Modernism:
As a term, modernism is most often used to identify the most distinctive forms, styles, concepts, and sensibilities in literature and art from roughly WWI to the post-WWII years. Since it is a broad intellectual movement, modernism varies widely in specific features, but most critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with the traditional bases of both Western culture and Western art. Modernists were writers and artists who questioned the certainties and standard truths that had previously provided support systems for all social organization, religion, morality, and the conception of the human self. Modernists were influenced by late 19th century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Darwin. They were especially influenced by the savagery and slaughter of WWI.
The modernist revolt against traditional literary and artistic forms and subjects manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of WWI, which shook human faith in the continuity and foundations of Western culture. The inherited mode of ordering a literary or artistic work—and for that matter of ordering the world—assumed a relatively stable and coherent worldview. But there was a general shattering of traditional beliefs and foundational truths after WWI, and there was a general emergence of a belief in the futility and meaningless of life, that the world was characterized by disorder rather than order, by anarchy rather than stability. Experimenting with new forms and styles, modernists explored the dislocation and fragmentation of parts rather than the traditional artistic concept of unity. Modernist writers subverted the conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language. Such techniques have obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the modernist paintings of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism as well as in the violations of standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist composers (Stravinsky, Copeland).
A prominent feature of modernism is the attempt to be “avant-garde,” a military term for “advance-guard.” Quite self-consciously, authors and artists attempted to, in Pound’s famous phrase, “make it new.” By violating accepted conventions and decorums, they undertook to create new artistic forms and styles and to introduce neglected, often forbidden subjects. Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy. Their aim is often to shock the sensibilities of their audiences and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.
Literary Characteristics: free verse, stream-of-consciousness, objective correlative, imagism, multiple points-of-view, broken or fragmentary narratives, iceberg narratives, alienated characters, defiance of traditional values.
Joyce, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Conrad, Proust, Woolf, Pirandello, Brecht
Post-Modernism:
The often disputed term postmodernism is applied to the literature and art produced after World War II, when the disastrous effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi Totalitarianism and European Fascism, the mass exterminations and horror of WWII, the threat of total destruction by the atom bomb, the devastation of the natural environment, the space age, and the ominous threats of overpopulation and starvation. The term generally applies to a cultural condition prevailing in advanced, industrialized capitalist western societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles, most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, postmodernism is said to be a culture or aesthetic sense of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, and promiscuous and random superficiality, in which the traditional values of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and structure are evacuated or dissolved in a colorful chaos of signals. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, carried to an extreme, of the counter-traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms that had become conventional and familiar by the latter half of the twentieth century. A familiar undertaking in postmodernist writings is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying abyss or void (or nothingness) on which our supposed security is precariously suspended. In recent developments in linguistic and literary theory, there is an effort to subvert the foundations of language itself, so as to demonstrate that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates into a play of indeterminacies. In the most basic (and crude) terms, a postmodern writer or artist does not attempt to wrest meaning from the world through the traditional methods of myth, symbol, and artistic complexity but instead embraces the meaningless confusion and absurdity of contemporary existence with either indifference or flippant enthusiasm. Often postmodern writers write about writing itself (metafiction, or fiction about fiction), in which a narrator reflects critically on the lack of coherence in his or her own writing. Postmodernism as a term is generally not applied to poetry or drama but more often to fiction and art. Some writers often discussed as postmodern are Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass, Angela Carter, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, and William Golding.
Monday, November 15, 2010
John Winthop's "A Model of Christian Charity"
--lay sermon delivered on board the Arbella, the flagship vessel of a fleet carrying some 700 passengers during the "Great Migration" in 1629-1630. Some 20 thousand settlers journeyed to New England during the "Great Migration"
--sermon deals with ideals of Christian charity that must be realized if colony was to succeed in its divine errand--and also to survive the harsh conditions
--Winthrop argued that the settlers had to form a commonwealth for the mutual benefit of all and that their society had to be able to withstand the scrutiny of a hostile world--social cohesion and social commitment were required.
From the Text:
--God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich[,] some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in subjection.
--wee are a Company professing our selves fellow members of Christ
--for the worke wee have in hand, it is by mutuall consent through a speciall overruling providence, and a more then an ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ to seeke out a place of Cohabitation and Consortship under a due form of government both civill and ecclesiastical. . . . The end is to improve our lives to doe more service to the Lord
--That which the most in their Churches maintain as a truth in profession only, wee must bring into familiar and constant practise, as in this duty of love wee must love brotherly without dissimulation, wee must love one another with a pure hearte fervently, wee must beare one anothers burthens
--Thus stands the cause betweene God and us, wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke, wee have taken out a Commission, the Lord hath given us leave to drawe our owne Articles . . . Now if the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in peace to the place wee desire, then hath hee ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strickt performance of the Articles contained in it, but if wee shall neglect the observation of these Articles which are the ends wee have propounded, and dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnall intencions, seeking greater things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us[,] be revenged of such a perjured people[,] and make us know the price of the breach of such a Covenant
--we must be knit together as one man
--for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are uppon us [reference to Matthew 5: 14-15, "Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid."]
--But if our heartes shall turne away soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other Gods our pleasures, and proffitts, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good Land whither wee passe over this vast Sea to possess it
--lay sermon delivered on board the Arbella, the flagship vessel of a fleet carrying some 700 passengers during the "Great Migration" in 1629-1630. Some 20 thousand settlers journeyed to New England during the "Great Migration"
--sermon deals with ideals of Christian charity that must be realized if colony was to succeed in its divine errand--and also to survive the harsh conditions
--Winthrop argued that the settlers had to form a commonwealth for the mutual benefit of all and that their society had to be able to withstand the scrutiny of a hostile world--social cohesion and social commitment were required.
From the Text:
--God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich[,] some poore, some high and eminent in power and dignitie; others mean and in subjection.
--wee are a Company professing our selves fellow members of Christ
--for the worke wee have in hand, it is by mutuall consent through a speciall overruling providence, and a more then an ordinary approbation of the Churches of Christ to seeke out a place of Cohabitation and Consortship under a due form of government both civill and ecclesiastical. . . . The end is to improve our lives to doe more service to the Lord
--That which the most in their Churches maintain as a truth in profession only, wee must bring into familiar and constant practise, as in this duty of love wee must love brotherly without dissimulation, wee must love one another with a pure hearte fervently, wee must beare one anothers burthens
--Thus stands the cause betweene God and us, wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke, wee have taken out a Commission, the Lord hath given us leave to drawe our owne Articles . . . Now if the Lord shall please to heare us, and bring us in peace to the place wee desire, then hath hee ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission, and will expect a strickt performance of the Articles contained in it, but if wee shall neglect the observation of these Articles which are the ends wee have propounded, and dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnall intencions, seeking greater things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us[,] be revenged of such a perjured people[,] and make us know the price of the breach of such a Covenant
--we must be knit together as one man
--for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are uppon us [reference to Matthew 5: 14-15, "Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid."]
--But if our heartes shall turne away soe that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other Gods our pleasures, and proffitts, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good Land whither wee passe over this vast Sea to possess it
"Self-Reliance" Passages
(First published in Essays, 1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
To believe your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,--that is genius.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better of securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. . . . No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is what is against it. . . . I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what people think. . . . It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you, is that it scatters your force. . . . If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote with the great party either for the Government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, --under all those screens, I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. . . If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.
For non-conformity, the world whips you with its displeasure.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word. . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . .
It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Travelling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so not by rambling round creation as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where they were. . . Travelling is a fool’s paradise.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but loses so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. . . . His notebooks impair the memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber . . .
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is a want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem what they call the soul’s progress, namely the religious, learned, and civil institutions, as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other, by what each has, and not by what each is.
(First published in Essays, 1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)
To believe your own thoughts, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,--that is genius.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the members agree for the better of securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. . . . No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is what is against it. . . . I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what people think. . . . It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you, is that it scatters your force. . . . If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-Society, vote with the great party either for the Government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, --under all those screens, I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. . . If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument.
For non-conformity, the world whips you with its displeasure.
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word. . . . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. . .
It is for want of self-culture that the idol of Travelling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so not by rambling round creation as a moth round a lamp, but by sticking fast where they were. . . Travelling is a fool’s paradise.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but loses so much support of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. . . . His notebooks impair the memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber . . .
And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is a want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem what they call the soul’s progress, namely the religious, learned, and civil institutions, as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other, by what each has, and not by what each is.
A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1588
Thomas Harriot
They are a people clothed with loose mantles made of deer skins, and aprons of the same round about their middles, all else naked . . . having no edge tools or weapons of iron or steel to offend us.
If there fall out any wars between us and them, what their fight is likely to be, we having advantages against them in so many manner of ways, as by our discipline, our strange weapons and devises, especially Ordinance great and small, it may easily be imagined: by the experiences we have had in some places, the turning up of their heels . . . running away was their best defense.
I respect of us, they are but a poor people, and for want of skill and judgment in the knowledge and use of things, do esteem trifles before things of greater value.
Most things they saw with us, as Mathematical instruments, sea Compasses, the virtue of the load-stone [magnet] in drawing iron, a perspective glass [telescope] whereby was showed many strange sights, burning glasses [magnifying glass], wild fireworks, guns, books, writing and reading, spring clocks that seem to go of themselves, and many other things we had that were so strange unto them, and so far exceeded their capacities to comprehend . . . that they thought they were the works of gods then men, or at leastwise they been given and taught us of gods. Which made many of them to have such opinion of us, as that if they knew not the truth of God and Religion already, it was rather to be had from us whom God so specially loved, than from a people that were so simple.
Thomas Harriot
They are a people clothed with loose mantles made of deer skins, and aprons of the same round about their middles, all else naked . . . having no edge tools or weapons of iron or steel to offend us.
If there fall out any wars between us and them, what their fight is likely to be, we having advantages against them in so many manner of ways, as by our discipline, our strange weapons and devises, especially Ordinance great and small, it may easily be imagined: by the experiences we have had in some places, the turning up of their heels . . . running away was their best defense.
I respect of us, they are but a poor people, and for want of skill and judgment in the knowledge and use of things, do esteem trifles before things of greater value.
Most things they saw with us, as Mathematical instruments, sea Compasses, the virtue of the load-stone [magnet] in drawing iron, a perspective glass [telescope] whereby was showed many strange sights, burning glasses [magnifying glass], wild fireworks, guns, books, writing and reading, spring clocks that seem to go of themselves, and many other things we had that were so strange unto them, and so far exceeded their capacities to comprehend . . . that they thought they were the works of gods then men, or at leastwise they been given and taught us of gods. Which made many of them to have such opinion of us, as that if they knew not the truth of God and Religion already, it was rather to be had from us whom God so specially loved, than from a people that were so simple.
Monday, November 8, 2010
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. Barry’s example, Montrose’s essay on Fantasies, reinforces the idea that literature plays off reality and reality plays off literature.
"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 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
Differences Between New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
As we have seen 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.
--from www.cultmatnewhist.blogspot.com
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. Barry’s example, Montrose’s essay on Fantasies, reinforces the idea that literature plays off reality and reality plays off literature.
"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 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
Differences Between New Historicism and Cultural Materialism
As we have seen 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.
--from www.cultmatnewhist.blogspot.com
Monday, November 1, 2010
Wordsworth
The World is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
That winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
--William Wordsworth, 1807
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
That winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
--William Wordsworth, 1807
Thoreau
Passages from "Economy"
I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and every where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.
But I wonder if herds are not the keepers of men than men the keepers of herds.
Most men . . . are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day . . . He has not time to be anything but a machine.
It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live . . . trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt . . . always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick . . .
Talk of the divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty is to fodder and water his horses.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and every where, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.
But I wonder if herds are not the keepers of men than men the keepers of herds.
Most men . . . are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day . . . He has not time to be anything but a machine.
It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live . . . trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt . . . always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow, and dying to-day, insolvent; seeking to curry favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not state-prison offenses; lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import his groceries for him; making yourselves sick . . .
Talk of the divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty is to fodder and water his horses.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
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