Chapter 9: New Historical and Cultural Criticism

Tyson begins this chapter by reminding us that critical theories overlap with one another in a number of ways and she summarizes the main theme of each of the distinct critical theories we have covered thus far:

• Marxism attempts to revel the ways in which our socioeconomic system is the ultimate source of our experience

• Feminism attempts to reveal the ways in which patriarchal gender roles are the ultimate source of our experience

• Psychoanalysis attempts to reveal the ways in which repressed psychological conflicts are the ultimate source of our experience

• Structuralism attempts to reveal the simple structural system that make possible our understanding of an otherwise chaotic world, and

• Reader-response theory attempts to reveal the operations whereby readers create the text they read.

As we see with the two-theoretical approaches that will be covered in this posting, there is so much overlap between new historicism and cultural criticism, it is important to differentiate the two by discussing each filed separately.

I did not realize it until I began reading the chapter New Historical Criticism is largely based on the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) who in recent decades has been the most talked about of French intellectuals. Foucault was a historian who was concerned with real human being in the midst of the material conditions of their lives. His vivid description of the lepers in the Middle Ages, or the prison cells and factory building of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exemplifies the kind of baseline from which Foucault worked, and which keep him immune form the idealist tendencies of the strurcturalist and poststructuralist intellectuals. Foucault always had his eye on power, control, struggle, and historical change. The same time, he was concerned with the history of ideas. However, this did not mean a history of intellectuals; it meant the history of ideas and practice, practice of the doctors, the prisoner reformers, the psychiatrist, and the factory managers whom Foucault studied. According to Foucault discourse is a system of language that excludes or constrains what can be know by what can be said and expressed with language. Foucault suggests that there are three great forms of exclusion: the division between madness and reason; prohibited words; and will to truth.

Tyson (1999) provides clear distinction between the two approaches of understanding history from a traditional historical perspective and new historicists, which is made clear in questions asked by each. Traditional historian says, “What happened?” and “What did the event tell us about history?” in contrast, new historic’s ask, “How has the event and interpretive?” and “What do the interpretations tell us about the interpreters?” On page 287, she provides six points to review of the concepts:

1. A writing a history is a matter of interpretation, not found. Thus, all historical accounts are narratives and can be analyzed using many of the tools used by literary critics analyze narrative.
2. History is needed in your (it does not proceed neatly from cause A to effect B and from cause B to effect C) nor progressive (the human species is not steadily improving over the course of time).
3. Power is never wholly confined to a single person or a single level of society. Rather, power circulates in our culture the exchange is a material goods, exchanges of human beings, and most important for literary critics, as well be below, exchanges of ideas through the various discourse is a culture produces.
4. A dismal monolithic (single, unify universal) spirit of an age, and there is no adequate totalizing we use this (an explanation that provides a single key to all aspects of a given culture). There’s only a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses, the meanings of which the historian can try to analyze, through the analysis will always be incomplete, accounting for all the a part of the historical picture.
5. Personal identity – like historical events, text, and artifacts – is shaped by and shapes the culture in which it emerges. Thus, cultural categories such as normal and abnormal, sane and insane, are matters of definition. Put another way, our individual identity consists of the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we draw the material for our narratives from the circulation of discourses that constitutes our culture.
6. All historical analysis is unavoidably subjective. Historians must therefore review of the ways in which they know they have been positioned, by their own cultural experiences, to interpret history.

Cultural criticism shares with new historicism the view that human history and culture constitutes a complex arena of dynamic forces in which we can construct only a partial, subjective picture. For cultural critics, culture is a process, not a product; it is a good experience, not a fixed definition. More precisely, a culture is a collection of interactive cultures, each of which is growing and changing, each of which is constituted at any given moment in time by the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, occupation, and similar factors that contribute to the experience of its members. The

To summarize the theoretical premise of cultural criticism, Tyson offers three instances on page 294.

1. “Cultural criticism tends to be more overtly political unit support of oppressed groups.
2. Because of its political orientation, cultural criticism often draws upon Marxist, feminists, and other political theories and performing its analysis.
3. Cultural criticism, in the narrow sense of the term, is especially interested in popular culture".

In conclusion, it is important to remember when cultural criticism the operations of oppression, it does not view oppressed peoples, as political theories sometimes do, as helpless victims. Rather, like new historicism, cultural criticism views oppressed people as both victimized by the dominant power structure and capable of resisting or transforming the power structure.