New Historical and Cultural Criticism

Question 1

New Historicism’s principal question

Answer 1

New historicist would read an historical paper and ask themselves “What does this account tell us about the political agendas and ideological conflicts of the culture that produced and read the account in the year that it was made?”

Question 2

Traditional historians see history as

Answer 2

A series of events that have a linear, causal relationships; They believe that history is progressive.

Question 3

There are no facts, there are only

Answer 3

Interpretations

Question 4

History to new historicists

Answer 4

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. Individuals and groups of people may have goals, but human history does not.

Question 5

Impossibility of objective analysis

Answer 5

New historicism explanation of how there are no facts, only interpratations

Question 6

Saying of how all events are produced, by new historicism

Answer 6

All events are shaped by and shape the culture in which they emerge.

Question 7

Subjectivy / Selfhood

Answer 7

Is shaped by and shapes the culture into which we were born; 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.

Question 8

Michael Foucault

Answer 8

Power circulates in all directions, to and from all social levels, at all time. And the vehicle by which power circulates is a never ending proliferation of exchange

Question 9

Forms of exchange to create power

Answer 9

(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, kidnapping, and slavery; and (3) the exchange of ideas through the various discourses a culture produces.

Question 10

Discourse

Answer 10

A social language created by particular cultural conditions at a particular time and place, and it expresses a particular way of understanding human experience.

Question 11

Draws attention to the role of language as the vehicle of ideology.

Answer 11

Discourse

Question 12

Can there be just one discourse?

Answer 12

No, there is a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses

Question 13

Discourse assiociations of power

Answer 13

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

Question 14

How does new historicists make historical analysis?

Answer 14

Through deconstructive criticism; it considers literary texts 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 those texts were written.

Question 15

Rhetorical strategies

Answer 15

The stylistic devices by which texts try to achieve their purposes

Question 16

Master Narrative

Answer 16

A narrative told from a single cultural point of view that, nevertheless, presumes to offer the only accurate version of history. New historicists try to stop it.

Question 17

Thick description

Answer 17

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. It focuses on the personal side of history (traditions) as much as or more than on such historical topics as military campaigns and the passage of laws.

Question 18

Self-positioning

Answer 18

To be 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.

Question 19

Literary texts for new historicists

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Difference of Cultural Materialism to New Historicism

Answer 20

Cultural criticism tends to be much more politically oriented than new historicism. argues that working‑class culture has been misunderstood and undervalued. The dominant class dictates what forms of art are to be considered “high” (superior) culture

Question 21

Cultural work

Answer 21

The ways in which they shape our experience by transmitting or transforming ideologies.

Question 22

Culture for cultural materialism

Answer 22

, a culture is a collection of interactive cultures, each of which is growing and changing, each of which is constituted at any given moment in time by the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, occupation, and similar factors that contribute to the experience of its members.

Question 23

The text is absolutely inseparable from

Answer 23

its historical context.

Question 24

Cultural products are not simply the product of history,

Answer 24

they also actively make history

Question 25

There is no difference between “high” and “low” culture:

Answer 25

all of them are treated as ideological constructions.

Question 26

New historicism (John Barnnigan)

Answer 26

a mode of critical interpretation which privileges power relations as the most important context for texts of all kinds… as a critical practice it treats literary texts as a space where power relations are made visible

Question 27

Thick descrption (Cliffor Geertz)

Answer 27

analysis by way of detailed and minutely observed social and cultural practices.

Question 28

Raymond Williams says this

Answer 28

No dominant culture ever in reality includes or exhaust all human practice, human energy and human intention”. The dominant culture is always under pressure for alternative views and beliefs

Question 29

Dissidence

Answer 29

not so much a matter of individual agency but is first of all produced by the inner contradiction that characterized any social order.

Question 30

Cultural Materialism gives space for

Answer 30

dissidence, resistance, and action.