New Historicism

“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” (Murfin 223).

Subject Position of New Historicists

“In addition to breaking down barriers that separate literature and history, history and the social sciences, new historicists have reminded us that it is trecherously difficult to reconstruct the past as it really was, rather than as we have been considtioned 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 vantage point” (Murfin 224).

Stephen Greenblatt

Clifford Geertz

Important Details

“As Catherine Gallagher has suggested, the boundary between new historicists and feminists studying ‘people and phenomena that once seemed insignificant, indeed outside of history: women, criminals, the insane’ often turns out to be shifting or even nonexistent” (Murfin 230).

Michel Foucault

“. . . power represents a whole web or complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens. Not even a tyrannical aristocrat simply wields power, for the aristocrat is himself formed and empowered by a network of discourses and practices that constitute power” (Murfin 225).

Brook Thomas

historiography Sigmund Freudthe Other

“... our task is not to affirm the truth of his narrative but to interrogate it” (246).

“Survival of the species, however, demands that unlike Kurtz it must not succumb to it [the horror], but instead cover it up. The work of civilization is a lie, but since the alternative is so terrifying it must go on” (253).

“Any new historical criticism worthy of its name will share in this goal of using historical analysis as a way to help those in the present work toward the construction of a new future, a future in which work is not only used as a means to control ‘the Other’ within, but also directed toward liberating ourselves to help improve the lives of others truly different from us” (256).

Cultural Criticism

“. . . involves several tendencies more compatible with the old historicism than with the thinking of new historicists such as Greenblatt. These include the tendency to believe that history is driven by economics; that it is determinable even as it determines the lives of individuals; and that it is progressive, its dialectic one that will bring about justice and equality” (Murfin 228).

Michel de Certeau, “the practice of everyday life” (Murfin 259).

• How does our culture emerge from our everyday lives?

• How did Heart of Darkness emerge from the everyday life of the late nineteenth century?

• How do we read Heart of Darkness in the context of our everyday lives during the early twenty-first century?

Patrick Brantlinger

“Heart of Darkness . . . offers a powerful critique of at least certain manifestations of imperialism and racism, at the same time that it presents that critique in ways that can only be characterized as both imperialist and racist” (Murfin 270)

“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget.”

Heart of Darkness

“What bothered Conrad more than the thought of starving, Congolese chain gangs,” writes Murfin, “was the realization that their exploitation was being characterized in Europe as a noble act of philanthropy” (270).

LIES!

OppositionsRacist / Not-Racist

High / Low

Imperialist / Anti-Imperialist

Culture

The end of World War II

collapses distinctions “between high, popular, and mass culture” (Murfin 260).

Note Murfin’s Plurals

• “culture is really a set of interactive cultures” (260)

• “the recent evolution of feminism into various feminisms” (268)

• the implication of Marxisms (264-68)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Trinh T. Minh-ha

Gloria Anzaldúa

Mikhail Bakhtin

Carnival

heteroglossia

Walter Benjamin

the aura

Uniqueness and authenticity

Antonio Gramsci

radical organic intellectuals

hegemony

Louis Althusser

“He argued that the main function of ideology is to reproduce the society’s existing relations of production, and that that function is

carried out even in literary texts” (Murfin 266).

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Homi K. Bhabha