HAND-OUT 6: NEW HISTORICISM, CULTURAL STUDIES, POSTCOLONIALISM

Working with Ideology and Alterity

AUTHOR --> WORK --> LANGUAGE --> READER -->CONTEXT

All three (N.H, C.S and PostC.) exist in a continuum and deal with literature in the larger
context of CULTURE. Sometimes they are considered separate, other times New Historicism and Postcolonial
Studies are considered part of Cultural Studies.
Big Theorists
Roland Barthes (yet again!), Michel Foucault (poststructuralist, but influenced the movement a lot), Stephen
Greenblatt (esp. for New Historicism), Louis Althusser (actually Marxist), Antonio Gramsci (also Marxist),
Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams (founders of Cultural Studies).
Big Concepts
 CULTURE
What is culture?
Michael Richardson: “Culture is simply what human beings produce and the means by which we
preserve what we have produced.” -->it is “constructed, multifaceted and uniquely human.”
(Ott& Mack, 135)
Forms of culture
Physical(artifacts: books, textbooks, clothing), Social(traditions, habits, customs), Attitudinal
(ways of understanding, attitudes towards religion, sexuality, gender).
Qualities of culture
Collective (one individual cannot make a culture); Rhetorical (functions through symbols),
Historical(fluctuates according to history), Ideological (we see the world in some ways and not
in others);
 IDEOLOGY
Functions of Ideology
- it limits (the blinding function);
- it normalizes;
- it privileges;
- it interpellates (Althusser’s term): it hails us as subjects;

 HEGEMONY (Antonio Gramsci)

While ideologies change over time, some remain dominant, almost impossible to change. Dominant
ideologies are called hegemonical (they incorporate subcultures and subvert them); Ex; punk subculture,
torn jeans.

 DISCOURSE (Michel Foucault)

Knowledge does not create power, but the other way round. Ex: the discourse of gender.
Old vs. New Historicism
 OLD HISTORICISM NEW HISTORICISM (influenced by
Deconstruction)
Reading history as background of literature Reading history and literature together

History is objective History is subjective

Facts Interpretations

Linear, progressive Complex, not progressive

History Histories
Monolithic (single, universal accessible truth) Plural, multiple, fluid
History vs. literature, Fact vs. Fiction Literature & History, Facts of history are
nothing but stories, narratives.

Cultural Studies
As a Discipline
1964: Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, Raymond Williams, Stuart
Hall.
What Cultural Studies does:
Analyzes literature, but also pop culture (distinctions between high and low brow culture are erased)
see Barthes’ analysis of striptease, for instance;
Looks at marginalized groups (interactions between The One and the Other): racial and ethnic others,
but more recently also Trauma Studies, Disability Studies.
Postcolonial Studies
Interested in the colonized “other”.
Hybridity: mixture between cultures, esp. that of the colonizer and that of the colonized producing
mixed identities.
Subaltern (& Subaltern Studies), GayatriSpivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”