Introduction to New Historicism, Michel Foucault & Stephen Greenblatt
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Introduction to New Historicism
New Historicism is a literary theory that proposes to understand Literature in connection with culture, politics, history and social realities. New Historicism argues that artistic work is not detached from the social and cultural practices of the times. It was first developed around 1980 by Stephen Greenblatt.
New Historicism proposed that an artistic entity is a product of the social and cultural circumstances in times in which the entity was produced. It is based on the following principles –
A work of art is a part of material practices within society. It states that a work of fiction cannot be totally detached from non-fiction. It further states that a fictional entity is attached to history.
New Historicism fundamentally is defined as a theory that analyzes a text in connection with political and historical realities. Thus New Historicism is the opposite of New Criticism. While New Criticism focused only on the purity of the text, on the other hand, New Historicism rejects the idea of text as an isolated, pure concept.
New Historicism states that a text is not divorced from external agents of influence such as economics, societal influences, and material circumstances. New Historicism also proposes that there is no absolute boundary between fiction and history.
Thus fiction is to be understood through history and history is to be understood through fiction. New Historicism also tells that fiction and non-fiction are not totally separate from each other.
So any artistic production also becomes a medium of political expression. The act of reading and understanding a text happens at the site of performance in the outside world. For instance – A particular book may also tell a lot about its historical backdrop through its storytelling.
New Historicism rejects the idea of art as a purely aesthetic concept. It instead argues that art is connected with material realities in which an artistic entity was produced. Within New Historicism, the emphasis is not on the internal details of a text.
The emphasis of New Historicism is on the external agents surrounding a text. Stephen Greenblatt’s discourse on Shakespeare has led to a breakthrough in the field of New Historicism in which Greenblatt has proposed to rewrite Shakespeare’s legacy through interaction with political, cultural, material, social, economic and historical themes.
For instance – Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, at a certain point was only read as an artistic work. But New Historicism has given a chance to read the play through a post-colonial lens. Some of the scholars associated with New Historicism are Stuart Hall, Raymond William, and Stephen Greenblatt.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and literary critic. Michel Foucault paved the way for post-modernism. His theories dealt with the tussle between power and knowledge.
According to Foucault, knowledge is controlled by people who have power. So the discourse of knowledge is driven by power. In other words, it has been argued by Foucault that knowledge is not purely free or autonomous from power. Thus knowledge also becomes a form of social control.
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, 1975, talked about a history of prison and punishment carried out by a lawful state to create a sense of fear among the people of the state. The book used the metaphor of prison to argue that the state controls people not by capturing their bodies but the state controls people by capturing their minds and their souls.
It meant that the government uses fear of the penalty attached to a crime to control the minds of people. So the site of control and oppression has shifted from the body to the mind or soul. The book also brought forward an idea of surveillance. Surveillance is the act of watching over or spying on a person or multiple persons.
According to Michel Foucault, surveillance is the weapon used by a nation or state to control the lives of free citizens through fear, conditioning, consensus and ideology.
Surveillance is a more intelligent and subtle form of control based on the minds of people rather than their physical bodies. So the book following the metaphor of prison argues that life itself is a prison and our souls and lives are prisoners in this prison because the state ultimately wants to control people rather than letting people be.
The History of Sexuality, 1976, argues that sexuality is not a determined or fixed fact. Sexuality is a social construct that can be changed. So men and women can experience within their lives a transformation of genders.
In a way, this book liberated the idea of homosexuality from the shackles of orthodox laws and traditions. According to the book, sexuality is not a fixed concept but is a rather fluid and malleable concept.
Michel Foucault did not have complete faith in the judiciary institution. According to him, the idea of justice is also attached to power. It is ultimately a desire for power that controls knowledge and justice. Michel Foucault’s other notable works include Madness and Civilization, 1964, The Order of Things, 1966.
Stephen Greenblatt
Stephen Greenblatt is an American Literary critic. He was born in the year, 1943. He served as the Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Greenblatt is one of the founders of new historicism which is also known as cultural poetics.
He used the term, New Historicism in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. New Historicism is a literary theory that attempts to understand intellectual history through an engagement between literature and cultural contexts. It tries to establish a connection between literature, history, culture, and social aspects.
According to the theory, Literature or understanding of literature is not divorced from cultural backgrounds. Stephen Greenblatt stated that Literature is not isolated from social and cultural themes.
He also believes that a text is shaped by the external agents around itself. It means that an author’s mindset is shaped by social and cultural responses between author and engagements with the world.
Stephen Greenblatt is prominent for his extensive works on William Shakespeare. He is the editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2015) and the general editor and a contributor to The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Stephen Greenblatt in his discourse on Shakespeare argued that Shakespeare’s drama should be analyzed through cultural and social themes rather than in isolation.
Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987) is a book by Stephen Greenblatt in which he discussed how art and society are interrelated. According to Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s plays are supposed to be read in connection with the cultural practices and social, political realities of the times in which we live.
He argued that Shakespeare’s drama is not meant to be read or understood purely as works of fiction. He further argued that such artistic works must create an academic discourse where readers and scholars engage with the politics and the culture in their times.
It becomes that a text becomes connected with history and politics existing in the world. Stephen Greenblatt argued that a text is an academic engagement with the problems of the world. And the text becomes a medium to understand the history and evoke questions and ideas about the problems in societies.
Some of his prominent books are Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, 1989, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1992, Hamlet in Purgatory, 2002, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, 2005, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 1980, The Greenblatt Reader, 2005, Shakespeare’s Freedom, 2010, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, 2017, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, 2018.
