Cultural Materialism

vs. New Historicism

► New Historicism: “The historicity of the text and the textuality of history.”
The phrase was coined by Stephen Greenblatt around 1980.
Other practitioners are J.W. Lever. Jonathan Dollimore.
Simple Definition: a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary
texts, usually of the same time period. It refuses to privilege literary text.
* It is no longer a matter of literature maintaining the foreground and history the
background, instead it is a matter of literature and history occupying the same area and
given the same weight. Reading all of the textual traces of the past, fiction or non.
* Places the literary text within the frame of a non-literary text.
* A historical anecdote is given, relating the text to the time.
* Context is replaced by “co-text”, that is an interrelated non-literary text from the same
time period. Greenblatt: “Will of the World.”
► Differences between old and new historicism:
* Old: hierarchical, with literature being the “jewel,” and history the
background
* New: Parallel readings, no more hierarchy.
* Old: A historical movement: creates a historical framework in which
to place the text
* New: a historicist movement. Interested in history as represented
and recorded in written documents—history as text.
* “The word of the past replaces the world of the past.”
* “The aim is not to represent the past as it really was, but to present
a new reality by re- situating it.”
► Foucault and New Historicism:
* New Historicism is always anti-establishment, on the side of liberal ideas and
personal freedoms.
* Believe in Michel Foucault’s idea of an all-seeing—panoptic—surveillance
State.
* The panoptic state exerts power through discursive practices, circulating
ideology through the body-politic.
* The State is seen as a monolithic structure and change is nearly impossible.

► Advantages.
* Written in a far more accessible way than post-structuralist theory.
* It presents its data and draws its conclusions in a less dense way
* Material is often fascinating and distinctive.
* New territory.
* Political edge is always sharp, avoids problems of straight Marxist criticism.
► "New Historicism focuses on the way literature expresses-
and sometimes disguises-power relations at work in the
social context in which the literature was produced, often
this involves making connections between a literary work
and other kinds of texts. Literature is often shown to
“negotiate” conflicting power interests. New historicism has
made its biggest mark on literary studies of the
Renaissances and Romantic periods and has revised
motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing. Much
new historicism focuses on the marginalization of subjects
such as those identified as witches, the insane, heretics,
vagabonds, and political prisoners."
► --Jay Stevenson
 Cultural Materialism
► Cultural materialism is a theory which views culture as a
productive process, focusing on arts such as literature.
Within this culture art is translated as a social use of
material means of production.
► The concept of "literature" is seen as a social development,
which according to Raymond Williams, only truly
developed between the 18th and 19th century, within our
culture. The critic explains in his essay Culture is Ordinary,
„a culture is a whole way of life, and the arts are part of a
social organisation which economic change clearly radically
effects”.
► Cultural Materialism
► Cultural materialism is “a politicized form of historiography.”
► -Graham Holderness
► Raymond Williams coined the term Cultural Materialism.
Jonathan Dollimore and Allen Sinfield made current and
defined Cultural materialism as “designating a critical
method which has four characteristics:
► Historical Context: what was happening at the time the
text was written.
► Theoretical Method: Incorporating older methods of
theory—Structuralism, Post-structuralism etc.
► Political Commitment: Incorporating non-conservative
and non-Christian frameworks—such as Feminist and
Marxist theory.
► Textual Analysis: building on theoretical analysis of
mainly canonical texts that have become “prominent
cultural icons.”
► Culture: What does this term mean in the context
of Cultural Materialism?
► Culture in this sense does not limit itself to “high
culture” but includes all forms of culture like TV
and pop music.
► Materialism: What does this term mean in the
context of Cultural Materialism?
► Materialism is at odds with idealism. Idealists
believe in the transcendent ability of ideas while
materialist believe that culture cannot transcend
its material trappings.
► In this way, Cultural Materialism is an
offshoot of Marxist criticism.
► History, to a cultural materialist, is what has happened and
what is happening now. In other words, Cultural Materialists
not only create criticism of a text by contextualizing it with
its own time period, but with successive generations
including our own. Cultural Materialism bridges the gap
between Marxism and Post-Modernism.
► Some things that Cultural Materialist might look at when
analyzing Shakespeare:
► Elizabethan Drama during its own time period
► The publishing history of Shakespeare through the ages
► That weird movie version of Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo
D. in it
► The tourism and kitsch surrounding Shakespeare today
► Raymond Williams
► Raymond Williams added to the outlook of Cultural
Materialism by employing “structures of feeling.” These are
values that are changing and being formed as we live and
react to the material world around us. They challenge
dominant forms of ideology and imply that values are organic
and non-stagnant.
► Cultural Materialism embraces change and gives us
different (changing) perspectives based on what we
chose to suppress or reveal in readings from the past.
► Shakespeare is one example of how Cultural Materialism can
change our point of view, and even our values, in regard to
past texts. Many Cultural Materialist have challenged the
fetishistic relationship conservative Britain has with
Shakespeare.
► "Raymond William's term for the theory of culture he develops in the
course of a long dialogue with Marxism, and which ascribes a central
importance to the role of structures of feeling. Williams is critical of the
base/structure model so often used by Marxists to analyze cultural
phenomena on the grounds that it makes, for example, the literature
dependent, secondary and superstructural, or subsumes it into the
wider category of ideology. Cultural Materialism stresses that culture is
a constitutive social process which actively creates different ways of
life. Similarly, signification or the creation of meaning is viewed as a
practical material activity which cannot be consigned to a secondary
lever or explained in terms of a primary level of economic activity.
Consciousness itself is not a reflection of a basic or more material level
of existence, but an active mode of social being. Williams is also critical
of the technological determinism of theorists such as Mcluhan who
argues that communications media have independent properties that
impose themselves automatically ('the medium is the message'). He
does not deny that the function of the media is determined, but insists
that its determination is social and always bound up with sociocultural
practices."
► --David Macey
► "Britain's reply to new historicism was the rather different creed of cultural
materialism, which-appropriately for a society with more vigorous socialist traditions-
displayed a political cutting edge largely lacking in its transatlantic counterpart. The
phrase “cultural materialism,” had been coined in the 1980s by Britain's premier
socialist critic, Raymond Williams, to describe a form of analysis which examined
culture less as a set of isolated artistic monuments then as a material formation,
complete with its own modes of production, power-effects, social relation, identifiable
audiences, historically conditioned thought forms. It was a way of bringing an
unashamedly materialist analysis to bear on that realm of social existence-'culture'-
which was thought by conventional criticism to be the very antithesis of the material;
and its ambition was less to relate 'culture' to 'society,' in William's own earlier style,
than to examine culture as always-already social and material in its roots. It could be
seen either as an enrichment or a dilution of classical Marxism: enrichment, because it
carried materialism boldly through to the 'spiritual' itself; dilution, because in doing so
it blurred the distinction, vital to orthodox Marxism, between the economic and the
cultural. The method was, so Williams himself announced, 'compactible' with Marxism,
but it took issue with the kind of Marxism which had relegated culture to secondary,
'superstructural' status, and resembled the new historicist in its refusal to enforce such
hierarchies. It also paralleled the new historicism on taking on board a whole range of
topics-notably, sexuality, feminism, ethnic and post-colonial questions-to which Marxist
criticism had traditionally given short shrift. To this extent, cultural materialism formed
a kind of bridge between Marxism and postmodernism, radically revising the former
while wary of the more modish, uncritical, unhistorical aspects of the latter. This,
indeed, might be said to be roughly the stand to which most British left cultural critics
nowadays take up."
► --Terry Eagleton
► Differences Between New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
►
As you can see and read in Barry, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have a
significant overlap. In fact the main difference is politics. There are three main
differences:

►
1. Cultural Materialists concentrate on the the interventions whereby men and women
make their own history, where New Historicists focus on the the power of social and
ideological structures which restrain them. A contrast between political optimism and
political pessimism.
2. Cultural Materialists view New Historicists as cutting themselves off from effective
political positions by their acceptance of a particular version of post-structuralism.

►
3. New Historicists will situate the literary text in the political situation of its own day,
while the Cultural Materialists situate it within that of our own.
What Cultural Materialist Do
► 1. They read the literary text (very often a Renaissance
play) in such a way as to enable us to 'recover its
histories', that is, the context of exploitation from which it
emerged
► 2. At the same time, they foreground those elements in
the work's present transmission and contextualising
which caused those histories to be lost in the first place,
(for example, the 'heritage' industry's packaging of
Shakespeare in terms of history-as-pageant, national
bard, cultural icon, and so on)
► * political agenda: 3. They use a combination of marxist
and feminist approaches to the text, especially in order to
do the first of these (above), and in order to fracture the
previous dominance of conservative social, political, and
religious assumptions in Shakespeare criticism in
particular
(From Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 1995)
What Cultural Materialist Do
► 4. They use the technique of close textual analysis, but
often employ structuralist and post-structuralist
techniques, especially to mark a break with the inherited
tradition of close textual analysis within the framework of
conservative cultural and social assumptions
► 5. At the same time, they work mainly within traditional
notions of the canon, on the grounds that writing about
more obscure texts hardly ever constitutes an effective
political intervention (for instance, in debates about the
school curriculum or national identity)

(From Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 1995)

 Starting Questions
► In the network of power the characters
form, does Prospero, or anyone else, have
absolute power?
► How do different characters’ histories (e.g.
Caliban’s vs. Prospero’s) interact with each
other?
 The Tempest – Act 1-2
Miranda and Prospero
1. Is Miranda as innocent, meek and
passive as she appears to be? What’s
her views of knowledge and the past?
--She is sweet, kind, but with a desire to
know, a memory repressed and some
hints of an interest in sex and marriage
(11. 21, 35; 42050; 55; 119).
 The Tempest – Act 1-2
Prospero and Ariel
Is Ariel all obedient? (ll. 189; 220; 242) --
his use of ‘pains.”
1. Why and how does Prospero tells Ariel’s
story to him?
By describing “once a month” in great details
Ariel’s past history of tortures, scolding
him and naming him (‘my slave’). (ll 250 -
 The Tempest – Act 1-2
Prospero and Caliban
Caliban, for sure, is disobedient but needed
by Prospero (p. 118, l. 310). How is
Caliban’s version of Prospero’s arrival
different from the previous two he tells
Miranda and Ariel respectively? (ll. 30)
How is his story subversive?
 The Tempest – Act 1-2
Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand
How is authority constructed and denied?
1. What does Prospero do to achieve what he
wants (marrying Miranda to Ferdinand)? In his
intervention, how is his power challenged by the
other powers? (e.g. pp. 126-27)
2. Aren’t Ariel’s songs (pp. 122-123) enchanting?
Analyze the sound patterns.
 Caliban: multiple interpretation
► Kermode: the ‘thing’: unregenerate, ordinary nature, the
base . . . Ground against and upon which the moral battle
for civilization is defined and played out;
► Aime Cesaire: the ‘thing’ given its full dignity as the
supreme, ordinary good, the good that is politically
repressed and exploited, yet which promises to return in
the future.
► Brown: an effect of a multiplicity of texts and forces: he is
a native of the Indies, a slave, a savage, a cannibal, a
woodwo, a masterless man, an irish rebel, . . .(Wilson 14)
► Which do you agree with?
 Wuthering Heights
► Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, during a time of structural social
change, and coincidently, four months before Marx and Engels's book, The
Communist Manifesto came out.
► The book acted as a reaction, during a time when social fellowship had been
obstructed by the industrial revolution.
► A new class, that existed between the aristocracy and the working class
emerged; the bourgeoisie. A hegemonic, capitalist framework, used previously
by the aristocracy, existed as an industrial template for the new class, outlining
an ideological way of life. However, with the middle classes' new found
materialism, they separated themselves from association with the working
class in order to gain more land, voting rights through the 1832 reform act,
and a substantial amount of money.
► This social change affected literature as William's notes, "periods of major
transition between social systems are commonly marked by the emergence of
radically new forms" of literature.
 Wuthering Heights
► Wuthering Heights as a piece of literature, can be interpreted as a historical representation
of the social and economic difficulties that existed between class and culture at the time.
► Heathcliff in particular, is emulative of the bourgeoisie, and their betrayal towards the class
which they emerged from. Originating from the streets of Liverpool, it has been suggested
by critic, Sneiden, that Heathcliff "is a product of a thriving Liverpool slave trade". As
Earnshaw found him "in the steets of Liverpool; where he picked it up and inquired for its
owner". Despite this mild assumption, Mr Earnshaw insists that Heathcliff is treated as an
equal to his blood-related offspring. He is provided with the same rights, and education.
However this "creates fresh inequalities in the family hierarchy" .Heathcliff's intrusion and
favouritism from Earnshaw upsets the social equilibrium at the 'Heights, and creates hatred
from siblings such as Hindley. Treated unequally by his siblings, especially after the demise
of Mr Earnshaw, Heathcliff, "is set to work meaninglessly, as a servant rather than a member
of the family" and remains at the bottom of a materialist institutional structure installed at
the 'Heights, restoring order in terms of class, as he works as the slave and gypsy he is
thought to be. Known for his barbaric behaviour, his romantic escapism with Catherine is
obstructed as she chooses to marry the more "civilised" and higher class Edgar Linton. After
disappearing for three years and reappearing, Heathcliff, "the gipsy- the ploughboy", as
Edgar remembers him, transforms into a "well-formed man"of intelligent countenance.
 Wuthering Heights
► Heathcliff's transformation mimics that of the bourgeoisie, while his motivation feeds
through an "obsession with taking revenge on his old enemies", through social and
economic hegemony.
► However as he is already saturated by the ideological materialist system he was brought
up in, instead of fighting it, he becomes deeply embedded in it. He is "neither within
society nor outside it", as he contradicts himself by becoming top of a heirachy that he
was once the bottom of.
► To solidify his new place in society, he marries into the landed gentry of the Linton's, a
family which he took great dislike towards, "for purely mercenary reasons". It is this type
of contradictive behaviour, as critic Eagleton observes, "which encapsulates a crucial
truth about bourgeois society".
 "Books are not just structures of meaning, they are also
commodities produced by publishers and sold on the market
at a profit„. T. Eagleton
► The production of written word within itself is not materialist, but literature
caters a demand which is what makes it materialist. The writer isn't the
individual who produces capital. The transformation, as the writer's material
becomes mass produced, is what makes it capital, and through this William's
explains the difficulty in separating "the development of literary form, from the
highly specific economics of fiction publication„. 
► Although there's no doubt Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights for her own
enjoyment, "capital, wage-labour, and production of commodities" through the
selling of the novel, meant that she would have had a material gain from it's
publication. Through this, the glorified trans-individuality that signifies the
author is smothered by the fact that "they are also workers hired by publishing
houses to produce commodities which will sell". An impending team of lower
class labourers, described by Marx as "an appendage of the machine" of
consumerism, are therefore working for the material production that enables a
middle class woman to have her creative work published.