New Historicism

APRIL 6, 2022
Dr. Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim
[email protected]
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KOLAY GELSIN 
PREVIOUS CLASS ON
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
• Any questions?
• on Barthes, The Death of the Author?
• on Derrida, deconstructive methodology?

• Comments?
 NEW HISTORICISM
• In 1960s and 1970s, the poststructuralist intellectual revolution challenged the old
historicism on several aspects and established a new set of assumptions:
• Firstly, history is always “narrated” and the past is always in the form of “representations”
so the first sense is untenable.
• Secondly , there is no single “history”, only discontinuous and contradictory “histories”
• Thirdly, the past is not something which confronts us as if it were a physical object, but
is something we construct from already written texts of all kinds of which we construe
in line with our particular historical concerns.
• Fourthly, “history” is always a matter of telling a story about the past, using other texts as
our intertexts and literary works should be regarded as texts among other texts.
• These academic ideas are very different from the old historicists who hold the views that
history is not so much textual as more simply “a series of empirically verifiable events”
 NEW HISTORICISM
• A critical approach developed in the 1980s in the writings of
Stephen Greenblatt (an American Shakespearean, literary historian,
and author, Harvard University).
• New Historicism is characterized by a parallel reading of a text with
its socio-cultural and historical conditions, which form the co-text.
New Historians rejected the fundamental tenets of New Criticism
(that the text is an autotelic artefact), and Liberal Humanism (that the
text has timeless significance and universal value) .
• On the contrary, New Historicism, as Louis Montrose suggested, deals
with the “texuality of history and the historicity of texts.”
 Textuality of history
• refers to the idea that history is constructed and fictionalized, and
the historicity of text refers to its inevitable embedment within the
socio-political conditions of its production and interpretation.
• Though it rejects many of the assumptions of poststructuralism, New
Historicism is in a way poststructuralist in that it rejects the essential
idea of a common human nature that is shared by the author,
characters and readers; instead it believes that
• identity is plural and hybrid.
 New Historicist Interpretation
• New Historicist interpretation of a text begins with identifying the
literary and non-literary texts available and accessible to the public, at
the time of its production, followed by reading and interpreting the
text in the light of its co-text.

• what is co-text?
• parallel reading of a text with its socio-cultural and historical
conditions, which form the co-text.
 Historical/Cultural
Anecdote
• a powerful and dramatic explication of the “anecdote”,
which is the historical context or the co-text.
Stephen Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare
(1980) does a New Historicist reading of Renaissance
plays, revealing how ‘self-fashioning was an episteme of
the era, as depicted in the portraits and literature of the
time.
 Identity/Self Fashioning
• Stephen Greenblatt in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Öz-
biçimlendirme)
• suggests that during the Renaissance, the fashioning of identity,
both in formation and expression, is primarily a product of social
institutions. That is the reason why the "fashioning" of identity was
less autonomous since in Renaissance "... family, state, and religious
institutions impose a rigid and far-reaching discipline upon their
middle class subjects" (Greenblatt, 1980: 1).
• identity fashioning is artificial and imposed during early modern
period.
 Identity/Self Fashioning
• Greenblatt evaluates four 16th century authors, Edmund Spenser,
Thomas Wyatt, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, who
are all mobile characters, who moved toward diverse paths than
what normally would be expected from them.
• All these authors knew about fashioning since they had to adapt
themselves to different identities, as they did not follow the
expected pattern.
• Being sons of middle class families, they did not inherit their
personalities; they had to reinvent them (1980: 8).
 The discipline of New Historicism
• The discipline of New Historicism has been influenced by the
deconstructionist idea that a text is at war with itself; Bakthinian
dialogism which posits that a text contains a multiplicity of conflicting
voices; and most prominently by Foucauldian Power/Knowledge and
discourse.
• Analyzing the nature of power, Foucault expounds that Power (for
instance, in the form of the panoptic surveillant sate), defines what is
truth, knowledge, normalcy. New Historicism believes in the
Foucauldian idea of the “ modes of power” decides the lives and
actions of the citizens.
• New Historicism applies the poststructuralist idea that reality is
constructed and multiple, and the Foucauldian idea of the role of
power in creating knowledge.

• New historicism appeared in the United States as a reaction against

literary formalism.
• While traditional historicism regards history as "universal," new
historicism, considers it to be cultural.
• According to Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds, "new" historicism
can be differentiated from "old" historicism "by its lack of faith in
'objectivity' and 'permanence' and its stress not upon the direct
recreation of the past, but rather the process by which the past is
constructed or invented" (1993: 4).
 A New Outlook to Literature
• Literature, for new historicism, is a social and cultural creation
constructed by more than one consciousness, and it cannot be
diminished to a product of a single mind. Therefore, the best way of
analysis is achieved through the lens of the culture that produced it.
• Literature is a specific vision of history and not a distinct category of
human activity.
• The relationship between history and literature is seen as a dialectic: the
literary text is interpreted as product and producer, end and source of
history.
• Stephen Greenblatt explains the new historicist effort to establish relations
between different discursive practices as an attempt "to develop terms to
describe the ways in which material—here official documents, private
papers, newspaper clippings, and so forth—is transferred from one
discursive sphere to another and becomes aesthetic property" (1982: 3).
Therefore, if the circumstances of a literary text are impossible to
recuperate, the concern of the literary critic should be to recover the
ideology that gave birth to the text, and which the text in turn helped to
spread within the culture
 Foucault’s Influence on New Historicism

• The ethos of New Historicism was profoundly influenced by Foucault‘s

theories of Power/Knowledge and Discourse. Foucault observed that the
discourse of an era brings into being concepts, oppositions and
hierarchies, which are products and propagators of power, and these
determine what is “knowledge”, “truth” and “normal” at a given time.
Drawing on Jeremy Bentham‘s notion of the panoptic surveillant State,
that exerts its power through discursive practices, circulating ideology
through the body-politic, Foucault highlighted the subtle, indirect
oppression and the “capillary” modes of power that controls
individuals and their knowledge. His primary concern has been with
power’s relationship to the discursive formations in society that make
knowledge.
• Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited
figure across the humanities and social sciences. His two most referenced works, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison (1975) and The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1976), are the central sources for his analyses of power.
Interestingly enough, however, Foucault was not always known for his signature word. He first gained his massive
influence in 1966 with the publication of The Order of Things. The original French title gives a better sense of the
intellectual milieu in which it was written: Les mots et les choses, or ‘Words and Things’. Philosophy in the 1960s was
all about words, especially among Foucault’s contemporaries.
• In other parts of Paris, Derrida was busily asserting that ‘there is nothing outside the text’, and Jacques Lacan turned
psychoanalysis into linguistics by claiming that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’.

• For his part, however, Foucault moved on, somewhat singularly among his generation. Rather than staying in the
world of words, in the 1970s he shifted his philosophical attention to power, an idea that promises to help explain
how words, or anything else for that matter, come to give things the order that they have. But Foucault’s lasting
importance is not in his having found some new master-concept that can explain all the others.
• Power, in Foucault, is not another philosophical godhead. For Foucault’s most crucial claim about power is that we
must refuse to treat it as philosophers have always treated their central concepts, namely as a unitary and
homogenous thing.
 POWER
• Foucault understood power as continually articulated
knowledge and vice versa; that knowledge always endorses
the position of the powerful and that knowledge is created
by power structures.
• 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.
• Thus, following the Foucauldian mode of analysis, New
Historicists seek to find examples of power and
manifestation of discursive practices, how they are dispersed
within the text, and how they contribute to establishing the
“greatness” or ‘failure’ of a text at a given point of time.
 FOUCAULT AND POWER
• We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in
negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it
‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it
produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and
the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’
(Foucault 1991: 194).
 POWER… CONTINUED
• Power is also a major source of social discipline and conformity. In
shifting attention away from the ‘sovereign’ and ‘episodic’ exercise of
power, traditionally centred in feudal states to coerce their subjects,
Foucault pointed to a new kind of ‘disciplinary power’ that could be
observed in the administrative systems and social services that were
created in 18th century Europe, such as prisons, schools and mental
hospitals.
• Their systems of surveillance and assessment no longer required force
or violence, as people learned to discipline themselves and behave in
expected ways.
• Foucault believed in possibilities for action and resistance. He was an
active social and political commentator.
• To challenge power is not a matter of seeking some ‘absolute truth’
(which is in any case a socially produced power), but ‘of detaching the
power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and
cultural, within which it operates at the present time’ (Foucault, in
Rabinow 1991: 75). Discourse can be a site of both power and
resistance, with scope to ‘subvert or contest strategies of power’
(Gaventa 2003: 3):
 Discourses
• Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up
against it… We must make allowances for the complex and unstable
process whereby a discourse can be both an instrument and an effect
of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling point of resistance and a
starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and
produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it,
renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart’ (Foucault 1998: 100-
1)

• what do you make of it? any thoughts, comments, examples?

• New Historicism as a literary theory based on the idea that literature
should be studied and intrepreted within the context of both the
history of the author and the history of the critic.

• New Historicism has heavily drawn from Foucault and his concept of
power!

• the main concept of power: “viewing it not only class-related but

extending throughout society”.
 IN SUM: KEY TERMS

Key Terms Definitions

Culture the values, conventions, social practices, social forms, and

material features of a racial, religious, or social group

written or spoken language that is often used to study how

Discourse people use language

a materially rooted social environment tied to a specific

Historical Milieu historical period
 Foundational Questions of New Historicist Criticism

• Does the text address the political or social concerns of its time
period? If so, what issues does the text examine?
• What historical events or controversies does the text overtly address
or allude to? Does the text comment on those events?
• What types of historical documents (e.g., wills, laws, religious tracts,
narratives, art, etc.) might illuminate the meaning and the purpose of
the literary text?
• How does the text relate to other literary texts of the same time
period?
PRACTICAL
CRITICISM
• Studying Mehmet Fatih Uslu’s “Greenblatt’ın Yeni Tarihselci
Eleştirisi”

• 1. How does Uslu explain the school of new historicism?

Which names and debates does he provide and foreground?
• 2. How does he differentiate between traditional historicism
and new historicism?
• 3. Which limitations does Uslu mention with regards to Yeni
Tarihsel Eleştiri? (sonuç bölümü)
• 4. Do you see any limitations and concerns with the idea of
• * power?
• * aesthetics? aesthetics of a literary work?
 from Uslu…
• Bunun yanında klasik tarihçiler için yazarın otoritesi sorgulanmazdır,
büyük yazarların büyük yapıtları onların dehasının birer ürünüdür.
Romantik deha zamanlar ve mekanlar üstüdür. Oysa Yeni Tarihselciler
yine Foucault etkisinde otoritenin belli bir söylemler ağının ürünü
olduğu kanaatindedirler. Bunun yanında Greenblatt'ta "insan
öznelliği" kavramı da klasik tarihçilerden farklı tanımlanmıştır. Tilyard,
Spencer ve Coleridge gibi tarihçiler insanı idealist bir bakış açısıyla
tanımlarlar, oysa Althusser'den etkilenen Greenblatt'a göre insan her
şeyden önce belirli bir toplumsal anın tarihsel sonucudur ve insan
öznelliği ideoloji tarafından kurulmuştur (14).
 from Uslu…
• Artık önemli olan tarihle metin arasındaki sonsuz ve karşılıklı ilişkiselliği
kavramaya çalışmaktır. Louis Montrose, Yeni Tarihselcilik için bir slogan
haline gelmiş ibaresiyle bu durumu "metnin tarihselliği ve tarihin
metinselliği" şekinde özetler. "Metnin tarihselliği'' her metnin bir tarihselliği
ve toplumsallığı yani maddi bir zemini olduğunu; tüm yazma ve okuma
faaliyetlerinin bu maddi zeminle anlaşılabileceğini ifade eder. Ama bu tek
başına yeterli değildir; aynı zamanda "tarihin metinselliği” de göz önünde
bulundurulmalıdır. Yani hiçbir zaman geçmişin özgün deneyimini ele geçirmek
ve yeniden yaratmak mümkün değildir. Geçmişin izleri bize ancak metinler
aracılığıyla ulaşır.

• what do you make of this analysis?

 NEXT CLASS: POSTMODERNISM
• Lyotard, “Defining the Postmodern”
• Linda Hutcheon, “Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics”
• Brian McHale “From modernist to postmodernist fiction: change of
dominant 2. Some ontologies of fiction” (Postmodernist Fiction,
1987).

• Texts to be considered:
• Beyaz Kale, Orhan Pamuk
• Görünmez Kentler (Invisible Cities), Italo Calvino