CULTURAL STUDIES: NEW HISTORICISM

What is New historicism -New historicism, a form of literary theory which aims to understand
intellectual history through literature and literature through its cultural context, follows the
1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of cultural poetics.

- As we noted with feminist and other critical approaches, the more recent the appearance of a
particular perspective, the more difficult it is to define. The field of cultural studies is a prime
example of this problem. Emerging in the 1960s, this field has yet to settle into an accepted and
agreed-upon set of principles and practices. In it you will recognize many theories that you have
already met, including ideas drawn from Marxism, feminism, popular culture, racial and ethnic
studies, and more. It is not a single, standardized approach to literature (or anything else) but a
field that binds its adherents through some common interests and purposes, although they are
addressed in widely divergent ways.

-At present, three types of cultural studies that are getting particular notice are new historicism,
postcolonialism, and American multiculturalism. Although each has its own distinct focus, all
are concerned with social and cultural forces that create a community or that threaten it.

AN OVERVIEW OF CULTURAL STUDIES

-Part of the difficulty in defining cultural studies, or even culture for that matter, is that the
terms are so inclusive. If culture refers to the sum of the beliefs, institutions, arts, and behaviors
of a particular people or time, then cultural studies can be said to address an almost
unthinkably broad body of knowledge: language, customs, legal systems, literature, and more.

-The intent is to connect historical, social, and economic knowledge surrounding the topic, a
topic that may not seem to be very literary at all. Because any context is virtually unending, the
critic never knows enough. As a result, interpretations made from a cultural studies perspective
tend to be openended and continue to evolve as they are affected by new information.

-For the most part, groups engaged in cultural studies share the assumption that within any
society there is a dominant group that determines what is acceptable and what is unacceptable
for the larger body. It defines the culture’s taste sand values—in short, its ideology. Cultural
critics are interested in those groups of people who do not belong to the dominant parties and
who challenge the hegemony of the powerful. In the world of literature, they are the people
Antonio Gramsci called subaltern writers. However, wherever there is dominance, there is also,
to some degree, defiance that makes it impossible for the powerful to prevent change
indefinitely. Recognizing that subjects (people) are socially constructed, cultural critics work to
change power structures where they are unequal, making the subjugated and marginalized
more visible and influential makers of the culture.

-The challenge presented to the power structure by groups such as African Americans, gay
people, and women has led to challenges in other arenas as well. In literature, it has created a
rejection of the concept of the “masterpiece.” All the artifacts of a time or a people are of
interest to the cultural critic, each to be treated with equal importance. There are no
hierarchies of importance, no divisions between “fine art” and “popular art,” between “high
culture” and “low culture.”

- Art itself is but one of many manifestations of a culture, one expression of it. Such an
assumption makes cultural studies inevitably interdisciplinary. No single approach can provide
the kind of analysis that broad social concerns demand. Literary criticism, in these terms, is a
limited creature that needs the help of anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, and
more.

-When literature is no longer given special reverence but is instead regarded as one of many
areas of interest, its connections with the everyday world of work are inevitably involved; at
this point, the influence of Marxism becomes particularly evident. Marxism is reflected, for
example, in the interest that cultural studies researchers have in how a work was produced.
-With the increased self-awareness that has burgeoned since the 1960s among groups of
people bound by common ties of race, ethnicity, history, and gender, a thorough discussion of
cultural studies would become a book of its own. Even a consideration of how it affects literary
criticism in general is beyond the scope of this presentation. Consequently, only three types of
cultural studies will be looked at in this book: new historicism is discussed in this chapter, while
postcolonialism and American multiculturalism are taken up in the following one. Although they
are not the only types of cultural studies that could have been selected, these three have
received significant attention of late. The ways in which their adherents read and analyze texts
can be applied to the literatures of other cultural groups.

ASSUMPTIONS, PRINCIPLES, AND GOALS OF NEW HISTORICISM

-New historicism, which readers began to apply to texts in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
attracted enough attention to challenge the prominent position then held by the
deconstructionists. However, given that it is a radically new way of examining the human past,
new historicism is difficult to pin down, partly because it is still changing and developing and
partly because it draws on widely diverse fields that seem to have little in common except their
interest in the study of cultures.