Name – Karan D. Pandya
Batch – 2018-20
Roll No – 18
Paper No 8 – Cultural Studies
Topic –British Cultural Materialism & New
Historicism
Enrollment No -2069108420190029
Submitted – Smt. S. B. Gardi
Department of English Bhavnagar
University
Cultural Studies
British Cultural
Materialism
Cultural studies is referred to as
"cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In
the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the
"givens" of British culture. Edward Burnett Tylor's pioneering anthropological study Primitiae Culture
(1877) argued that "Culture or civilization, taken in its widest
ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art,
morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society". Claude L6vi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers
to assign "culture" to primitive peoples, and they with the work of
British scholars like Raymond Williams, to attribute culture to the working
class as well as the elite. As Williams memorably states: "There are no
masses; there are only ways of seeing [other] people as masses". To
appreciate the importance of this revision of "culture" we must
situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the
British Empire upon which the sun never set, an ideology left over from the
previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for "culture"
developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered
community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver
of the past.
The other trajectory led
toward a future, socialist utopia that would annul the distinction between
labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the
norm. This cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation "critical
of the aestheticism, formalism, anti historicism, and a politicism common among
the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism"; such was the
description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R.
Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois culture.
Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge
and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the "great
tradition" of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of
a wider range of readers than just the elite.
Ironically the threat to
their project was rr.ass culture. Raymond Williams applauded the richness of
canonical texts such as Leavis promoted, but also found they could seem to
erase
certain communal forms of life. Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Gyorgy Luk6cs, TheodorAdorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Antonio Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and in the many systems of domination related to literature. From Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, for example, they got the concept of cultural "hedge firered," referring to relations of domination not always visible as such. Williams noted that hegemony was "a sense of reality for most people. beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move". But the people aren't always victims of hegemony!; they sometimes possess the power to change it. Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people, that "the main function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relations of production, and that that function is even carried out in literary texts."
Ideology must maintain this state of affairs if the state and capitalism can continue to reproduce themselves without fear of revolution. Althusser saw popular literature as merely "carrying the baggage of a culture's ideology," whereas "higher" literature retained more autonomy and hence had more power.
certain communal forms of life. Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Gyorgy Luk6cs, TheodorAdorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Antonio Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and in the many systems of domination related to literature. From Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, for example, they got the concept of cultural "hedge firered," referring to relations of domination not always visible as such. Williams noted that hegemony was "a sense of reality for most people. beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move". But the people aren't always victims of hegemony!; they sometimes possess the power to change it. Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people, that "the main function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relations of production, and that that function is even carried out in literary texts."
Ideology must maintain this state of affairs if the state and capitalism can continue to reproduce themselves without fear of revolution. Althusser saw popular literature as merely "carrying the baggage of a culture's ideology," whereas "higher" literature retained more autonomy and hence had more power.
Walter Benjamin attacked
fascism by questioning the value of what he called the " artta" of
culture. Benjamin helps explain the frightening cultural context for a film
such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Lukdcs developed what he
called a "reflection theory," in which he stressed literature's
reflection, conscious or unconscious, of the social reality surrounding it not
just a flood of realistic detail but a reflection of the essence of a society.
Fiction formed without a sense of such reflection can never fully show the
meaning of a given society.
Cultural materialists
also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great
student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian Formalism Bakhtin, especially his
amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class
struggle, at once conflictual and communal, individual and social. Feminism was
also important for cultural materialists in recognizing how seemingly
"disinterested" thought is shaped by power structures such as
patriarchy.
New Historicism
Laputn-"the whore." What did Jonathan Swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels? It is a question that has tantalized readers since the eighteenth century. The science fiction aspect of that island still amuses us, but why "the whore"? There may be an answer, and as we will show later, new historicism is the right approach to answer this question.
"If the 1970s could be called the Age of Deconstruction," writes joseph Litvak, "some hypothetical survey of late twentieth-century criticism might well characterize the 1980s
as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the Recovery of the Referent" (120). Michael Warner phrases new historicism motto as, "The text is historical, and history is textual".
Fredric ameson insisted, "Always historicize!". As a return to historical scholarship, new historicism concerns itself with extraliterary matters-letters, diaries, films, paintings, medical treatises-looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text. New historicists seek "surprising coincidences" that may cross generic, historical, and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony, or popular culture. New historians see such cross cultural phenomena as texts in themselves. From Hayden\Atrhite, cultural studies practitioners learned how figural relationships between present and past troPes are shaped by historical discourses. From Clifford Geertz, they derived the importance of immersion in a culture to understand its "deep" ways, as opposed to distanced observation. Carolyn Porter credits the emergence of American Studies, Women's Studies,and Afro-American Studies on college and university campuses for ushering in new historicism as a volatile new presence in literary criticism.
New historicism versus
old historicism: the latter, says Porter, saw history as "world views
magisterially unfolding as a series of tableaux in a film called
Progress," as though all Elizabethans, for example, held views in common.
The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favor of ordering
history only through the interplay of forms of power Stephen Greenblatt, a
Renaissance scholar and founding editor of the journal Representations, may be
credited with the coining of the term "new historicism." Greenblatt
identifies major influence on his thought from ]ameson, Foucault, and Jean
Francois Lyotard, all of whom raise the question of art and society as related
to institutionalized practices. Jameson blames capitalism for perpetrating a
false distinction between the public and the private, and Lyotard argues that
capitalism has forced a false integration of these worlds. New historicism
exists, Veeser explains, between these two poles in an attempt to work with the
"apparently contradictory historical effects of capitalism" without
insisting upon an inflexible historical and economic theory (1-6). From
Foucault, new historicists develooped the idea of a broad
"totalizing" function of cultureobservable in its literary texts,
which Foucault called the episteme. For Foucault history was not the working
out of "universal" ideas: because we cannot know the governing ideas
of the past or the present, we should not imagine that "we" even have
a "setter" for mapping the "real." Furthermore, history itself
is a form of social oppression, told in a series of ruptures with previous
ages; it is more accurately described as discontinuous, riven by "fault
lines" that must be integrated into succeding cultures by the epistles of
power and knowledge.
Methods of expression can
also be methods of oppression; even though the modern age is governed by a
complex master narrative, it may still be seen as only a narrative to succeed
those of earlier generations. A new 1pistbme will render obsolete our ways of
organizing knowledge and telling history.
New historicism
frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: exchange, negotiation, and
circulation of ideas are described. H. Aram Veeser calls "the moment of
exchange" the most interesting to new historicists, since social symbolic
capital may be found in literary texts: "the critic's role is to dismantle
the dichotomy of the economic and the non-economic, to show that the most
purportedly disinterested and self-sacrificing practices, including art, aim to
maximize personal or symbolic profit" . Greenblatt adds that
"contemporary theory must situate itself . . . in the hidden places of
negotiation and exchange" ("Towards a Poetics of Culture" 13).
Bourdieu's insights are again a resource, especially his definition of tllte
habitus, a "system of dispositions" comparable to what linguists
analyze as the sum of tacit knowledge one has to know to speak a given
language.
What about Laputa? How
can new historicism help us answer the question raised a few pages ago? In
"The Flying Island and Female Anatomy: Gynaecology and Power in Gulliver's
Travels," Susan Bruce offers a reading of Book III that makes some new
historicist sense out of Swift's use of Laputa. Bruce ties together some
seemingly disparate events of the year 1727, soon after the book was published,including
relations between eighteenth-century midwives and physicians and a famous
scandal involving a "monstrous birth" that rocked the Royal Court.
Bruce examines a
four-volume commentary on Gulliver's Travels by one Cavolini di Marco, in which
the author gives a fairly dry account of his observations until he gets to the
episode in Book IV, "A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," in which Gulliver
captures rabbits for food. At that point, di Marco launches into a tirade: But
here I must observe to you, Mr. Dean, en passant, that Mr Gulliver's Rabbits
were wild Coneys, not tame Gutless ones, such as the consummate native
effronterie of St. Andr6 has paulmed upon the publick to be generated in the
Body of the Woman at Godalming in Surrey. St. Andrew having, by I know not what
kind of fatality, insinuated himself among the foreigners, obtained the post of
Anatomist-Royal.
Di Marco was referring to
a scandal involving the royal physician St. Andrew and the so-called
rabbet-woman of Surrey, Mary Toft, who managed to convince prominent members of
the medical profession in 1727 that she had
to a number of rabbits, which she had actually inserted into her vagina
and then "labored" to produce. Bruce asks why di Marco felt it
necessary to allude to this event. By researching records of Toft's trial and
the ultimate ruin of St. Andrew, she illuminates the depiction of the female
body as island in Book III of Gulliver's
Travels and elsewhere.
Travels and elsewhere.
Bruce describes the trend
toward the education of midwives and the medical profession's desire to stamP
them out. Examining books published for literate midwives during this period
and testimony from Mary Toft's trial allows Bruce to describe the hostility not
only toward the midwife who collaborated with Toft in the hoax but toward women
in general. Bruce then connects the male establishment's outrage at the female
Power expressed in the hoax to Gulliver's observations on women/ especially his
nauseating description of the Queen of Brobdingnag at the table or his seeing
another Brobdingnagian woman with a breast tumor with holes so large that he
"could have easily crept" into one. The implication is that under the
male gaze, the magnification of the female body leads not to enhanced
appreciation but rather to horror and disgust. Bruce connects Gulliver's
anxious fixation on the female body to the anxieties of his age involving the
rise of science and the changing role of
women.
women.
Laputa is a gigantic
trope of the female body: the circular island with a round chasm at the center,
through which the astronomers of the island descend to a dome like structure of
the "Flandona Gagnole," ot "astronomer's cave." Laputa has at its center a giant lodestone on which the movement of the island depends. The floating physical structure of Laputa is
like a uterus and vagina; Gulliver and the Laputians are able to enter this cavity at will and control not only the movements of the lodestone and island, but also the entire society. As Bruce remarks, "It is this which engenders the name of the island: in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the achievement of male control over female body itself renders that body the whore: laputa" .
the "Flandona Gagnole," ot "astronomer's cave." Laputa has at its center a giant lodestone on which the movement of the island depends. The floating physical structure of Laputa is
like a uterus and vagina; Gulliver and the Laputians are able to enter this cavity at will and control not only the movements of the lodestone and island, but also the entire society. As Bruce remarks, "It is this which engenders the name of the island: in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the achievement of male control over female body itself renders that body the whore: laputa" .
But eventually the
control over the feminine that drives Laputa becomes its own undoing, for the
more the men of the island try to restrict their women from traveling below to
Balnibarbi (where they engage in sexual adventures with Balnibarbian men , the
more male impotence threatens Laputian society. Gulliver notes the men's
ineffectuality in several ways, abstracted as they are in their foolish
"science"; they are so absent-minded they must have an attendant
called a "Flappe{' who constantly must slap them out of their reveries.
The women/ on the other hand, have an "Abundance of Vivacity; they condemn
their Husbands, and are exceedingly fond of
Strangers. . . . Mistress and Lover may proceed to the greatest Familiarities before [the husband's] Face, if he be but provided with Paper and implements, and without his Flapper by his side." Bruce connects the men's "doomed attempt of various types of science to control the woman's body" to the debate about language in Book III. While the men invent the "Engine for Improving Speculative Knowledge" that produces only broken sentences, the women and other cofiunoners clamor "to speak with their own Tongues, after the Manner of their Forefathers." Thus in "A Voyage to Laputa," control of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality, reflecting the contemporary debates of Swift's day. One final historical note: a pamphlet published n7727 was purportedly written by "Lemuel Gulliver Surgeon and Anatomist to the Kings of Lilliput and Blefuscu, and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Balnibarbi." It is entitled The Anatomist Dissected: or the Msn-Midwife finally brought to Bed.Its subject is Mary Toft, the "rebbet woman."
Strangers. . . . Mistress and Lover may proceed to the greatest Familiarities before [the husband's] Face, if he be but provided with Paper and implements, and without his Flapper by his side." Bruce connects the men's "doomed attempt of various types of science to control the woman's body" to the debate about language in Book III. While the men invent the "Engine for Improving Speculative Knowledge" that produces only broken sentences, the women and other cofiunoners clamor "to speak with their own Tongues, after the Manner of their Forefathers." Thus in "A Voyage to Laputa," control of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality, reflecting the contemporary debates of Swift's day. One final historical note: a pamphlet published n7727 was purportedly written by "Lemuel Gulliver Surgeon and Anatomist to the Kings of Lilliput and Blefuscu, and Fellow of the Academy of Sciences in Balnibarbi." It is entitled The Anatomist Dissected: or the Msn-Midwife finally brought to Bed.Its subject is Mary Toft, the "rebbet woman."
