New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Essay Example

is improving over the course of time, advancing in its moral, cultural, and technological accomplishments.

New historicists, in contrast, don’t believe we have clear access to any but the most basic facts of history. But our understanding of what such facts mean, 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. 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. Furthermore, new historicists argue that reliable interpretations are, for a number of reasons, difficult to produce. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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 one way street from cause to effect. Any given event is a product of its culture, but it also affects that culture in return. In other words, all events are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge. 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. Their relationship is mutually constitutive 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.

Rather, the question is, “What are the processes by which individual identity and social formations 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. 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. Thus, according to new historicists, power does not emanate only from the top of the political and socioeconomic structure.

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. 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. From a new historical perspective, no discourse by itself can adequately explain the complex cultural dynamics of social power. For there is no monolithic spirit of an age, and there is no adequate totalizing explanation of history.

There is, instead, a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses: they are always in a state of flux, overlapping and competing with one another 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.

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. To maintain dominance, his power must circulate in numerous discourses. As these examples suggest, what is “right,” “natural,” and “normal” are matters of definition. Thus, in different cultures at different points in history, homosexuality has been deemed abnormal, normal, criminal, or admirable. The same can be said of incest, cannibalism, and women’s desire for political equality.

Just as definitions of social and antisocial behavior promote the power of certain individuals and groups, so do particular versions of historical events. 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. The more unaware historians are of their biases the more those biases are able to control their narratives. 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. We can’t understand a historical event, object, or person in isolation from the web of discourses in which it was represented because we can’t understand it in isolation from the

meanings it carried at that time.

The more we isolate it, the more we will tend to view it through the meanings of our own time and place and, perhaps, our own desire to believe that the human race is improving with the passage of time. 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.

That is, even when historians base their findings on the kinds of “primary sources” listed above, rather than on the interpretations of other historians (secondary sources), those primary sources are almost always in the form of some sort of writing. 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 rhetorical strategies; they can be deconstructed to reveal the limitations of their own ideological assumptions; and they can be examined for the purpose of revealing their explicit and implicit patriarchal, racist, and homophobic agendas.

In addition, historical accounts can be analyzed in the same manner. In other words, new historicists consider both primary and secondary sources of historical information forms of narrative. Both tell some kind of story, and therefore those stories can be analyzed using the tools of literary criticism. Indeed, we might say that in bringing to the foreground the suppressed historical narratives of marginalized groups new historicism has econstructed 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. In fact, a focus on the historical narratives of marginalized peoples has been such an important feature of new historicism that some theorists have asked how new historicists can accept narratives from oppressed peoples any more readily than they have accepted narratives from the patriarchal Anglo-European power structure.

One answer to this question is that a plurality of voices, including an equal representation of historical narratives from all groups, helps ensure that a master narrative 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.

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. A plurality of historical voices also tends to raise issues that new historicism considers important, such as how ideology operates in the formation of personal and group identity, how a culture’s perception of itself influences its political, legal, and social policies and customs, and how power circulates in a given culture.

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 of the war, countries for whom the American Revolution was but a moment in their struggle for colonial power, primarily in the Caribbean; (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. 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.

In addition to its focus on marginalized historical narratives, new historical analysis involves what is called thick description, a term borrowed from anthropology. Thick description attempts, through close, detailed examination of a given cultural production 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. Thus, thick description is not a search for facts but a search for meanings, and as the examples of cultural productions listed above illustrate, thick description focuses on the personal side of history as much as or more than on such traditional historical topics as military campaigns and the passage of laws.

The example of thick description may push the point a bit far, it 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. 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.