2.3. The Marxist Influence:
New Historicism is also marked by the impact of Marxist theory
and particularly two theorists: the American Fredric Jameson and the French
Louis Althusser. Studying the relationship between text and its context,
Stephen Greenblatt deals with the same question rooted in Marxism. As Jan
R.Veenstra asserts in her essay "The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt: On
Poetics of Culture and the Interpretation of Shakespeare", he builds his
definition of text, as a mirror of the cultural dialects that shape a
particular society, upon Jameson's "attempt to justify a materialist
integration of all discourses and to that end seeks to expose the
fallaciousness of a separate artistic sphere"(177). Greenblatt starts from
Jameson's theory to show that the duality of uniformity and diversity that
forms a characteristic of the poetics of capitalist society can affect the
appreciation of textuality (Veestra, 178). Jameson's book The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) presents one of
the key books that largely reflect the new historicist ideology and that
succeed to quench the thirst of new historicists to build their widely known
theory. In his book, Jameson refers to other theorists like Luckas, Freud,
Barthes, Levi-Strauss and Frye to express the centrality of history as a
fundamental part in culture, art and literature. He considers the
appropriate
Layouni 12
interpretation of literary texts as a way to relate literature to
the world of history, arguing that history is actually present in the deep,
hidden side of every canonic text and that the role of the interpreter is to
unveil that side. In this context , Jameson gives the example of the novel as a
new literary genre, developed in the 18th C, stressing on the role of the
political social and economic circumstances of the 18th C societies
in the understanding of such a genre as novel. Jameson's focus on the
importance of history can be summarized in his famous slogan "Always
Historicize!" (The Political Unconscious 9) which emphasizes the fact
that, as Satya P. Mohanty expresses in her book Literary Theory and the
Claims of History:
Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics,
"Interpretation is [...] an opening up of the text to the winds of history"
(100).
The impact of Marxism on new historicism is further accentuated
through the influence of Louis Althusser on Greenblatt. Stephen Greenblatt
finds inspiration in the way Althusser studies the way institutions are shaped
in textual forms and presents the different changes and strategies of
subversion to regain power. Greenblatt was also inspired by Althusser's concept
of Ideological State Apparatuses, referring to the group of
institutions, like education, the religious institution of churches, law, and
the modern and the most used institution of media, that serves to impose the
ideology of the dominant power (the state) on individuals. Greenblatt uses this
Althusserian concept in his attempt to locate the sources of culturally
widespread powers in texts. The essence of new historicism lies in the process
of reconstruction of the ideology of a particular text. Greenblatt
takes the Althusserian definition of ideology (the fact of being with concrete,
material existence within two levels of apparatuses) and uses it in the process
of interpretation. He states that the text is a product of a particular
ideology of one age and that the process of its interpretation is affected by
two ideologies: the author's ideology and the reader's ideology. Thus,
Greenblatt affirms that our understanding of the past is inescapably
subjective.
Layouni 13
As a theory of literary criticism, new historicism shares
different principles with other theories forming unusual consideration of the
relationship between literature and history. It widens the scope of literary
interpretation by including other fields and disciplines viewing the literary
text not merely as a piece of fiction, which should be analyzed in an attempt
to decode the author's intended meanings, but rather as a way to build the
forgotten broken image of the history of a particular culture in a particular
epoch. New Historicist research is associated mainly with three periods: the
Renaissance (Stephen Greenblatt), The Victorian period (Catherine Gallagher's
studies) and the Romantic period (Jerome McGann). Stephen Greenblatt and Louis
Montrose present the key figures of new historicism who established the key
concepts and the key notions and ideas of the theory.
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