New Historicism

New Historicism (English: " New Historicism " ) is a theory the direction of Literature, which was developed in the 1980s at the University of Berkeley. Other designations are Poetics of Culture and Cultural Poetics. As a leading theorist of the New Historicism is true of the American literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt.

Theory

Opponents: New Criticism and Historicism

The New Historicism is regarded as a countermovement to the New Criticism, which since the 1930s prevailing in the American Literary Studies Theory direction. While New Criticists, and later post-structuralism and deconstruction, focused on analyzing literary texts according to their internal structure, without regard to their historical origins and its contemporary context, the New Historicism literary texts back to their own cultural context and puts them in conjunction with the same time circulating texts, beliefs and cultural practices.

Beginning of the 80s the restriction of Literary Studies at the New Criticism was often perceived as oppressive restriction. The increasing incomprehensibility and inaccessibility of poststructuralist research appeared as isolation of the Humanities from the rest of society. Through the New Historicism contemporary political references were made ​​again and present topics contextualist analyzes.

The New Historicism is also explicitly from the historicism of European character. The historicist hermeneutics started from the premise that all texts culturally produced reflected the spirit of their time. This is based on a simple structural homology between text and historical "background". The operated in the 70 years in the German literature social history of literature and the ideology-critical German went basically from the same premise: A text could materialistic requirements of his era either criticize or confirm.

Text and Context

In New Historicism now is the question of the manner how literary texts relate to their historical surroundings, made ​​new. The relationship is now no longer the work of and background, but, under bonds of the theory of intertextuality that. From a text to all other texts of its culture A text is no longer perceived as aesthetically cohesive unit, but as a node in a cultural fabric in which overlap several discourse threads. Texts are charged with social energy, thereby producing resonance effects with their cultural environment. A literary text can be found in very different ways from his cultural themes and back to her again as well. So he belongs to a network of social circulation.

Most theorists within the Historic New ITR understand why, inspired by theories of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, the whole story and every culture as a text or structure of texts. Your interest refers to the " historicity of texts and the textuality of history" ( Louis Montrose ).

The historicity of texts means that texts are always embedded in a cultural historical context to which they owe their existence and in which they are included. Only in this environment, they are out to understand. Literary works are not autonomous (as after Adorno's influential opinion ), but only have a certain degree of relative autonomy. They can be socially productive, in which they, for example, Specify models for social roles or reflect on social role behavior itself.

Textuality of history means that history is not "directly" accessible - there is no " story itself " - but only on stories. When history is written, whether in anecdotes, fables, newspaper articles or chronicles, are always already narrative and textual selection patterns at work, which can not be detached from the narrated material. The New Historicism thus shares the view of the historian Hayden White, who represents the influential position in Metahistory (1973 ) that each historiography is always pre-structured by fundamental linguistic and literary patterns.

Text and power

New Historic ISTS assume the position of Michel Foucault that any text is inscribed in a social power structure of discourse. This power structure does not oppressive, but productive: it makes the production of certain texts at all possible, but also acts as a system of rules that regulates what can be said at all.

Literature therefore does not represent an autonomous space that is delimited by the constraints of society a priori. This limit must be periodically renegotiated. Literary texts also engage in the power structure of society, how can circulate viruses and support contemporary beliefs or attack. Social behavior is often formed according to the specifications of art (think of literary heroes like Goethe's Werther or movie characters that are imitated in daily life). Conversely regulate social rules by censorship laws and what is allowed in the literature.

Subject

The New Historicism also expands the subject matter. No longer only literary works, but all kinds of texts, historical documents, anecdotes and objects can be integrated into a literary reading. The choice is not limited by direct " influence". All components of a synchronous cross-section through an epoch can be related to the analyzed text.

The selection of the "right " material is thus the task of the researcher. There are no fixed structures within a culture that could determine which might be an appropriate context to a specific text. In particular, the essays by Stephen Greenblatt make it clear that literary work, must always remain aware of their contingency. Even the researchers themselves finally writes from a historical point of view, the already selected for possible interests and perspectives.

History

The inception of the New Historicism Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self- Fashioning book are optional: From More to Shakespeare ( 1980) or the introduction to the magazine genre ( 1982) considered. In the latter Greenblatt also characterizes the terms " New Historicism " and " poetics of culture" for a new research interest in literary studies. Starting from Greenblatt faculty at the University of Berkeley, the new theory school was initially heated debate in the U.S., was recognized within a few years, institutionalized and established itself as a " new orthodoxy " next to the New Criticism. Although it was developed in the Renaissance research, the theory was generalized rapidly and is now being applied to a vast amount of research subjects.

New Historicism has been involved from the outset been a melting pot for many different approaches to gender studies, African- American Studies, Cultural Studies. So he could very quickly in the United States as a genuinely interdisciplinary paradigm for integrating vision within the humanities. As early as 1989 called Louis Montrose the " New Historicism " as the " latest orthodoxy " of American literature; at the same time, the mixture was taken up in encyclopaedias.

Significance is mainly the re-orientation approach to the study of literature to cultural studies, for the knowledge from all subject areas, especially in the natural sciences, can become the object of research. You should integrate the individual humanities back in a field of research and also the division into " two cultures" (CP Snow) counteract.

At the beginning of the 90s, the New Historicism was also perceived in the German literature by a wider public. Since the German, has, unlike the American Literary Studies, an almost unbroken tradition of historical text reading, a pent-up demand in the practical literature research was less present than on methodological and terminological field. The New Historicism was therefore far more modest added than in the U.S.. Meanwhile, however, his potential was recognized for the reorientation of literary studies as cultural studies. The Journal KulturPoetik founded in 2001 to be expressly understood as a forum for cultural studies, oriented on New Historicism interdisciplinary research.