New Historicism / Cultural Materialism

NEW HISTORICISM: a rather unspecific term describing a revival of interest, among some American critics since 1982 when Stephen Greenblatt, in a special issue of Genre, used this term to describe a new kind of historically based criticism that studied literary works within their historical and political contexts. Emerging in reaction against the successive ahistorical orthodoxies of New Criticism, myth criticism, and deconstruction, the new historicism draws upon post-structuralist theories of discourse, Marxist theories of ideology, and the work of British literary historians. Prominent among the new historicist critics in the study of Renaissance literature are Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Goldberg; but the trend has also appeared in studies of 19th-century British and American literatures.

New historicism differs from old or traditional historicism in several ways. Following Michel Foucault, it argues that "man" is a construct of social and historical circumstances and not an autonomous agent of historical change. There is nothing essential about the actions of human beings; there is no such thing as "human nature." Instead, individuals undergo a process of subjectification, which on one hand shapes them as conscious initiators of action, but on the other hand places them in social networks and cultural codes that exceed their comprehension or control. Since each individual’s way of thinking is shaped by this process, it follows that the historian is also a product of subjectification, which is always partly informed by the past. This last point is very important to new historicism, for it reforms our ideas of what history may be. Instead of a body of indisputable, retrievable facts, history becomes textualized; that is, it becomes a group of linguistic traces that can be recalled, but which are always mediated through the historian/interpreter. Objective history is therefore an impossibility; every account is just that—another text, and like any novel, play, or poem, it is open to the same kind of critical interpretive scrutiny.

Since historical accounts are texts and must be evaluated as such, and since, by extension, history itself is a large amorphous text consisting of various and often disparate accounts, the relation of history to literature changes radically in new historicism. No longer does history act as the background to literary texts, and no longer are historical accounts considered reliable and unproblematic representations of what really went on during a particular time. In this respect, new historicism has attempted to eradicate distinctions between literature and history, arguing that each partakes of the other and that both participate in social networks and deploy cultural codes that cannot be fully articulated. Thus, one characteristic of new historicist criticism has been its extensive use of historical or nonliterary texts in its discussion of more traditional literary works.

New historicism has also been concerned to portray itself as politicized criticism. Again borrowing from Foucault, new historicists argue that homogeneous depictions of an era or of a way of thinking incorrectly invalidate the truly disparage and often contentious activities taking place in that age. New historicists repudiate, or in their words, "refuse," the idea of an "Elizabethan worldview" or a Victorian frame of mind," etc., and have often tried to show instead how structures of power ultimately reabsorb opposition and dissent, thus giving the appearance of a homogeneous or totalized society. The purpose of their investigations, they argue, is not only to show how dominant ideas and power structures can subvert radicalization in bygone eras, but how such domination also impinges on our own political choices.

CULTURAL MATERIALISM: originated with the English critic Raymond Williams, who sought to describe a form of critical activity in the Marxist tradition that remains a materialism but avoids the trap of attempting to understand all cultural activities as mere effects of the economic base. Beginning from the Marxist thesis that social being determines consciousness and insisting that culture must be understood as "a whole social process," Williams analyzed a wide variety of cultural forms, from canonical literature to television and other forms of popular culture, producing a body of work that has had considerable influence on younger generations of critics.

The theories of cultural materialism are based on an analytic understanding of what "culture" is about. There are (at least) two ways of using the word "culture." The analytic one is used in the social sciences and especially anthropology: it seeks to describe the whole system of significations by which a society or a section of it understands itself and its relations with the world. The evaluative use has been more common when we are thinking about "the arts" and "literature": to be "cultured" is to be the possessor of superior values and a refined sensibility, both of which are manifested through a positive and fulfilling engagement with "good" literature, art, music, and so on.

Cultural Materialism draws upon the analytic sense of "culture," and it includes work on the cultures of subordinate and marginalized, non-hegemonic groups (like schoolchildren and women and gays and people of color and skinheads, etc.), and on cultural forms (like television, popular music, and fiction, etc.). But its effects are perhaps most startling when it is applied to artifacts and practices which have traditionally been prized within the evaluation of culture. In brief, "high culture" is taken as merely one set of signifying practices among others.

"Materialism" is opposed to "idealism": it insists that culture does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it. Cultural materialism therefore studies the implication of literary texts in history.

In recent years, cultural materialists have often chosen to investigate the contemporary reception of canonical texts and have devoted much energy to the study of Shakespeare as a cultural institution. This work is characteristic of current cultural materialism and offers a politically charged critique of the customary attitude of reverence toward the Shakespearean canon. As an example: a play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its production--to the economic and political system of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to the particular institutions of culture production (the court, patronage, theatre, education and the church); moreover, the relevant history is not just that of four hundred years ago, for culture is made continuously and Shakespeare's text is reconstructed, reappraised, reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts such that what and how Shakespeare's plays signify depends on the cultural field in which they are situated.

N.B.: Cultural materialism is a perhaps more inter-disciplinary term than New Historicism, yet in general conversation both terms are often interchangeable.