New-Historicism新历史主义文论.ppt

1、New Historicism,新历史主义文论,New Historicism,Historicity of texts Textuality of history 文本的历史性 历史的文本性,“Old” Historicism,Consider history first Position text within history Study history to improve your study of literature History can “explain” mysteries and anomalies of a literary text,“Old” Historicism,

2、Old Historicism: a single political point of view was found, in most cases identical to the political point of view of the people or at least of of the ruling class (e.g. Elizabethan world view),New Historicism,Cultural poetics 文化诗学 Cultural materialism: beginning of 1980s the in Great Britain New H

3、istoricism: beginning of the same time in California, USA.,Discourse Analysis,In order to be able to define New Historicism, Discourse Analysis must be explained as it is a prerequisite. Discourse: makes different types of media comparable in order to avoid a literary canon. Because of this the medi

4、a are related to each other. Discourse links them to each other like threads, so that they become a network.,Discourse,novels,poems,literary texts,pictures,many other media,Discourse Analysis,Discourse Analysis means describing the function of media for an author (e.g. a picture or a novel has influ

5、ence on an author and his literary texts) BUT New Historicists argue that the threads of the discourse have to be considered so that a complexity and an order is rebuilt.,Discourse Analysis,I had dreamed of speaking with the dead, and even now I do not abandon this dream. But the mistake was to imag

6、ine that I would hear a single voice, the voice of the other. If I wanted to hear one, I had to hear the many voices of the dead. And if I wanted to hear the voice of the other, I had to hear my own voice. The speech of the dead, like my own speech, is not private property. Stephen Greenblatt, Shake

7、spearan Negotiations, p.20,New Historicism,Background: Althusser: ideology: (意识形态)institutional discourse that puts its readers into the position of ”subjects” of the discourse and ”subjects” them to the interests of the ruling classes Foucault: discourse: (权力话语)all discourse and knowledge are expre

8、ssions of the power-relations in a society Deconstruction/Bakhtin: (对话理论)the conflictual or multivocal nature of texts (dialogic) Cultural anthropology: (深度描写)thick description: close analysis of reading of a social product to discover its social meaning,Louis Althusser 1918-1990,Louis Althusser (19

9、70): Ideology is the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence.,Michel Foucault (1926-1984),Michel Foucault (1978): Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everythi

10、ng, but because it comes from everywhere.,Michel Foucault (1926-1984),Michel Foucault (1978): We must take allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting

11、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 it.,Michel Foucault (1926-1984),Michel Foucault (1978): We must take allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby

12、 discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance(妨碍), a stumbling-block, a 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

13、 possible to thwart(反对,阻拦) it.,M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975),M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975),M. M. Bakhtin (1934-35): the essence of novelistic heteroglossia. A language is revealed in all its distinctiveness only when it is brought into relationship with other languages, entering with into one single heterog

14、lot unity of societal becoming. Every language in a novel is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real social groups and their embodied representatives. Against the dialogising background of other languages of the era and in direct dialogic interaction with them each language be

15、gins to sound differently than it would have sounded on its own, as it were (without relating to others).,M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975),M. M. Bakhtin (1934-35): the essence of novelistic heteroglossia. A language is revealed in all its distinctiveness only when it is brought into relationship with other

16、 languages, entering into one single heteroglot unity of societal becoming. Every language in a novel is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real social groups and their embodied representatives. ,M. M. Bakhtin (1895-1975),Against the dialogising background of other languages o

17、f the era and in direct dialogic interaction with them each language begins to sound differently than it would have sounded on its own, as it were (without relating to others).,Clifford Geertz (1923-),Move from description to interpretation Customs not important but what lies behind them Culture as

18、symbolic: symbolic anthropology,Geertz on culture,culture is best seen not as complexes of concrete behavior patterns customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters as has, by and large, been the case up to now, but as a set of control mechanisms plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engin

19、eers call “programs”) for the governing of behaviour. (The Impact of the Concept of Culture on that of Man: 44),Geertz on culture,man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental scienc

20、e in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Thick Description: 5),Thick Description,Considertwo boys rapidly contracting the eyelids of the right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements,

21、 identicalYetthe difference between a wink and a twitch is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicating in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately (2) to someone in particular (3) to impart a part

22、icular message (4) according to a socially established code (5) with the knowledge of others around himthe winker has done two things: contracted eyelids and winked; the twitcher has done only one. (Thick Description: 6-7),Raymond Williams (1921-1988),Theorizes literature alongside culture Symbiotic

23、 relation between literary texts and culture Founding figure in Cultural Studies,Raymond Williams (1921-1988),De-Sacrializes literature Sees culture as a whole way of life Claims contemporary taste derives from capitalism Sees literature as a shifting historical product,New Historicism,Reasons for t

24、he emergence of New Historicism: Resistance to the textualism and formalism of New Criticism and deconstruction Attempt to re-contextualize literary texts without recourse to traditional ”background criticism Response to the failure of the left-wing politics of student radicalism in the 60s and 70s

25、to instigate social and political change,New Historicism,New Historicism: there is not only a single world view propagated by the ruling class history = literature there is no history, no facts but there are documents which have to be interpreted there is no history as background for literature, his

26、tory is just telling stories about the past,New Historicism,history is not finished or stable, it can always be seen from a different perspective so there is no past in the pure form, first you have to work and read many different texts,New Historicism,Wants to consider work within its historical co

27、ntext Concerned with historical and cultural conditions of production Interested in how work is historically interpreted, evaluated, and re-evaluated Not simply trying to account for a text through history,New Historicism,Literature not a trans-historical phenomenon Literary text as one of many text

28、s in history (e.g. philosophical, scientific, anthropological) Different texts can represent dissonance and divergence Texts embedded in context as (inter)active component,New Historicism,Challenges traditional Humanist notions that literary text involves universal values and aesthetics Issue of a t

29、exts resistance to and re-containment within a historical cultural site Literary texts influenced by ideological formations of an age No disinterested literary text Concerned with readers appropriating texts without considering historical and ideological contexts,past (text),reader interpreter,negot

30、iation,Ongoing process, never finalized,New Historicism,Seen from this point of view, concepts of western thought - like justice/injustice, normality/abnormality, failure/success, life/death, work/leisure but also evaluative terms like good/bad, light/dark, rich/poor, strong/weak as they are related

31、 to man/woman - can be seen with regard to their specific function in a specific historical structure of a society, and thus can be re-evaluated from this perspective, shifting the meanings of texts according to the question one asks them,New Historicism,Practice of New Historicism Two groups: One a

32、rising within the Romanticism (Marilyn Butler, Marjorie Levinson, Jerome McGann and David Sinpson) The other within the Renaissance Studies (Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose),Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943),Leading voice in New Historicism President of Modern Language Associatio

33、n Greenblatts work focused around Early Modern Period,Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943),Denies stability of social world Cultural Poeticssees texts in relation to other texts and cultures Claims we should not expect cultural/historical moment to be unified,Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943),Stephen Greenblatt

34、(1986): the work of art is not itself a pure flame that lies at the source of our speculations. Rather the work of art is itself the product of a set of manipulations, some of them our own, many others undertaken in the construction of the original work.,Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943),Stephen Greenbla

35、tt (1986): , the work of art is the product of a negotiation (my emphasis) between creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society. In order to achieve the negotiation, artists need to create a currency

36、 that is valid for a meaningful, mutually profitable exchange The terms ”currency” and ”negotiation” are the signs of our manipulation and adjustment of the relative systems.,New Historicism,Text-context: No foreground-background dialectic ”Embeddedness”: text embedded in context as an interactive c

37、omponent ”Negotiation”: between text and context Text-subjectivity: - The human subject produced and positioned by the play of power and ideology of a particular era (subject/subjected),New Historicism,Method: ”Negotiation”: No objective criticism The reader is bound by the values of his/her period

38、when reading (naturalization/appropriation) Stress on differences between now and then: the past reveals power-configurations in the present ”Thick description”,New Historicism,Louis Montrose (1989) New Historicism has a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.

39、,Louis Montrose: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies may be characterized chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest t

40、he cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing - not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unm

41、ediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question - traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement; and secondly, that those textual tr

42、aces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the documents upon which historians ground their own texts, called histories. As Hayden White has forcefully reminded us, such textual histories necessarily but always incompletely constitute in their narrative a

43、nd rhetorical forms the History to which they offer access.,Louis Montrose: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies may be characterized as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. By

44、the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing - not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them. By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and au

45、thentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question - traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially,Louis Montrose: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,consequent upon comple

46、x and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement; and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the documents upon which historians ground their own texts, called histories. As Hayden White has forcefully reminded us, such textual histories necessarily but always incompletely constitute in their narrative and rhetorical forms the History to which they offer access.,New Historicism,Since the 1980s New Historicist lite