History

Question 1

What does Michel Foucault assert humans require?

Answer 1

History to “emerge into existencce” - “history has become the unavoidable element in our thought”

Question 2

What does Michel Foucault claim?

Answer 2

Knowledge is not certain or definite, but historically influenced DISCOURSE which is in the process of being shaped in the present
History is thus itself open ended, and knowledge is both constructed historical;y and in the present at oncce

Question 3

What does Rita Felski insist?

Answer 3

‘history is not a box’

Question 4

Why does Rita Felski critique the ‘hermenetuics of suspicion’ of historicism/New Historicism?

Answer 4

It claims to ‘know a text better than it can ever know itself’ and thus fails to ‘recognise the distinctiveness of individual authors’, rather aggressively contextualising and thus reducing them

Question 5

Which model does Rita Felski prefer?

Answer 5

Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory - ideas of non-human actors, and webs of interconnections/disconnections which are both spatial and temporal
Thus suggests ‘literature is not an object-to-be-explained’, but rahter a non-human actor which itself shaped history

Question 6

Why does Rita Felski suggest contextual readings are reductive?

Answer 6

The ‘busy afterlife of a literary artefact refuses our efforts to box it into a moment of origin’ - texts do not cease to exist after their immediate context but rather influence and evolve over time

Question 7

What does Rita Felski suggest actor-network theory is not grounded upon?

Answer 7

the idea that ideology influences network dissemination - texts are maintained through hsitory but NOT by ideology

Question 8

What does Hugh Grady suggest Postmodern New Historicism must consider?

Answer 8

‘the crucial impact of the present on how we constitute

the past’ when considering the text in its original context

Question 9

What is Clifford Geertz’s term which so influenced New Historicism?

Answer 9

“thick description” - idea of double meanings and multiple layers

Question 10

What are two examples of Steven Greenblatt’s New Historicist theoretical owrk?

Answer 10

Renaissance Self-Fashioning - considers how, through texts, a self is formed as performance in response to contemporary power structures
Invisible Bullets - how texts demonstrate subversion and containment of contemporary thought, and create this subversion/containment enacted themselves

Question 11

How does Hegel’s historicism perceive history?

Answer 11

Continual movement of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and back to the beginning - spiral effect - suggesting that every event both is based upon yet reacts against what came before it

Question 12

What does Hegel insist?

Answer 12

That all human societies are defined by their history, they must be understood through this history also

Question 13

What is the view of New Historicism?

Answer 13

As each epoch has its own knowledge system, texts should be understood within this context

Question 14

Why do Steven Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher suggest they have superior knowledge of a text?

Answer 14

‘we seek something more, something that the author we study would not have had sufficient distance upon themselves and their own era to grasp’

Question 15

What do Greenblatt and Gallacher say about culture?

Answer 15

Culture is itself seen as a ‘text’ - allowing the amount of objects able to be read/interpreted to increase

Question 16

What does New Historicism arguably do to a text?

Answer 16

Stops it from being “self-enclosed” - thus questioning the status of classics as standing alone, demonstrating their influence by other contemporary texts,

Question 17

What do Greenblatt and Gallacher insist the New Historicist project is?

Answer 17

‘not to aestheticise an entire culture, but to locate inventive energies more deeply interfused within it’

Question 18

What do Greenblatt and Gallacher say happens when a whole culture is seen as a text?

Answer 18

‘boundary between what is representation and what is event’ becoems more blurred

Question 19

What do Greenblatt and Gallacher note of text and context?

Answer 19

In New Historicism text and context often shift and swap positions

Question 20

What do Gallacher and Greenblatt seek as ‘counterhistories’?

Answer 20

Moments in texts which make ‘slippages, cracks, and fault lines’ in the dominant culture apparent are sought - to make these “couterhistories” opposed to dominant view (associated with power) visible

Question 21

What does a New Historicist approach emphasise?

Answer 21

That literature is not the result of a single mind, but rather the end product of a particular cultural moment - impact of cultural moment and ideology within it emphasised

Question 22

What is the ‘double vision’ identified by Gallacher and Greenblatt

Answer 22

It is impossible to entirely leave behind the influence of one’s own historical conditions - art both pulls one out of, and back into, one’s ‘own world’
Similarly, art is ‘at once immersed in its time and place and yet somehow pulling out and away’ from it

Question 23

What did Clifford Geertz argue of culture?

Answer 23

It is an “acted document”, therefore “analysis is sorting out the structures of signification…and determining their social ground and import”

Question 24

Why was Geertz’s theory useful for New Historicism, according to Gallacher and Greenblatt?

Answer 24

“thick descriptions” of “cultural texts” suggested that the boundaries of literariness are unstable (questions interpenetration of literature and life) - therefore G and G argue that ‘elements of lived experience enter into literature’ thus literature records ‘everyday institutions and bodies’ [which they can then analyse]

Question 25

What do Gallacher and Greenblatt insist that New Historicist criticism creates?

Answer 25

the ‘touch of the real’ - real experience in literary analysis

Question 26

What do Gallacher and Greenblatt identify as the goal of New Historicism?

Answer 26

‘to see a vast social process, a life-world, through the lens afforded by a particular passage’

Question 27

What do Gallacher and Greenblatt identify as the use of anecdotes?

Answer 27

Their ability ‘to interrupt the Big Stories’ - revealing counterhistories

Question 28

What do Gallacher and Greenblatt note of the paradox of anecdote and counterhistory?

Answer 28

‘anecdotalists are implicated, it seems, in the annihilating force, indebted to “the lightning flash of power”’ - because it is only due to their involvement IN this power that the difference between “counterhistory” and dominant history can be seen
However, notes that this can create sense of guilt - which some critics ‘overdramatised’

Question 29

What do Gallacher and Greenblatt note of Foucault?

Answer 29

His ‘personal invovlement’ - appeared to be actively ‘warning himself against any complacent separation between his desire to hear the voice of the other and his desire for disciplinary and institutional power’