New Historicism
New Historicism ( English : "New Historicism ") is a theory of literary studies that was developed in the 1980s at the University of Berkeley . Other names are Poetics of Culture and Kulturpoetik . The American literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt is regarded as the leading theoretician of New Historicism .
theory
Opponents: New Criticism and Historicism
The New Historicism is considered counter-movement to the New Criticism , which since the 1930 's in the American Literary Studies prevailing theory direction. While New Criticists , and later also post-structuralism and deconstruction , concentrated on analyzing literary texts according to their internal structure without paying attention to their historical origin and their contemporary context , New Historicism puts literary texts back in their own cultural context Context and relates them to the texts, beliefs and cultural practices circulating at the same time.
In the early 1980s, the limitation of literary studies to New Criticism was often perceived as an oppressive limitation. The increasing incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of post-structuralist research appeared as the isolation of humanities from the rest of society. Through the New Historicism , contemporary political references could be established and contemporary issues could be analyzed contextually.
The New Historicism is made explicitly by the historicism from European character. Historicist hermeneutics was based on the premise that all culturally produced texts reflected the spirit of their time. A simple structural homology between the text and the historical "background" is assumed. Also in the 1970s, operated in German Literature Social history of literature and ideology-critical German went basically from the same premise: A text was the materialistic either criticize conditions of his age or confirm.
Text and context
In New Historicism the question of the way in which literary texts relate to their historical environment is being re-posed. The relationship is now no longer that of work and background , but, borrowing from the theory of intertextuality , that of one text and all other texts in its culture. A text is no longer understood as an aesthetically closed unit, but as a node in a cultural fabric at which numerous threads of discourse overlap. Texts are charged with social energy , creating resonance effects with their cultural environment. A literary text can take topics from its culture in very different ways and also return them to it. So it belongs in a network of social circulation .
Most theorists within the New Historicists therefore understand, based on theories of the ethnologist Clifford Geertz , the whole of history and every culture as a text or a structure of texts . Her interest relates to the " historicity of texts and the textuality of history " (Louis Montrose).
The historicity of texts means that texts are always embedded in a cultural historical environment to which they owe their existence and in which they intervene. They can only be understood from this environment. Literary works are not autonomous (as in Adorno's influential view), but only have a certain degree of relative autonomy. You can become socially productive by z. B. provide models for social roles or reflect on social role behavior yourself.
The textuality of history means that history is not accessible “directly” - there is no “history in itself” - but only through narratives. When history is written, whether in anecdotes, fables, newspaper articles or chronicles, narrative and textual selection patterns are always at work that cannot be detached from the narrated material. The New Historicism thus shares the view of the historian Hayden White , who in Metahistory represents the position of influence (1973) that any historiography is always pre-structured through basic linguistic and rhetorical and literary pattern.
Text and power
New Historicists take on Michel Foucault's position that every text is inscribed in a social power structure of discourses . This power structure is not suppressive, but productive: it makes the production of certain texts possible in the first place, but also acts as a system of rules that regulate what can be said at all.
Literature therefore does not represent an autonomous space that is delimited a priori from the constraints of society . This limit has to be renegotiated regularly. Literary texts also interfere with the power structure of society, can circulate like viruses and support or attack contemporary beliefs. Social behavior is often shaped according to the guidelines of art (think of literary heroes like Goethe's Werther or of film characters who are imitated in everyday life). Conversely, social regulations through censorship and laws regulate what is allowed in literature.
The approach is not only characterized by the metaphor of power, but also by an economic metaphor: It is based on exchange relationships between literature and culture, a circulation of social energies and the negotiation of artistic and non-artistic aspects.
object
The New Historicism also expands the subject area. Not only literary works, but all kinds of texts, historical documents, anecdotes and objects can be integrated into literary studies. The selection is not restricted by direct “influence”. All components of a synchronous cross section through an epoch can be related to the analyzed text.
Selecting the “right” material is therefore the task of the researcher. There are no fixed structures within a culture that could determine what an appropriate context for a particular text could be. Stephen Greenblatt's essays in particular make it clear that literary work must always be aware of its contingency . Finally, the researcher himself writes from a historical point of view that already preselects possible interests and perspectives.
history
Stephen Greenblatt's book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980) or its introduction to the magazine Genre (1982) are viewed as the beginning of New Historicism . In the latter, Greenblatt also coined the terms “New Historicism” and “poetics of culture” for a new cognitive interest in literary studies. Based on Greenblatt's faculty at the University of Berkeley, the new theory school was initially heavily discussed in the USA, recognized within a few years, institutionalized and established as a “new orthodoxy” alongside New Criticism . Although developed in Renaissance research, the theory was quickly generalized and is now applied to a wide variety of research subjects.
From the very beginning, New Historicism was a reservoir for a wide variety of approaches in gender studies , African-American studies and cultural studies . In the USA, as a genuinely interdisciplinary paradigm, it could very quickly become an integrating model within the humanities . As early as 1989 , Louis Montrose described "New Historicism" as the "newest orthodoxy" in American literary studies; at the same time the approach was taken up in specialist dictionaries.
What is particularly important is the approach to reorientation of literary studies to cultural studies , for which knowledge from all subject areas, especially from the natural sciences, can become the subject of research. It is intended to reintegrate the individual humanities into a research field and also counteract the division into “ two cultures ” ( CP Snow ).
At the beginning of the 1990s , New Historicism was also perceived by a wider public in German literary studies. Since German studies , unlike American literary studies , has an almost unbroken tradition of historical text reading, there was less catching up to do in practical literary research than in the methodological and terminological field. The New Historicism was therefore included far more subdued than in the US. In the meantime, however, its potential for the reorientation of literary studies as cultural studies has been recognized. The journal KulturPoetik , founded in 2001 , expressly sees itself as a forum for cultural-scientific, interdisciplinary research based on New Historicism.
literature
- General literature
- Moritz Baßler (Ed.): New Historicism. History of literature as the poetics of culture (= Fischer. 11589 Fischer Wissenschaft ). Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-11589-2 (2nd, updated edition. (= UTB . 2265 Literary Studies. ). Francke, Tübingen et al. 2001, ISBN 3-8252-2265-9 ).
- Catherine Gallagher, Stephen Greenblatt : Practicing New Historicism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL et al. 2000, ISBN 0-226-27934-0 .
- Jürg Glauser, Annegret Heitmann (ed.): Negotiations with New Historicism. The text-context problem in literary studies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1436-7 .
- Stephen Greenblatt: Dirty Rites. Reflections between worldviews (= small cultural studies library. Vol. 33). From the American by Jeremy Gaines. Wagenbach, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-8031-5133-3 .
- Stephen Greenblatt: Negotiations with Shakespeare. Interior views of the English Renaissance (= Fischer. 11001). From the American by Robin Cackett. Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-596-11001-7 .
- H. Aram Veeser (Ed.): The New Historicism. Routledge, New York NY et al. 1989, ISBN 0-415-90069-7 .
- Trade journal
- Culture Poetics . Journal for cultural history literary studies. 2000 ff., ISSN 1616-1203 .
