Hello Everyone, I'm a student of the Department of English,M.K.B.U. This blog is a part of a thinking activity which is given by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. In this blog I'm going to discuss New-Historicism as a part of cultural studies.
What is cultural studies ?
Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary field, drawing on theories and practices from a range of humanities and social sciences disciplines, that seeks to investigate the central role played by culture in the organisation and distribution of power locally and globally. At the centre of Cultural Studies sits a host of questions, such as what constitutes a text, how some texts, visual images, and cultural artefacts come to be valued over others, and how questions of value relate to the distribution of power and authority.
Rather than concentrating exclusively on the group of elite texts that make up so-called "high culture," Cultural Studies takes as its focus the whole complex of changing beliefs, ideas, feelings, values, and symbols that define a community’s organisation and sense of itself. Culture in this sense is often understood to be a primary vehicle of globalisation in the contemporary world and deeply enmeshed in particular social, economical and political environments. As such, when we study culture, we are studying the world we live in and how we function in it.
There are five types of cultural studies.That are like.,
British Cultural Materialism.
New Historicism.
American Multiculturalism.
A.African American Writers
B.Latina/o Writers
American Indian Literatures
Asian American Writers
Postmodernism and Popular Culture
Postmodernism
Popular Culture
5.Postcolonial Studies
British Cultural Materialism.
Cultural studies is referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the "givens" of British culture.
In modern Britain two trajectories for "culture" developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as a preserver of the past. The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annul the distinction between labour and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norm.
Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R. Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the "great tradition" of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.
American Multiculturalism
In this part, there is the history of the development of the American people. There are many types of American people. This part is divided into four parts. America is like a bowl of salad because there are so many different people lived in.
African American Writers
Latina/o Writers
American Indian Literatures
Asian American Writers
Postmodernism and Popular Culture
1. Postmodernism
Postmodernism, like poststructuralism and deconstruction, is a critique of the aesthetics of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true, arguing that it is all contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of "others." Beginning in the mid-1980s, postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and other fields.Modernist literature rejected the Victorian aesthetic of prescriptive morality (famously argued by Henry James in "The Art of Fiction") and, using new techniques drawn from psychology, experimented with point of view, time, space, and
stream-of-consciousness writing. Major figures of "high modernism" who radically redefined poetry and fiction included Virginia Woolf, james foyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and William Faulkner.
2. Popular Culture
There was a time before the 1960s when popular culture was not studied by academics-when it was, well, just popular culture. But within American Studies programs at first and then later in many disciplines, including semiotics, rhetoric, literary
criticism, film studies, anthropology, history, women's studies, ethnic studies, and psychoanalytic approaches, critics examine such cultural media as pulp fiction, comic books, television, film, advertising, popular music, and computer cyberculture. They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, region, and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popu-
lar culture.
There are four main types of popular culture analyses:
production analysis
Textual analysis
Audience analysis
Historical analysis.
Postcolonial Studies
Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by Third World countries after the decline of colonialism: for example, when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves. Many Third World writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created in a postcolonial culture. Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the preconceptions about their culture.
New-Historicism
New- Historicism is also a type of cultural studies. It told about the importance of history in day to day life. How history is saved in the form of books,diaries etc.
"If the 1970s could be called the Age of Deconstruction," writes Joseph Litvak, "some hypothetical survey of late twentieth-century criticism might well characterise the 1980s as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the Recovery of the Referent".
Michael Warner phrases new historicism's motto as, "The text is historical, and history is textual".
Through this quote we can say that a text is always connected with history. Whenever something is happening in the world writers may write that in their work and through that we can get the history.
Frederic Jameson insisted, "Always historicize!"
Through this statement Frederic tries to say that if we historicize history then only we can get the knowledge of those particular things because no one can remember all the things which happened in the past.
As a return to historical scholarship, new historicism concerns itself with extraliterary matters-letters,diaries, films, paintings, medical treatises-looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text. With the help of diaries,films , paintings we can save history and we show that whenever we want.
New historicists seek "surprising coincidences" that may cross generic, historical,and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony, or popular culture. New historians see such cross-cultural phenomena as texts in themselves. From Hayden Atrhite, cultural studies practitioners learned how figural relationships between present and past are shaped by historical discourses.
New historicism versus old historicism :-
the latter, says Porter, saw history as "world views magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called Progress,"
The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favour of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.Stephen Greenblatt, a Renaissance scholar and founding editor of the journalRepresentations, may be credited with the coining of the term "new historicism."
New historicism exists, Veeser explains, between these two poles in an attempt to work with the "apparently contradictory historical effects of capitalism" without insisting upon an inflexible historical and economic theory.
From Foucault, new historicists developed the idea of a broad "totalizing" function of culture observable in its literary texts, which Foucault called the episteme. For Foucault history was not the working out of "universal" ideas: because we cannot know the governing ideas of the past or the present, we should not imagine that "we" even
have a "centre" for mapping the "real."
History itself is a form of social oppression, told in a series of ruptures with previous ages; it is more accurately described as discontinuous, riven by "fault lines" that must be integrated into succeeding cultures by the epistles of power and knowledge.
Conclusion :-
To conclude, we can say that history is most important for remembering past events. Through history we can connect past and present. Letters , diaries,films, painting,medical treatises are the elements which help us to note the history. In text there may also be several points about the history through which we can get the knowledge of our past events or history.
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