society
• In a similar manner, our subjectivity, or selfhood, is shaped by and
shapes the culture into which we were born. For most new
historicists, our individual identity is not merely a product of society.
Neither is it merely a product of our own individual will and desire.
Instead, individual identity and its cultural milieu inhabit, reflect, and
define each other .

07/17/2023 18
• Their relationship is mutually constitutive (they create each other)
and dynamically unstable.

• Thus, the old argument between determinism and free will can’t be
settled because it rests on the wrong question: “Is human identity
socially determined or are human beings free agents?”

• For new historicism, this question cannot be answered because it

involves a choice between two entities that are not wholly separate.

07/17/2023 19
• Rather, the proper question is, “What are the processes by which
individual identity and social formations—such as political,
educational, legal, and religious institutions and ideologies—create,
promote, or change each other?”

• For every society constrains individual thought and action within a

network of cultural limitations while it simultaneously enables
individuals to think and act.

07/17/2023 20
• Our subjectivity, then, is 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.

07/17/2023 21
power does not emanate only from the top of
the political and socioeconomic structure
• Thus, according to new historicists, power does not emanate only
from the top of the political and socioeconomic structure. According
to French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose ideas have strongly
influenced the development of new historicism, power circulates in all
directions, to and from all social levels, at all times.

07/17/2023 22
• And the vehicle by which power circulates is a never-ending proliferation of
exchange:

• (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,

kidnap‑ ping, and slavery; and

• (3) the exchange of ideas through the various discourses a culture produces.

07/17/2023 23
• A discourse is a social language created by particular cultural conditions at a particular
time and place, and it expresses a particular way of understanding human experience.

• For example, you may be familiar with the

•
• discourse of modern science,
• the discourse of liberal humanism,
• the discourse of white supremacy,
• the discourse of ecological awareness,
• the discourse of Christian fundamentalism,
• and the like.

07/17/2023 24
• And as you read the chapters of this textbook, you will become familiar with

• the discourses of psychoanalytic criticism,

• Marxist criticism,
• feminist criticism, and so on.

• Although the word discourse has roughly the same meaning as the word
ideology, and the two terms are often used interchangeably, the word
discourse draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology.

07/17/2023 25
• From a new historical perspective, no discourse by itself can
adequately explain the complex cultural dynamics of social power.

• 1. For there is no monolithic (single, unified, universal) spirit of an

age,

• 2. and there is no adequate totalizing explanation of history (an

explanation that provides a single key to all aspects of a given
culture).

07/17/2023 26
• There is, instead, a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses:
• they are always in a state of flux, overlapping and competing with one
another (or, to use new historical terminology, negotiating exchanges
of power) in any number of ways at any given point in time.

• Furthermore, no discourse is permanent. Discourses wield power for

those in charge, but they also stimulate opposition to that power.

07/17/2023 27
• This is one reason why new historicists believe that the relationship
between individual identity and society is mutually constitutive:

• on the whole, human beings are never merely victims of an

oppressive society, for they can find various ways to oppose authority
in their personal and public lives.
• For new historicism, even the dictator of a small country doesn’t
wield absolute power on his own.

07/17/2023 28
• To maintain dominance, his power must circulate in numer‑ ous discourses, for example, in

• 1.the discourse of religion (which can promote belief in the “divine right” of kings or in God’s love
of hierarchical society),
• 2. in the discourse of science (which can support the reigning elite in terms of a theory of
Darwinian “survival of the fittest”),

• 3. in the discourse of fashion (which can promote the popularity of leaders by promoting copycat
attire, as we saw when Nehru jackets were popular and when the fashion world copied the style
of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy),

• 4. in the discourse of the law (which can make it a treasonous offense to disagree with a ruler’s
decisions), and so on.

07/17/2023 29
matters of definition.
• As these examples suggest, what is “right,” “natural,” and “normal”
are matters of definition.

• Thus, in different cultures at different points in history, homo‑

sexuality has been deemed abnormal, normal, criminal, or admirable.
The same can be said of incest, cannibalism, and women’s desire for
political equality.

07/17/2023 30
• In fact, Michel Foucault has suggested that all definitions of

• “insanity,”
• “crime,”
• and sexual “perversion”

• are social constructs by means of which ruling powers maintain their

control. We accept these definitions as “natural” only because they
are so ingrained in our culture.

07/17/2023 31
• Just as definitions of social and antisocial behavior promote the
power of certain individuals and groups, so do particular versions of
historical events.

• Certainly, the whitewashing of General Custer’s now-infamous

military campaigns against Native Americans served the desire of the
white American power structure of his day to obliterate Native
American peoples so that the government could seize their lands.

07/17/2023 32
• And that same whitewashing continued to serve the white American
power structure for many a decade beyond Custer’s time, for even
those who had knowledge of Custer’s misdeeds deemed it unwise to
air America’s dirty historical laundry, even in front of Americans.

• Analogously, had the Nazis won World War II, we would all be reading
a very different account of the war, and of the genocide of millions of
Jews, than the accounts we read in American history books today.

07/17/2023 33
 Those biases are able to control their narratives.

• Thus, new historicism views historical accounts as narratives, as

stories, that are inevitably biased according to the point of view,
conscious or unconscious, of those who write them.

07/17/2023 34
 • So far, we’ve seen new historicism’s claims about what historical
analysis cannot do. Historical analysis

• (1) cannot be objective,

• (2) cannot adequately demonstrate that a particular spirit of the
times or world view accounts for the complexities of any given
culture, and
• (3) cannot adequately demonstrate that history is linear, causal, or
progressive.

07/17/2023 35
• If you’ve read chapter 8, “Deconstructive Criticism,” you’re in a good
position to understand the answer to these questions because a good deal
of new historical practice incorporates deconstructive insights about
human language and experience.

• For example, we might say that new historicism deconstructs the

traditional opposition between
• 1. history (traditionally thought of as factual)
• 2.and literature (traditionally thought of as fictional).

07/17/2023 36
• By and large, we know history only in its textual form, that is, in the form of the

• documents,
• written statistics,
• legal codes,
• diaries,
• letters,
• speeches,
• tracts,
• news articles,

• and the like in which are recorded the attitudes, policies, procedures, and events that
occurred in a given time and place.
07/17/2023 37
• As such, they require the same kinds of analyses literary critics
perform on literary texts.

• For example, historical documents can be studied in terms of their

• 1.rhetorical strategies (the stylistic devices by which texts try to

achieve their purposes);
• 2. they can be deconstructed to reveal the limitations of their own
ideological assumptions;
• 3. and they can be examined for the purpose of revealing their explicit
and implicit patriarchal, racist, and homophobic agendas.

07/17/2023 38
• Indeed, we might say that in bringing to the foreground the suppressed historical narratives of
marginalized groups—

• such as women,
• people of color,
• the poor,
• the working class,
• gay men and lesbians,
• prisoners,
• the inhabitants of mental institutions, and so on—

• new historicism has deconstructed the white, male, Anglo-European historical narrative to
reveal its disturbing, hidden subtext: the experiences of those peoples it has oppressed in order
to maintain the dominance that allowed it to control what most Americans know about history.

07/17/2023 39
Master narrative, told from a single cultural point of view

• Plurality of voices, including an equal representation of historical

narratives from all groups, helps ensure that a master narrative—a
narrative told from a single cultural point of view that, nevertheless,
presumes to offer the only accurate version of history—will no
longer control our historical understanding.

• At this point in time, we still do not have an equal representation of

historical narratives from all groups.

07/17/2023 40
• And even as the historical narratives of some groups are becoming more
and more numerous, such as those of women and of people of color,

• those narratives generally do not receive the same kind of attention as

patriarchal Anglo-European narratives do in the classroom, where most of
us learn about history.

• Therefore, new historicism tries to promote the development of and gain

attention for the histories of marginalized peoples.

07/17/2023 41
• We can see how a plurality of historical voices tends to raise these kinds
of issues if we imagine the differences among the following hypothetical
college courses on the American Revolution:

• (1) a course that studies traditional American accounts of the war;

• (2) a course that contrasts traditional American accounts of the war with
traditional British, French, Dutch, and Spanish accounts.

• (3) and a course that contrasts the above accounts with Native American
accounts of the war recorded from the oral histories of tribes that were
affected by it.
07/17/2023 42
• As we move, in our imagination, from the first course to the second
and then to the third, our focus moves farther away from the
“factual” content of historical accounts and foregrounds, instead,

• the ways in which history is a text that is interpreted by different

cultures to fit the ideological needs of their own power structures,
which is a new historical concern.

07/17/2023 43
• In this context, new historicism might be defined as the history of
stories cultures tell themselves about themselves.

• Or, as a corrective to some traditional historical accounts, new

historicism might be defined as the history of lies cultures tell
themselves.
• Thus, there is no history, in the traditional sense of the term. There
are only representations of history.

07/17/2023 44
• thick description, a term borrowed from anthropology.

• Thick description attempts, through close, detailed examination of a given cultural production—
such as

• 1. birthing practices,
• 2. ritual ceremonies,
• 3. games,
• 4. penal codes,
• 5. works of art,
• 6. copyright laws,

• 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.
07/17/2023 45
Thick description is not a search for facts but a search for meanings
• It focuses on the personal side of history—

• 1. the history of family dynamics,

• 2. of leisure activities,
• 3.of sexual practices,
• 4. of childrearing customs

• —as much as or more than on such traditional historical topics as military campaigns
the passage of laws.

• Indeed, because traditional historicism tended to ignore or marginalize private life as

subjective and irrelevant, new historicism tries to compensate for this omission by
bringing issues concerned with private life into the foreground of historical inquiry.

07/17/2023 46
• Let me summarize an example of thick description offered by anthropologist
Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures.

• Imagine a young man winking at someone across a crowded room. A “thin

description” of the event would describe it as a rapid contraction of the right
eyelid—period.

• A thick description would attempt to find out what the wink meant in the
context in which it occurred.

• First, was it a wink—that is, a public gesture intended to communicate a

message—or just an involuntary twitch?

07/17/2023 47
• If it was a wink,
• 1. was it a wink performing its usual activity of imparting a conspiratorial (plotting, scheming) signal?

• 2. Or was it a fake wink, intended to make others believe a conspiracy was underway when, in fact, it
was not? In this case, the wink would not mean conspiracy but deception.

• 3. was it a parody of the fake wink just described, intended to satirize the person who winked in
order to deceive? In this case, the wink would mean neither conspiracy nor deception, but ridicule.

• Now suppose that, in this last example, the would-be satirist is unsure of his ability: he doesn’t want
to be mistaken for someone merely twitching or winking; he wants his friends to know that he’s
mocking someone.

07/17/2023 48
• So to be sure he can do it properly, he practices his satirical
• wink in front of a mirror.

• In this case, the wink would have a complicated meaning: it would be

the rehearsal of a parody of a friend faking a wink to deceive others
that a conspiracy is underway.

• This example illustrates the new historical notion that history is a

matter of interpretations, not facts, and that interpretations always
occur within a framework of social conventions.

07/17/2023 49
• Finally, new historicism’s claim that historical analysis is unavoidably
subjective is not an attempt to legitimize a self-indulgent, “anything goes”
attitude toward the writing of history.

• Rather, the inevitability of personal bias makes it

• imperative that new historicists be as aware of and 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.
This practice is called self- positioning.

07/17/2023 50
• For example, near the end of Louis Montrose’s new historical essay,
“Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” he
announces his own biases, which include those produced by his role
as a Renaissance scholar and professor.

• He tells us that he has a personal investment or interest in those

representations of the Renaissance in texts for which he feels a
particular affinity, such as those of Shakespeare and Spenser.

07/17/2023 51
• Furthermore, he writes about issues that are socially relevant today
because he wants to participate not only in the

• 1. current rethinking of Elizabethan culture

• 2. but in the current rethinking of our own culture.

07/17/2023 52
• Finally, Montrose admits that although his writing works to undermine
traditional historical approaches to literary scholarship

• —such as the traditional demarcation of a finite period called the

Renaissance to which specific cultural qualities are attributed—

• he has, as a professor and Renaissance scholar, “a complex and

substantial stake/personal interest in sustaining/supporting and
reproducing the very institutions whose operations [he] wish[es] to call
into question” (30).

07/17/2023 53
key concepts of new historicism

• 1. The writing of history is a matter of interpretations, not facts. Thus,

all historical accounts are narratives and can be analyzed using many
of the tools used by literary critics to analyze narrative.

• 2. History is neither linear (it does not proceed neatly from cause A to
effect B and from cause B to effect C) nor progressive (the human
species is not steadily improving over the course of time).

07/17/2023 54
• 3. Power is never wholly confined to a single person or a single level
of society. Rather, power circulates in a culture through exchanges of
material goods, exchanges of human beings, and, most important for
literary critics as we’ll see below, exchanges of ideas through the
various discourses a culture produces.

07/17/2023 55
• 4. There is no monolithic (single, unified, universal) spirit of an age,
and there is no adequate totalizing explanation of history (an
explanation that provides a single key to all aspects of a given
culture).

• There is only a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses, the

meanings of which the historian can try to analyze, though that
analysis will always be incomplete, accounting for only a part of the
historical picture.

07/17/2023 56
• 5. Personal identity—like historical events, texts, and artifacts—is shaped
by and shapes the culture in which it emerges. Thus, cultural categories
such as normal and abnormal, sane and insane, are matters of definition.

• Put another way, our individual identity consists of the narratives we tell
• ourselves about ourselves, and we draw the material for our narratives
from the circulation of discourses that constitutes our culture.

07/17/2023 57
• 6. All historical analysis is unavoidably subjective. Historians must
therefore reveal the ways in which they know they have been
positioned, by their own cultural experience, to interpret history.

07/17/2023 58
New historicism and literature

• New historical criticism has little in common with traditional historical criticism.
The latter, which dominated literary studies in the 19th cen.and the early decades
of 20th cen, confined itself largely to

• 1. studies of the author’s life,

• 2. to discover his or her intentions in writing the work,
• 3. or to studies of the historical period in which the work was written, 4. to reveal
the spirit of the age, which the text was then shown to embody.

07/17/2023 59
• New Criticism dethroned traditional historical criticism and controlled literary
studies from the 1940s to the 1960s, rejected traditional historicism’s approach
to literature.

• The understanding of a text’s meaning, however, has nothing whatsoever to do

with history, the New Critics argued, because great literary works are timeless,
autonomous (self-sufficient) art objects that exist in a realm beyond history.

07/17/2023 60
• New historicism, which emerged in the late 1970s, rejects both traditional
historicism’s marginalization of literature and New Criticism’s enshrinement of
the literary text in a timeless dimension beyond history.

• For new historical critics, a literary text doesn’t embody the author’s intention or
illustrate the spirit of the age that produced it, as traditional literary historians
asserted.

07/17/2023 61
literary texts are cultural artifacts

• Rather, literary texts are 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.

07/17/2023 62
Text/context…individual/society
• For new historicism, the literary text and the historical situation from
which it emerged are equally important because text (the literary
work) and context (the historical conditions that produced it) are
mutually constitutive: they create each other.

• Like the dynamic interplay between individual identity and society, literary
texts shape and are shaped by their historical contexts.

07/17/2023 63
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902)/ Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

• It’s interesting to note that, in our

• first example, the author wrote about a situation—Europe’s commercial exploi‐
• tation of Africa—produced by his own society and one that he’d experienced
• firsthand.

• In our second example, the author wrote about a population—former

• slaves struggling to survive both their own memories of the past and the harsh
• realities of daily life—that had lived over 100 years
• before the publication of her novel.

07/17/2023 64
• However, neither Conrad’s firsthand experience with his subject matter
nor Morrison’s temporal distance from hers means that either narrative
is necessarily more “accurate” than the other.

07/17/2023 65
• A traditional historical reading of Heart of Darkness might analyze, based on
historical accounts of European activities in the Congo during the 19th cent.,

• 1. How faithful the novel is to the historical realities of European exploitation of

human and natural resources in its quest for ivory.

• 2. Was the waste of human life as flagrant/scandalous as Conrad portrays it?

• 3. What were the politics involved in the division of African territories among
various European powers and in the administration of those territories?

07/17/2023 66
biographical materials

• Or a traditional literary historian might examine biographical materials in order to

determine what parts of the novel are drawn from Conrad’s actual experience
during his own trip up the Congo River as a steamship captain for a Belgian
company.

• 4. To what extent are Marlow’s experiences actually those of Conrad?

• 5. To what extent does the novel depict events that Conrad saw or heard about
himself?

07/17/2023 67
 C onr ad’s cr eat ive im ag inat ion

• 6. What was the influence on Conrad’s writing of his early interest in the great explorers of
the nineteenth century?

• 7. Did he keep extensive journals of his experiences as a sailor,

• 8. or did he write largely from memory?

• 9. How did his experience in the Congo, including the permanent impairment of his health
that resulted therefrom, affect his artistic production?

07/17/2023 68
• Similarly, a traditional historical reading of Beloved might analyze—
based on historical accounts of nineteenth-century American slaves,
slaveholders, and former slaves—whether or not Morrison’s depiction
of this aspect of American experience is faithful to historical reality.

07/17/2023 69
• Do her portraits of the Garners, their neighbors, Schoolteacher, and
the Bodwins accurately represent the range of values held by slave
owners and abolitionists at that time?

• Did Morrison capture the conflicting viewpoints that delineate the

spirit of that troubled age? Or a traditional historical reading might
investigate the circumstances of the novel’s composition in order to
find the historical sources of her characters, setting, and plot.

07/17/2023 70
• For example, to what extent was Sethe’s story modeled on that
• of runaway slave Margaret Garner, who, like Sethe, killed her baby
daughter to save her from being returned to her master’s plantation?

• What other characters and events in the novel are based on actual
historical figures and events?

07/17/2023 71
• What specific historical sources—newspaper accounts, slave
narratives, legal documents, records of the Middle Passage, history
books, and the like—did Morrison draw on?

• Finally, a traditional historical critic might analyze the author’s reading

• habits in order to find evidence of the influence of other literary
works on her own artistic technique.

• What African American literature, historical fiction, or Southern

fiction did she read, and can their influence be perceived in the
novel’s plot, characterization, or style?

07/17/2023 72
two conflicting discourses: anticolonialism and Eurocentrism

• a new historical analysis of Heart of Darkness might examine the ways in which
Conrad’s narrative embodies two conflicting discourses present in his own
culture: anticolonialism and Eurocentrism.

• The novel’s anticolonialist theme, which seems to be a primary

• focus of the text, can be seen in its representation of

• 1. the evils of Europe’s subordination

• 2. and exploitation of African peoples.

07/17/2023 73
 Europeans as savage as “savage” as the African peoples
• However, as Chinua Achebe observes, the novel nevertheless speaks from an
(apparently unconscious) Euro‐centric perspective:

• Marlow’s harrowing/disurbing insight into the European character

• consists of his realization that Europeans are, beneath their veneer of civilization,

• as “savage” as the African peoples they intend to subdue, which means that African
tribal culture is held to epitomize “savagery.”

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• Or, despite the novel’s Eurocentric bias, a new historical critic might
analyze the text as a kind of prototype, or early embodiment, of new
historical analysis.

• As Brook Thomas points out, Conrad’s novel debunks/discredit the

traditional historicist belief that history is progressive, that the human
species improves over time;

• and its narrative structure, which obscures plot events behind a hazy
veil of subjective description, implies that we do not have access to a
clear, unbiased view of the past.

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• Finally, a new historical analysis of Heart of Darkness might examine
the history of the novel’s reception by critics and the reading public to
discover how the novel shaped and was shaped by discourses
circulating at its point of origin (the time and place in which the book
was written and published) and over the passage of time, including
speculations about its relationship to possible future audiences.

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• For example, how might the novel’s reception over time reveal the
• ways in which interpretations of the text shaped and have been shaped by the
discourses of

• 1. historical progressivism,
• 2. social Darwinism,
• 3. white supremacy,
• 4. Afro‐centrism,
• 5. multiculturalism,
• 6. new historicism, and so on?

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• Social Darwinism refers to various societal practices around the world and
defined by scholars in Western Europe and North America in the 1870s that
applied biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to
sociology, economics and politics.

•  Social Darwinism posits that the strong see their wealth and power increase
while the weak see their wealth and power decrease. 

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• Similarly, a new historical analysis of Beloved might examine how the
novel’s departures from the historical accounts on which it is based
constitute a revision of those accounts, that is, an interpretation of the
history it represents.

• For example, to what extent do the transformations of Denver and

Paul D, as they come to understand Sethe’s experience, function as a
guide for our own understanding of Sethe’s historical situation?

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Was shaped by and has shaped
• how Beloved was shaped by and has shaped the modern debate between
two conflicting views of slavery:

• (1) that slaves were, for the most part, reduced to a childlike dependency on their
masters and

• (2) that slaves managed, much more thoroughly and consistently than has been
reported by traditional white historians, to build a coherent system of resistance
through the creation of their own coded forms of communication, the
establishment of their own communal ties, and the strategic use of personae
(such as the “happy slave” or the “dim-wit‐ted slave”/foolish) as camouflage for
their opinions, intentions, and subversive activities.

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• Finally, a new historical reading might investigate the circulation of mid-nineteenth
century discourses with which specific elements of the plot interact.

• For
• example, how do the various views of Sethe depicted in the novel—such as those
• of Schoolteacher, Mrs. Garner, Amy Denver, Mr. Bodwin, Stamp Paid, Ella,
• Beloved, and Paul D—reinforce or undermine the mid-nineteenth century dis‐
• courses of white supremacy, abolitionism, male supremacy, and motherly
love?

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• As you may have noticed, in all of the above examples of traditional
historical criticism, history—

• 1.the historical situation represented in the text,

• 2. the population portrayed,
• 3. the author’s life and times—

• is an objective reality that can be known and against which the

subjective literary work is interpreted or measured.

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• In contrast, in the new historical examples, the focus is on how the
literary text itself functions as a historical discourse interacting with
other historical discourses:

• those circulating at the time and place in which the text is set, at the
• time the text was published, or at later points in the history of the
text’s reception.

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• For new historicism is concerned not with historical events as events,
but with the ways in which events are interpreted, with historical
discourses, with ways of seeing the world and modes of meaning.

• Indeed, as we saw earlier, historical events are viewed by new

historicists not as facts to be documented but as “texts” to be “read” in
order to help us speculate about how human cultures, at various
historical “moments,” have made sense of themselves and their
world.

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• We can’t really know exactly what happened at any given point in history, but we can know what the people
involved believed happened—we can know from their own accounts the various ways in which they
interpreted their experience—and we can interpret those interpretations.

• For new historical literary critics, then, the literary text, through its representation of human experience at a
given time and place, is an interpretation of history.

• As such, the literary text maps the discourses circulating at the time it was written and is itself one
of those discourses. That is, the literary text shaped and was shaped by the discourses circulating in the
culture in which it was produced.

• Likewise, our interpretations of literature shape and are shaped by the culture
• in which we live.

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