Anyhow, hello!
Our last Sunday's discussion of Macbeth was exceptionally layered, articulate, and interesting...though there had certainly been some trepidation to take on Shakespeare vs. one of our more general philosophical discussions. We may revisit the reading of a play or story or book again in the future, but for now, back to a general philosophical topic: Springing vaguely off Macbeth's "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player /That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more" it seemed compelling to all of us to look a bit more at history and historical context for the next banter. We wondered why, for example, there would be such existentialist-like lines in Shakespeare's play (like the above) beside lines about heaven/hell, and lines about superstition/fate.
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| Put it down, Lady Macbeth! It's not going to be worth it - Put it down! |
I have attached the prep materials (below) for The Eleventh Banter. There are only 5 pages & they aren't pedantic or tedious, but stirring, particularly for a bunch of skeptics & atheists (not to say that we are all atheists, perhaps some of us just think atheists are amusing to be around).
We will meet to discuss Historical Context Sunday, April 10th, 7pm at the usual locale.
Please RSVP.
See you then,
Sabine
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The Eleventh Banter:
~Consider what you understand about historical and cultural context. How do you see your own historical/cultural context as compared to Shakespeare’s historical/cultural context as compared to an African’s historical/cultural context who was one of the slaves on a ship bound from West Africa to America between 1650 and 1850?
~Consider how your own historical/cultural context influences the lens you are looking through when you look at Shakespeare’s writing of our favored lines in Macbeth. Consider again how your historical/cultural context, or let’s just say embedment, steers what you think about and feel when you consider the African made to U.S. or British slave.
~From the complexity of these considerations arises our eleventh topic: New Historicism. It is a theory in literature that attempts to address complex questions of interpretation of history, whether we are piecing out what we think of Macbeth (as in Banter 10) or what we think of our own places upon the stage, so to speak. New Historicism is just a lens, it’s not a religion, so let us try it on & see what we see (,take it off whenever you like):
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Assumptions underlying the New Historical critical approach
(taken from Judith Newton, "History as Usual?: Feminism and the 'New Historicism,'" Cultural Critique 9 [1988]: 87-121):
(1)"that there is no transhistorical or universal human essence and that human subjectivity is constructed by cultural codes which position and limit all of us in various and divided ways" (88).
a) Instead of the autonomous "self" or "individual," these critics speak of subject positions that are socially and linguistically constructed, created by various discourses of a given culture.
b) They are influenced by the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who focused upon the intricately structured power relations in a given culture at a given time to demonstrate how that society controls its members through constructing and defining what appear to be "universal" and "natural" truths.
c) They are skeptical toward any "universalizing" or "totalizing" claims, focusing rather on the specificities of a particular historical and cultural context.
(2)"that there is no 'objectivity,' that we experience the 'world' in language, and that all our representations of the world, our readings of texts and of the past, are informed by our own historical position, by the values and politics that are rooted in them" (88).
a) They emphasize the necessity for self-awareness on the part of the critic, who must be constantly aware of the difficulties of seeing the past except through the lenses and cultural constructs of the present.
(3)"that representation 'makes things happen' by 'shaping human consciousness' and that, as forces acting in history, various forms of representation ought to be read in relation to each other and in relation to non-discursive 'texts' like 'events'" (88-89).
a) Critics need to look not only at the historical causes of literary works, but also at their consequences.
b) In a process of thick description, they link literary works with many other cultural phenomena of a period, including the discourse of "popular culture" and of areas like economics, law, medicine, politics, etc.
i) In anthropology and other fields, a thick description of a human behavior is one that explains not just the behavior, but its context as well, such that the behavior becomes meaningful to an outsider (from Wikipedia).
New Historicism shares the above assumptions with what is often called Cultural Studies.
What is the New Historicism?
(Taken from a Bedford Critical Edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, editor John Paul Riquelme, 1998, p405-)
The title of Brook Thomas’s The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (1991) is telling. Whenever an emergent theory, movement, method, approach, or group gets labeled with the adjective “new,” trouble is bound to ensue, for what is new today is either established, old, or forgotten tomorrow. Few of you will have heard of the band called “The New Kids on the Block.” New Age bookshops and jewelry may seem “old hat” by the time this introduction is published. […]
New historicist critics are less fact- and event-oriented than historical critics used to be, perhaps because they have come to wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely and objectively known. They are less likely to see history as linear and progressive, as something developing toward the present or the future (“teleological”), and they are also less likely to think of it in terms of specific eras, each with a definite, persistent, and consistent Zeitgeist (“spirit of the times”). Consequently, they are unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily identifiable historical context.
[…] Due in large part to Clifford Geertz’s anthropological influence, new historicists such as Stephen Greenblatt have asserted that literature is not a sphere apart or distinct from the history that is relevant to it. That is what the old criticism tended to do: present the background information you needed to know before you could fully appreciate the separate world of art. The new historicist have used what Geertz would call “thick description” to blur distinctions, not only between history and the other social sciences but also between background and foreground, historical and literary materials, political and poetical events. They have erased the old boundary line dividing historical and literary materials, showing that the production of one of Shakespeare’s historical plays was a political act and historical event, while at the same time showing that the coronation of Elizabeth I was carried out with the same care for staging and symbol lavished on works of dramatic art.
In addition to breaking down barriers that separate literature and history, history and the social sciences, new historicists have reminded us that it is treacherously difficult to reconstruct the past as it really was, rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was. And they know that the job is utterly impossible for those who are unaware of that difficulty and insensitive to the bent or bias of their own historical/cultural vantage point.
[…]
In his introduction to a collection of new historical writings on The New Historicism (1989), H. Aram Veeser stresses the unity among new historicists, not by focusing on common critical procedures but, rather, by outlining five “key assumptions” that “continually reappear and bind together the avowed practitioners and even some of their critics”:
- that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices;
- that every act of unmasking, critique, and oppositions uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes;
- that literary and non-literary texts circulate inseparably;
- that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature;
- finally,…that a critical method and a language adequate to describe culture under capitalism participate in the economy they describe.
--Ross C. Muffin
(I have a superb essay by the new historicist Catherine Gallagher if you have read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which shows New Historicism in action. If you haven’t read Tess it won’t make much sense. Ask me if you want it.)
A brief Shakespearean example of New Historicism, which ties in nicely with our ponderings at Banter 10 on why Shakespeare seemed to be expressing quite the existentialist stance in Macbeth’s “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech alongside heaven/hell and supersition/fate:
(From The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Poetics…by Louis Montrose, p32-)
In As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques sententiously observes that
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
Shakespeare’s plays reveal many traces of the older drama’s intimate connection to the annual agrarian and ecclesiastical cycles. But perhaps more conspicuous and pervasive than these are the connections between Shakespearean comic and tragic forms and the Elizabethan life cycle—the sequence of acts performed in several ages by Jaques’ social players. Typically, Shakespeare generates dramatic action by combining conflicts grounded in such fundamental cultural categories as ethnicity, lineage, generation, gender, political faction, and social rank. Interpersonal conflicts—and also intrapersonal ones—give human and dramatic embodiment to ideological contradictions. Shakespeare frequently focuses dramatic action precisely between the social acts, between the sequential ages, in the fictive lives of his characters. Many of the plays turn upon points of transition in the life cycle—birth, puberty, marriage, death (and, by extension, inheritance and succession)—where discontinuities arise and where adjustments are necessary to basic interrelationships in the family, the household, and the society at large.
These dramatic actions have a partial affinity with rites of passage, which give a social shape, order, and sanction to human existence. Such transition rites impose culture-specific thresholds upon the life cycle; and, by the same symbolic process, they conduct social actors safely from one stage of life to the next. In other words, transition rites mediate the discontinuities, which they themselves have articulated. The theatrical analogy to transition rites is not limited to the fictional space-time within the play. The actual process of theatrical performance, marked off in both time and space from the normal flow and loci of social activity, offered to its audience—and, of course, to its performers—an imaginative experience that partially and temporarily removed them from their normal places, their ascribed subject positions. In this sense, for the Queen’s common subjects, to go to the public playhouse to see a play was to undergo a marginal experience; it was to visit the interstices of the Elizabethan social and cognitive order.
So, you can see by this example, how new historicism really doesn’t separate the interpretation of the “All the world’s a stage” lines with historical influence on those lines being performed in Elizabethan England. It is almost hard to splice the two threads, so closely are they interwoven. This difficulty of looking is precisely what New Historicism attempts to get at.
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One particularly liberating aspect I’ve found with New Historicism in literature or in viewing history is that it lifts off the tendency toward anger—anger at the context of the times, really; but, outwardly anger at the wealthy, white, European male dominance; or anger at industry over nature; or anger at racism; or anger at last year’s wolf hunt. With the wearing of a lens that is truly interested in historical/cultural/educational context somehow I am then purely curious instead of hostile or disappointed in humans yet again. This may be why New Historicism compels me as much as it does.
Please attempt to apply some of what you’ve gleamed of these principles, with your adopted New Historicist lens, by interpreting the below lines. Jot down notes & bring to banter:
AIN'T I A WOMAN?
by Sojourner Truth
Delivered 1851 at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?
Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "intellect"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with women's rights or negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?
Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say.
