going back to what we talked about I I'd rather be standing up so I'm
going to see if I'm lucky today and this works I know how well you can see
this you can see very well but everything seems like very dark okay I'll do
it like that okay so it's only we're in the dark right now if you need
anything just type it there in the in the chat as I was saying new
historicism is about it what Stephen Grinblatt called parallel reading
we're going to be a literary text and a non-literary text at the same time
and in the singular facts but today we're reading the 12 o'clock news 12
o'clock news has a structure where there is like a sign word and then
there's a description that has very little to do with this word in the case
of the 12 o'clock news it was all elements that were on on the desk and and
the text on this site seems to describe a warfare situation and at the same
time we have Mary McCarthy's Mary McCarthy is a report from Vietnam which
had a very similar structure to this part of the religion so what we saw
here were a Mary McCarthy's report that was a very similar in structure to
Elizabeth Bishop's poem I think it's going to be a bit difficult for me to
say enough so I'll turn on the light once in a while to help you be able to
take notes summarizing new historicism is about parallel reading it was
coined by Stephen Greer that we're going to deal with a part of his
critical work in the study guide at the beginning of the study guide he
gives us a few pointers Yes, Stephen Greblat's Introduction to Power of
Forms in the English Renaissance, and Hayden White's Historical Texts as a
Literary Archipelago. Okay, we're going to read those two extracts today,
and we're going to summarize New Historicism, and we're going to move on to
cultural materialism. What is our definition for New Historicism? Our
definition for New Historicism is a method based on parallel reading of the
literary and non-literary text. What I was saying here, we read this at the
same time, and we extract conclusions. Now, usually we take them from the
same historical period. This is one of the big differences with cultural
materialism. They're from the same historical period. What is cultural
materialism like? It's going to suggest comparing the literary text to a
current, a contemporary text of our time. That makes the interpretation run
in a different direction. It's the same interpretation that we have when we
want to analyze whether, for example, Edgar Allan Poe was a feminist or
not. In modern terms, practically no author could survive the comparison
and the standards that we have of current literature. To establish new
paradigms for old authors seems an unfair movement, but we're going to see
that afterwards in cultural materialism, and we're going to see where the
current fashion of doing that stems from. New Historicism refuses a
privilege, which is maybe a key passage of the literary text, and it
removes the literary foreground and the historical background. It puts them
at the same level. It's like if you bring the mountains to the foreground,
and you take the portrait and you put it at the same distance. They're
given equal weight. That's a key element. I think I posted this
presentation last week, so it's probably in the forum. If you want to
download it and print it out. And if I didn't do it, just write me an email
and I'll post it or I'll send it to you immediately. The paradox of New
Historicism. New Historicism is paradoxical for some, standard for most, in
its approach to literature. No privileging of the literary text, which
seems a weird way to approach critical studies from literary experts. A New
Historic book, we say, will replace the literary text. within the frame of
a non-literary text, okay? So the critical essays of new historicists are
these historical essays that re-evaluate the literary text in the light of
a non-literary text. It's the same type of perception that we have when we
put Elizabeth Bishop's Overclocked News next to the news report from
Vietnam. Places from the Renaissance period and colonialist policies of the
time are put one next to the other in order to view works that seem
innocent or even naive in the period in which other situations that were
less edified occurred at the same time. So when you're tearing down your
universal literature what is your intent? Why are you doing this, would be
the question that most of the scholars would ask new historicists. They
want to focus, they want to refocus the attention of everyone from the main
characters and the heroes, from the dominant class, from this, what we
normally call the Western heterocentric patriarchal mainstream society to
the marginalized, shift the view to the marginalized and dehumanized, to
the suppressed others, to these other dominated people. Instead of focusing
on the U.S. Army, to focus on the Vietnamese Vietcong, instead of focusing
on the brilliant military victory, to focus on the people that are defeated
and are annihilated by, by, by, by, by, by, by, by, by, by by the bullying
way of practicing warfare in Vietnam or the United States. New resources to
say, normally forget intentionally all the academic preliminaries and all
the obvious interpretations. Basically they ignore everything that their
colleagues said before them because they want to break away from the past
and they want to reinterpret history in the light of a juxtaposition
between the literary text and the co-text. Okay, so let's compare this new
historicism and old historicism. New historicism are you simply parallel
study of literary and non-literary texts. Old historicism, hierarchical
separation between literary texts, this is a dual, and historical
background which is just decor, a prop, a triple as we would call it. Okay,
the second one is the use of the word archival. New historicism is a
historicist movement as opposed to historical. History is represented and
recorded in written documents. And I think I focused very much on this. We
can never recreate the past. We can only recreate the representation of the
past and make interpretations based on what was written but not on what
really happened because that's history. That is lost forever. And that's
something that new historicism, I think it's a very valid point that new
historicism makes and says you cannot reevaluate anything that you have not
experienced firsthand because you do not have a firsthand experience. You
can only recreate what other people wrote about what happened at that
moment. You don't really know what happened and there's probably another
point of view that is as valid as yours. And that's what new historicism
says. It says this document says this and this document says this. But it's
not the world as it was, it's the word as it was. It evaluates the word of
the past, not the world of the past. Which is probably a key sentence. Old
historicism or recall of historical events. There is always one mainstream
version like when you read a history book. Everything seems so simple and
so logical and so straightforward. There's only one version when Julius
Caesar crosses the Rubicon. And there is no version of why he crossed the
Rubicon or what the senators that were waiting in Rome thought about that.
Or what Julius Caesar did before crossing the Rubicon. So all of these
elements changes the perspective in which we look at history. We look at
history only through the literary texts and the code texts that have
reached our time. And that's why The closer in time it is, the easier it is
to look for contrasting information. The older it is in time, the more
complicated it becomes to find co-texts that match with historical texts.
So sometimes in the case of, for example, Renaissance plays, it's going to
compare Renaissance plays with works from the present that study, for
example, the wardrobes of the past and put them in perspective and why do
people dress in a certain way. So sometimes the co-text doesn't belong to
the same period as the literary text because it's just not possible to find
the literary text at that time. Okay, so deconstruction as a source for new
historicism. There is a preference for the textual record of the past. New
historicism embraces a pretext. The principle of poststructuralism. The
principle that Verena summarized as there is nothing outside the text. You
cannot evaluate or extract conclusions outside of what you have in the
text. Everything that you can analyze has to be contained in the text.
Everything about the past is only available for us in textualized form. And
this textualized form, and this is interesting, is processed three times.
Thrice processed. Thrice is the word we don't normally use in English. It's
kind of dated as a word. The ideology, I think I've always emphasized that
story is written by the winners of wars, not by the losers. So the ideology
of the winners is what is expressed in a history book or in a historical
document or in a literary work. There's only going to be the opinion of the
author that analyzed the facts and through his or her ideology wrote the
text. At the same time, the outlook, the perspective that the person had
about the events, maybe the perspective was firsthand, maybe the
perspective was not exactly firsthand. Okay? I keep saying this. This is
American literature. I think that most of you are going to do American
literature next year. An example of this outlook of the time is most of the
people, when evaluating the Native Americans of the 18th century or the
19th century, they always tend to look at the way that Native Americans or
Indians were described by James Benjamin Cooper. James Benjamin Cooper is
very famous for some novels, like, for example, The Last of Them. James
Benjamin Cooper studied a lot about the Indians and Native Americans before
writing this text, but he didn't have any first-hand experience. If we go
to, have you already done this? If you go back to the captivity narratives,
people that were captured by the Native Americans, you can see that they're
Native Americans. Native Americans are not black and white. It's not,
they're all terrible. Maybe at the beginning, because of the religious
difference, it was, they seemed terrible, and their practices seemed that
they were acting as savage animals. But after some time among the Native
Americans, they began to understand their reasons, the way they lived, the
way they interacted with other people. There was an understanding. But
James Benjamin Cooper, that lived 100 years later and had no first-hand
experience. He had no first-hand experience with Native Indians, Native
Americans, with Indians. His process was very simple. He wanted to write
good fiction. So he basically had two kinds of Indians, good Indians and
bad Indians. The good ones were on my side, the bad Indians were on his
side. And that simplest way of creating a cliché for an entire culture was
so powerful because so many people read his books. Many more people read
his books than the captivity narratives. And there is one century before,
but that became the standard way of believing that the Native Americans
were. And he had never spoken to a Native American. So this idea of the
outlook of the person being able to create an image, I don't think that
when Shakespeare wrote his plays about Italy, about Julius Caesar, about
Romeo and Juliet, he had first-hand knowledge. He got a libretto or a book
that he liked, he read it and he created his own story. In that story there
was his outlook, his recreation of what happened in the time. And it had to
fit the narrative. So sometimes when we write fiction, we are
misconstruing, not intentionally, but in a very significant way, the way
that people appear in front of society. The appearance that you might have
of the Veronese is that they would kill for honor and they would die for
love. And that's probably a mistaken or an incomplete version of the facts.
Just to bring in some more text than what we have in the book, yes please.
So you say that this is based on the perception we have of things?
Everything that we read has three lenses on top that deform the reality.
The first perception is our ideology. If, for example, you see an immigrant
crossing a border illegally, and you believe that immigrants should be
assisted and helped and rescued, you will write it in a way. If on the
other hand you believe that you have to have strong borders and that those
immigrants are probably going to steal your job and cash in money and not
want to work and they're probably going to be criminals, the way you're
going to construct that narrative is completely different. And that is your
ideology. Another thing is whether... you are a direct witness or you're
just watching it on the TV and you're creating your image when you read it
in reports and you're creating your image in an indirect way. And the other
one is the dispersive practices of the time. Every time has its own way of
explaining things. For example, Romanticism. We know, because that's the
way Romanticism was, that it was very dark in construction, difficult to
read, and it had all of a sudden fantastic elements embedded in the story
because it made sense to do that because it was a time where that was the
expectation of the readers. Afterwards, in realism, there was the opposite
feeling that the narrative had to be very well understood by almost
everyone. That the text had to be a contrast between man that is
insignificant in the global scheme of things and the nature that is
overpowering. In other periods of time, God was the explanation for
everything. So, the discursive practices of the time are very important.
They're not so obvious as the algorithm and the ideology, but they're also
very important. But I want you to understand that there is a triple
processing in every historical text that we read, whether it's literary or
whether it's a co-text. Even the most innocent of texts have this type of
lens applied to it, okay? And finally, when I read it, I also have my
ideology, my outlook, and the things that I'm used to reading and the
things that I'm not used to reading. So, I cross it again three times. So,
what this says is that the information that reaches me is severely
misconstructed or at least altered, both in my perception and the way it
was written. Okay? So, when it's processed by us, we go... we go through
the same process, and we distort it, and when we represent it, maybe our
capacity to represent it in words is not accurate enough, and we have to
navigate through the web of language. So, everything that we represent in a
text is remade. This is the key word, remade. Every time we're representing
a textbook that talks about history, it's being remade. The aim is not...
not to represent the past, but to present a new, resituated reality. We
cannot aspire to representing the past because of this excessive... this
excessive processing of the text. New Historicism and Foucault. New
Historicism is radically anti-establishment, anti-systemic, okay? All of
these movements are going to be anti-establishment to a certain extent. New
Historicism is very, very anti-establishment. I would say it tends to be a
leftist, Marxist type of writing that departs from the mainstream because
the mainstream is the Western Civilization. Everything that goes against
the Western Civilization, that goes against what we understand as the
normal, is anti-establishment. So all of the normals that I have, that your
parents had, that their parents had, has changed slightly over time. But
the ideas of the 50s and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and 90s question
all of the pillars that we call the normal. So what all of these theories
try to do is to reestablish, to rewrite a new normal or to just destroy the
previous normal. Give resources to this anti-establishment. It's always on
the side of liberal ideals of personal freedom and it accepts difference
and deviance. This is something that we're going to hear a lot. Deviant
from the outside. Normal. Deviant from normal. What is normal, actually?
Okay? I don't know if you've ever seen Foucault's Panoptic Surveillance. I
don't know if I have it in the slide up here. I think it's in the guide. Do
you want to watch for a second? Are you here? I don't think it's going to
be here in the picture. But, okay, well. Basically, well, let me read from
the book. In the third edition, top page 169, probably in page 172 or so,
in yours, New historicism is resolutely anti-establishment, that's what
we're saying here. It's always on the side of the liberals, liberal ideas
of personal freedom and accepting and celebrating all forms of difference
and deviance. And afterwards it says, this notion of the all-powerful, oh
sorry, I'm going to give you a reading because it explains where this comes
from. This celebration of difference and deviance is a way of surviving or
reacting against a repressive state, against an establishment that is
repressive. And the way it says, it is in the face of the power of a
repressive state, which is constantly revealed as able to penetrate and
paint the most intimate areas of personal life. This notion of the state as
an all-powerful, all-seeing, very similar to the Big Brother concept that
we read in Dordoghue's like before, stems from the post-rushist cultural
historian, Michael Foucault, whose pervasive image of the state, is that of
the panoptic. A panoptic is like an eye that can see everything. An eye
with legs. I'll show you a picture now. Meaning all-seeing surveyed. The
panopticon was a design for a circular prison conceived by the 18th century
utilitarian Jeremy Bentham. The design consisted of a tiered rank of cells
which can always be surveyed by a single warder positioned at the center of
the circle. The panoptic state, however, maintains its surveillance not by
physical force and intimidation, but by its power of its discursive
practices. To use Foucault's terminology, discursive is the adjective
derived from the noun discourse, which circulates its ideology throughout
the body politic. Okay, so before I continue, let me show you a picture of
that panopticon. This is the image of the prison that was invented. okay
which is the concept of the prison of a panopticon prison and to symbolize
this there is there's another image that is sort of a playful form as you
can see there is one single word that is surveying everyone in the prison
and and the way of controlling everyone is not through force but through
the feeling that they are doing the correct thing to stay in their cells so
it's a discursive practice it's like the idea that you're leaving a prison
and if you've read I mean before you can see it's a it's a paranoia all the
time the feel a governed and oppressed and controlled by anyone by the
states by a repressive state I don't know if I can no I can't find that
I'll look for it and bring it to the next class so you can see it I'm going
to put this in the in the chat for Ricardo to see okay well let's continue
so new historicism is seen as a way of fighting against the control as you
can see everything that I'm saying is in the book and just I'm just
summarizing it in that I think a bit easier way to remember but anyway read
the unit so you extract your own conclusions and complete whatever you
think I might be missing or not dealing with sufficiently the discursive
practice of the power is to circulate the official discourse this idea that
we're brainwashed by an official message and that that message is proven so
pervasive and we see it as the only natural way of acting and everything
that is in that message is deviant or for difference okay so so the idea of
difference is celebrated in new historicism as as a rebellion against the
discursive practice of the power new historicism is a way of fighting
against thought control New Historicism believes in intensive close
reading, this is also very deconstructionist and it feels very similar to
post-structuralism at this point, focusing on extracts of text. The problem
that both post-structuralism and New Historicism has is that close reading
is very narrow and therefore you can't read 300 pages in close reading. You
normally focus on small extracts of the story, whatever is convenient for
your essay. So at the end of the day, both post-structuralism and New
Historicism have that flaw. It's like looking for the text that suits your
purposes. And explains your ideas. So those were the basic flaws that
critics to this theory extracted. The advantages and disadvantages of New
Historicism. The appeal of New Historicism is great. It's founded on
post-structuralism, so it appeals to all the late post-structuralisms. It's
more accessible because it's easier to understand. It's less dense. It
presents data. It draws conclusions. The material itself that we saw in the
12 o'clock news, once you understood what the poem did, it was fairly easy
to understand the poem. And once you put it in juxtaposition with the
report, it became even clearer. It was a game that the poet was playing to
replicate the structure of a war report. So sometimes the material itself
is fascinating. The political text avoids problems encountered by other
criticism. It's more willing to allow historical evidence its own voice. It
doesn't deny historical facts, but it questions some of the conclusions
that are extracted from the historical evidence. So at the same time, it's
not as radical as post-structuralism. And it becomes more appealing to the
readership. Cultural materialism. Probably going to turn on the light and
read some of the books if you are able to follow this. I've been writing
that for over a while. In my book, this is 185 in yours, 184, it was 175 in
mine. Okay, so before we get there, go one page back and I think to
illustrate what we said before, what new historicists do, it's on the
previous slide, I think it's interesting to repeat this part. What new
historicists do is juxtapose literary and non-literary texts, reading the
former in the light of the latter. The first one is juxtapose literary and
non-literary. The second thing that they do is defamiliarize or they see it
as new. They try their best to defamiliarize the canonical literary text.
They try to strip it from the ideology, from your perspective. Detaching it
from the accumulated weight of previous literary scholarship and seeing it
as if it was new. Number three, they focus on state power and the
patriarchal system. They focus the attention within both the text and the
co-text on issues of state power and how it is maintained on patriarchal
structures and their perpetuation and on the process of colonization with
its accompanying mindset. The fourth would be aspects of the
post-structuralist outlook. They make use in doing so of aspects of the
post-structuralist outlook, especially Derrida's notion that every facet of
reality is textualized and Foucault's idea of social structures as
determined by dominant dispersive practices. We're not going to follow the
rest of the text linearly. We're just going to go to page 184 and let's
focus on cultural materialism. The British critic Graham Holderness
describes cultural materialism as a politicized form of historiography. We
can explain this as meaning the study of historical material which includes
literary texts. which those literary texts have in some way helped to
shape. So why would you bring co-text from the present? Because the present
is shaped by the text of the past. And that's what, that's the explanation
for bringing text of the present to the past. The term cultural materialism
was made current in 1985 when it was used by Jonathan Dolemort and Alan
Fitzsinfield as the best known of the cultural materials. As a subtitle of
their collection of essays, Political Shakespeare. They define the term in
a forward designating a critical method which has four characteristics. It
combines an attention to historical context, theoretical method, political
commitment and textual analysis. Historical context undermines the
transcendent significance traditionally according to the literary text.
Here the word transcendent roughly means timeless. The position taken of
course needs to face obvious objection that if we are still today, sorry,
that we are today still studying and reading Shakespeare and his plays have
indeed proved themselves timeless in the simple sense that they are clearly
not limited by the historical circumstances in which they were produced.
But this is a matter of degree. The aim of this aspect of cultural
materialism is to allow the literary text to recover its histories which
previous kind of studies have often ignored. The kind of history recovered
would involve relating the plays to such phenomena as enclosures and the
oppression of the rural court, state power and resistance to it,
witchcraft, the challenge and containment of carnivalesque. Secondly, so
this would be the second point, the first one is historical context. The
second one is the emphasis on theoretical method signifies a break with
liberal humanism and absorbing the lessons of structuralism,
post-structuralism and other approaches which have become prominent since
the 1970s. So basically what this cultural materialism does is it breaks
with liberal humanism. Liberal humanism was the way that we analyzed it
classically. Thirdly, the emphasis on political commitment signifies the
influence of Marxist and feminist perspectives and breaks from the
conservative Christian framework which hitherto dominated Shakespearean
criticism. Finally, the stress on textual analysis locates the critic of
traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored. In other words, there is
a commitment not just to making theory of an abstract kind, but to
practicing it on mainly canonical texts which continue to be the focus of
the massive amounts of academic and professional attention in which are
prominent national and cultural icons. So, to recap on cultural
materialism, it was developed or made current by the Marxist-Leninist
movement. In 1985, with this work on Shakespeare, it is a politicized form
of historicism. It studies historical material, including literary texts,
and these are the four features that we talked about, historical context,
theoretical method, political commitment, and textual analysis. Okay? One
last... One final... One final slide in this presentation. I'll go back to
the book before we read the extract from the essays, would be the very
clear differences between cultural materialism and new resources. The
differences between cultural materialism and new resources, and besides the
place where they stand, cultural materialism is a European highly
politicized form. The New Researches, which is previous and American. They
differentiate one from the other in around 15 years and they... And the
focus we knew from New Researches, it focused on the problems of the
people, the marginalized within the political situation of its own day. In
contrast, the focus on cultural materialism is present day. of the past
have shaped the reality of today and the codex is used as a comparison The
similarities that both of them bring to the table is there is a bigger
attempt in cultural materialism to adapt to existing criticism and there is
a deceptive new historicism, a particular version of poststructuralism.
Cultural materialism is more embracing of structuralism and
poststructuralism and new historicism has a narrower point of view. The
difference between the code text is very significant. We know that new
historicism took mainly a text from the own time of the literary text, in
the case of cultural materialism, because it's focused on the influence of
the present day and with the current documents. I think you asked me about
the paper, right? Yes. Great. I was thinking about that right now. Do you
know, many of you, it's your first year in Umeda? Okay. No, it's not your
first year. Is it your first year? No. No? You're like, yeah. Okay. So
basically the important thing at UNED is to learn how to pass every
subject. There is an exam deposit. It's called Calatayud. It's one of the
centers. It's in Calatayud. There's another one in Barbastro. But if you
Google, I'm going to do it right now in fact, if you Google Calatayud
deposit of examinants, you basically get the repository of exams of all the
studies at UNED and all the subjects within the studies. Have you ever used
this one? Yes. Every day. Oh my God. . Okay. You work with UNED. Okay. In
what part do you work? I work in Romadillo. Oh, okay. You work in
Romadillo. Yeah. I was there in June. I had to do some level testing there.
So you access the deposit every day for what reason? Because I work... The
other people that have visual... Are you working on these? No. It's not.
like a prison I'm pretty okay so basically what you have here is a
repertoire of everything that's all the time you would have to learn more
it's around here isn't it on the right okay no no the answers are in
commentators they're not available I teach a quick in English ah by the way
have a C2 group that has very few students so if you want to study English
and we're starting next week the the query group for C2 this is very good
for learning English and improving your English and and you get a discount
for being UNED students well you get discussed in every single direction
and it's a very small group like five or six students in the group and
they're going to have it for sure because my teacher wants to have all the
levels so I would really recommend you to to join if you if you're if
you're interested in improving your English it's Fridays from five to seven
so I think it's a good way to see C2 yeah very good for your I mean English
studies students have to finish with a C1 level at least and if you're good
at English if you want to practice it's a great way it's a great place to
practice it's a very great place to start and I'm leaving it there okay so
now in the case of comment I have extra videos there's one thing that you
have to take into consideration the peck is identical to the exam so if you
understand how the peck works you're going to understand how the exam works
if you have a look at the exam you're going to see exactly the same
structure that you're going to see in the in the peck so um if we click on
the subject here all the subjects that are available and you you can see
the exams from the previous years uh i'm going to write this in the in in
the chat so they gotta look and have a look and if I for example download
this is first week last year identify one of the central ideas and there it
does of grammatology the critic should use devices to fix meaning textual
limits should not be transcended knowledge of the historical text context
can shed light on a text author should have the final word on their texts
do you dare give me a an answer the second one the modern scripter is
Bart's alternative to the text which have been previously which had
previously been the main focus of attention the reader the receiver of the
author's message author viewed as the authoritative father of the text
translator who mediates between author and reader so as you can see this
text this, this test is very important because if you don't pass the test
you can't take the rest of the exam so it's an eliminatory set of questions
and it's exactly the same for the for the PEC they're going to publish it
they told me this morning and the exam itself there's a there's a fragment
here this is from the awakening I'm telling you and when you would have to
explain about this is the the context and you would have to say hey Japan
the awakening a American realism and of the romanticism whatever you want
to talk about it conceptualizing the working correctly may be a cause for
failing the part of the text analysis form and content how is Edna
characterized through her words in the dialogue what do Robert and Leon say
represent for her this is also from the from the text now theory and
criticism and here you can see seventy words seventy words two hundred
words and there is a one point eight five marks and zero point five so half
of it is about the literary analysis and half of the mark is about the
theory and criticism I think that the test it gives you four more points
that and yes four more points and the PEC gives you two that's a lot of So
if you don't take the PEC, you're severely limiting your options of passing
the subject. It's good work. You can work in groups and whatever. And the
theory in criticism would be feminist criticism, exploring the power
relationships. How are these obvious in the extract? What other aspects of
the source text are interesting for feminist criticism? So as you can see,
feminism takes up the entire exam in the first week. If we have a look at
the second week of last year, you'll see that it goes in a completely
different direction, which of the following phrases best defines a
post-structuralist approach to the text? Search for cohesive and unifying
elements. Treat the text as a product of a superior mind. Study it along
with a co-text. Read the text against itself, against the grain. This one
is probably the most important. This is probably the easiest question I've
seen in a very long time. Would you know the answer? Good exercise would be
to try to do this, the ones that we've already seen for the next day, and
see how prepared you are. Robert was there seated as he had... It's again
the word awakening. Well, there's two novels and some poems, and since the
pick is normally about... Dylan Thomas's poem, or about Elizabeth Bishop's
poem, because it's what you normally have time to cover by the time you
have to do the PEC, it makes sense because the first part is analyzed in
the PEC, the second part is normally reserved for either The Awakening or
Heart of Darkness, which are the big chunks of the second part of the
subject. Robert was there seated as he had before. Again from the... From
The Awakening, in another moment, contextualized, form and content, it
talks about how is Madame Rodinier characterized, and it says, discuss the
vision of sexual identity as a social construct in relation to the extract.
What other aspects of the source are interesting for feminist criticism? So
one of the things that you could think about is maybe if all the exams from
June were about feminism, most of the exams might be about post-colonialism
in the second section. And the rest of the semester, so just things that
that's a possibility. Okay? So I'll leave it there. And I just wanted you
to have... Enough insight on that. Yeah. I don't want to do a survey. Okay,
so going back to this, what I said before, the differences between cultural
materialism and new historicism are basically centered, I think, on new
cultural materialism being much more political and about the focus of the
context as very significant elements. There is a political characterization
of new historicism, of course, but the comparison has more to do with
analyzing the past and seeing whether it was fair or not. It's about
analyzing the present, and therefore, it's more open to discussion. I'm
going to turn on the light, and we're going to do the study guide. So, in
the study guide from Unit 2, I want to direct your attention to the
critical and literary theory parts on page 8. And we're going to start by
talking about Hayden White. And I really thought his essay from the
historical text as a literary artifact. In general, there has been a
reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly
are, verbal fictions. The contents of which, I don't know if you've seen
which words are involved, and if you can think about the reasons why
they're involved. The contents of which are as much imaginative as they are
found. And the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts
in literature than they have in those in the sciences. Considered as
potential elements of a story, historical events are value-neutral, whether
they find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic,
or ironic depends upon the historian's decision to configure them according
to the imperatives of one plot structure rather than another. The same set
of events can serve as components of a story that is tragic or comic, as
the case may be, depending on the historian's choice of plot structure that
he considers most appropriate. The important point is that most historical
sequences can be imploded in a number of different ways so as to provide
different interpretations of those events and to endow them with value. If
you understand what this means, that when we write about history, when
histories have been written, it's normally created with the same fictional
value than when we create fiction as such. There is a sense that the
historian's point of view is as important as the events that happen. It's
going to shape the narrative. It's going to make it more comical, more
tragic, according to his own preference or to what is considered reasonable
at the time. How a given historical situation is to be configured depends
on the historian's subtle need in matching up a specific plot structure
with a set of historical events he wishes to endow with a meaning of a
particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say, a
fiction-making operation. In the process of studying a given set of events,
the historian begins to perceive the possible story more as such an event's
main figure. The reader, in the process of following the historian's
accounts of those events, gradually comes to realize that the story he is
reading is one kind rather than another. It is a romance, a tragedy, a
comedy, a satire, an epic, or what have you. And when he has realized this,
he will be able to read the story. He has perceived the class or type to
which the story that he is reading belongs. He experienced the effect of
having the events in the story explained to him. He has at this point not
only successfully followed the story, he has grasped the point of it,
understood it. This is what leads me to think that historical narratives
are not only models of the past, but also metaphorical statements which
suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes, and the
story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives
with culturally sanctioned meanings. The overall coherence of any given
series of historical facts is the coherence of the story, but this
coherence is achieved only by generating the facts to requirements of the
story in form. A historical narrative does not image the things it
indicates. It calls to mind images of the things it indicates, in the same
way that a metaphor does. When a given concourse of events is created, it
calls to mind images of the things it indicates. When a given concourse of
events is plotted, implotted as a tragedy, this simply means that the
historian has so described the events as to remind us of the form of
fiction which we associate with the concept of tragedy. What all of this
points to is the necessity of reviving the distinction conventionally drawn
between poetic and prose discourse in discussions of historical facts. The
idea of such narrative forms as historiography and recognizing that the
distinction as old as Aristotle between history and poetry obscures as much
as it illuminates about both. The older distinction between fiction and
history, in which fiction is conceived as a representation of the
imaginable and history as a representation of the actual, must give place
to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with
or likening it to the imaginable. I want you to work for a couple of
minutes, I don't know if you've already done those at home. Mark the words
that have an asterisk, narrative, story, plot, romance, tragedy, comedy,
satire, epic. And discuss about a possible meaning, a definition for those
words from your own understanding. You can do that at home. Thank you. The
words with asterisk. Yes. Thank you. What was your name? Your name was?
Patricia. How would you define narrative in your own words? Not my themes.
All lies. Let's listen to see if we agree. Narrative. I think they refer to
documents written. Documents. Okay, that's one possibility. Narrative.
Andrea. Okay, Andrea. Narrative. Sorry, Andrea. Okay, it's telling us some
events or some... It can be fictional or factual. It can be about something
historical or not. Any other extension of the definition? And the
difference with a story? Is there a difference? Yes. okay okay because you
said narrative storytelling in the story they sound different in your mind
yes okay so so you say that history would be more connected to narrative
not necessarily but story is more fictional okay it's correct I'm a plot
I'm sorry who's okay would be like the key event or the most most defining
events of a story okay the the answer says the pattern events that happen
of events and situation situations in the narrative dramatic work a romance
and a romance is different in in our current perspective than it was
historically what's a romance and this is going to be very useful if you
when you take for example American literature or when you take um I think
you're already doing that but you'll take a while to get to Romance period
what's a romance for me is about the uh a story of the event okay it's
basically an adventure okay so it's a it's an adventure uh it's normally a
narrative that has implicitly uh fantastic or or non-realistic elements
that seem like magical or unexplained within the events mixed with things
that seem factual are other elements that seem supernatural or surreal okay
so that's the um the basic structure of a romantic story of a Romance
tragedy anyone in the beginning and what is the story that that ends in a
way, by the way. Very good, yeah. A tragedy is normally the description or
the events that lead to the fall of the hero. The central figure, the
central character in the story is going to have a bad ending. There's going
to be a bad outcome, a tragic outcome at the end for the main character. So
what we see basically is the worst moment of a character, a comedy. Both
tragedy and comedy are normally referred to in theatre, not as plays.
What's a comedy more typically? I think it's used as a way to criticise our
friends. That would be satire. Okay, that would be satire. Comedy would
be... A way of expressing a situation that might seem serious, but that
very soon is illustrated through humour, a humourous perspective that makes
the audience connect with the story from the point of view of feeling an
emotional object. So it's made for entertainment purposes and also to
illustrate something that can have a satire. It's a very critical aspect
when it's used as a way to subvert and criticise something, it's more of a
satire than simply a comedy. So we've already covered satire. The answers
say, in referring to a comedy, a play or other literary composition written
chiefly to amuse the audience by appealing to a sense of superiority over
the characters depicted. Comedy will normally be closer to the
representation representation of everyday life than a tragedy and will
explain common human failings rather than tragedies disastrous crimes its
ending will usually be happy for the leading characters so comedy is is
lighter to watch as experience because we know that the ending is going to
have like a sort of happy ending we like happy ending so it's um it's
something that that suits most tastes the satire is a mode of writing that
exposes a failing of individuals or society at the institutions and to
ridicule and scorn them and finally an epic can you think of what's the the
central epic in spanish literature okay heroes yes it would be like a hero
quest and we experience a life of a hero throughout a the narrative for
example neop is like the epitome of of of an epic of a spanish epic okay
yes be a wolf is another example um okay um so for example sometimes we
have mixes of these air types if we have a look at don quixote in certain
ways it's a satire disguised as an epic and and and mixing the the styles
we get different uh literary forms okay in terms and expressions it says um
briefly think what you mean verbal fictions in paragraph one verbal
fictions historical narratives are mostly verbal pictures why would it say
something like that because normally a historian was not sitting um on on
on on a mountaintop in in in the forest of the germany of the current
germany to see the roman invasion of the dramatic tribes it was it was
basically the the facts that he has compiled through other other people
that told the story before him the archaeological evidence his own
imagination and he creates a story so what he says with that most
historical accounts have to do more with literature than with facts or have
to do as much as with literature as with facts so that's why he's saying
careful with history because history we take it as fact and we should
probably take it as mostly fiction okay this is what this verbal fiction
means value neutral the the context is considered as potential elements of
a story historical events are value neutral The answer, the answer, he
says, White is saying here that historical events acquire narrative value
only after the historian organizes them into a specific plot type as a
story that is tragic, comic, or romantic. Before that, their narrative
value is potential and neutral. So the facts are neutral, but it's the
historian that creates a narrative using those elements. Because at the end
of the day, even if a historian wants you to read the history book, so it's
his job to create a narrative that fits the taste of the readers.
Implotted, implotted, organized into a plot. Fiction-making, the
significance that certain historical events and how they manifest
themselves, match with a precise plot. It says fiction-making, where is it?
Ah, yes. A fiction-making operation. So he says that, White says that
historical events are more literary than historical. And finally,
tailoring. Tailoring is like personalidad, okay? Or a pera medida. It's
adapting the facts to a particular story form. So when she says it here,
this coherence is achieved only by tailoring of the facts to the
requirements of the story form. How many times have we read that there is a
new study that reveals that something that we took for granted was actually
very different in the past? That's because sometimes when we have to
conclude a essay or write a history, or write about history, the facts have
to match. And if they don't match, sometimes we try to make them match,
even if it's not 100% accurate. So what White is saying, this destroys the
credibility of all historians. So I'm sure that historians, as well as
scholars, do not love to read Hayden White's version of what history was
doing. It's highly aggressive towards the profession of a historian. Okay,
you have a bundle of Okay, I'm going to read before we finish Steven
Greenblatt's sorry green that they will see that meanwhile and Partial text
from Shakespearean Shakespearean criticism as you can see Shakespeare is
widely used as as starting point for literary Criticism because it's so
wide and it's so widely known that it normally provides a lot of space for
almost every literary theory so most literary Theory books not this one,
especially but for example the one I use when I was a student focus on
Shakespearean work because that it's it's so full variety the body of work
of Shakespeare that it allows for a lot of interpretation and normally
contrasting interpretation and from the introduction to the power of forms
in English Renaissance 1988 as you can see all of these theories are quite
current I Am Richard the second no unit not that is playing Queen Elizabeth
on August the 4th 1601 in the wake of the abortive Essex rising on the day
before the rising someone had paid the Lord Chamberlain's men 40 shillings
I don't know if you know that the Lord Chamberlain's men is Shakespeare's
company. That's the way they were called the Lord Chamberlain Chamberlain's
men To revive their old play about the deposing and killing of Richard the
second So what this is saying from the very start is that theater by no
means is only entertaining sometimes theater and literature is as powerful
politically as any other weapon and therefore you can never take a literary
text as in us and And only intended for amusement even the most innocent
looking of the pieces and have very strong political Intent we saw that
with Elizabeth Bishop's poem that seemed like funny description of a set of
elements on on a desk We saw that there was a very strong political
connotations political criticism against imperialist movements and against
the colonialist practices in the in the Far East um so queen elizabeth when
she was in in danger of being deposed and executed said i'm richard ii
don't you know that it's like she was rebelling against um or she was
complaining that she was in that mess because of shakespeare's fault and
because of shakespeare's company fault because they had represented a play
that was too overt in giving ideas of how to depose and execute a king and
why you should do that in the case of richard ii um i guess for queen
elizabeth it was quite uncomfortable to watch some of these plays because
it was basically about the family tree um most of the story so um i guess
it wasn't the most comfortable thing to to watch um as far as we know the
play almost certainly shakespeare's it was performed only once at the globe
um but in elizabeth bitter recollection this tragedy was played 40 times in
open streets and houses the story of richard ii was obviously a highly
charged one in a society where political discussion was conducted with
deviousness clearly it is not the text alone that bears the full
significance of shakespeare's play but rather the story's full situation
the genre it is thought to embody the circumstances of its performance the
imagining of its audience that governs its shifting 40 times in open
streets and houses for the queen the repeatability of the tragedy and hence
the number of people who have been exposed to its infection is part of the
danger along with her conviction that the play had broken out of the
boundaries of the playhouse where such stories are clearly marked as
powerful illusions and moved into the more volatile zone the zone she calls
open of the streets modern historical scholarship has assured elizabeth
that she has nothing to worry about richard this about richard ii is not at
all subversive but rather of him to tutor order according to john dover
wilson the play far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion regards the
deposition of the legitimate king as a sacrilegious act that drags a
country down into abyss of chaos but in 1601 neither queen elizabeth nor
the earl of essex were so sure after all someone on the eve of a rebellion
thought the play sufficiently seditious to warrant squandering two pounds
on the players and the queen understood the performance as a threat. So one
of the criticisms that Stephen Greenblatt is throwing out on the table is
saying it's very easy to analyze from your dim-lit study in a university
that Richard II was not seditious and that nobody had anything to worry.
But in 1601, the people that witnessed it had a lot of reasons to worry. So
he's being extremely ironic in saying that modern scholars don't realize
the fact that it was absolutely disturbing at the time because it was put
within the context of the time. And that now we're understanding it and
reading it in isolation. And that when you read it in isolation, you read
it in a broken manner. And that you need to bring in the context. So the
idea... The idea of co-text, I think that you can understand it as a
context. Everything that surrounds the play or the literary works and that
makes it real. When you read Elizabeth Bishop out of the blue, you say,
okay, weird poem. I don't know if I like it or I don't like it. Maybe I
like it, maybe I don't. When you read it next to Mary McCarthy's War
Report, you say, wow, this is very powerful. The poem really hits on the
nail on the head, but without even needing to mention Vietnam. It's about
the entire poem because it speaks so bad about imperialist power that I can
refer to this poem as being Vietnam, as being Somalia, as being
Afghanistan, as being Syria, as being any area where the superpowers go in
just to take the loot. And they destroy the life of the people and they
treat them as mere spectators of the tragedy in their country and then they
leave. Okay. So... But I think that's what's so powerful, to understand a
text within the context, within the surrounding context that they are
around. How can we account for the discrepancy between Dover Wilson's
historical reconstruction and the anxious response of the figures whose
history he purports to have accurately reconstructed? Dover Wilson's
historical research has the effect of conferring autonomy and fixity upon
the text. And it is precise. The disfixity that is denied by Elizabeth's
response. Dover Wilson's work is a distinguished example of the
characteristic assumptions and methods of the mainstream literary history.
practiced in the first half of our century the new historicism is set apart
from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past the earlier
historicism tends to be monological that is it is concerned with
discovering a single political vision usually identical to that said to be
held by the entire literate class or indeed the entire population okay it's
a bit um monothematic um this vision most often presumed to be internally
coherent and consistent has the status of an historic of a historical fact
it is not thought to be the product of the historian's interpretation this
vision can serve as a stable point of reference the literature is conceived
to mirror the period periods believed from a safe distance so um what this
is what this part is saying is that there is a general perspective and i
think that we say this nowadays that time gives you perspective time gives
you perspective but maybe it also eliminates the urgency of the moment and
all the situations around it because we focus our attention we focus our
attention on a limited set of items we can't focus our attention on
everything maybe because we can't because we don't want to because only
this part of the story matches what we want them because we have a historic
we have a fictional intent we want to create a story that is coherent so
this way of seeing history as one uh unique way and and it being different
to the response that it created in its own time is that is a blatant
example of what new historicism is here it's very clear and i think this is
why new historicism had a lot of appeal to the readership of the time
because it really exposed situations that everybody says i understand this
this makes sense i am able to um to understand this for example when you
saw mary mccarthy's poem and um and and the the war report which i
understand what this means when you when we were studying
post-structuralism it was almost a matter of belief what that what i was
saying you interpreted in the text it wasn't so clear Here there is less
theory and more. I understand it with my own eyes. I'm able to come to the
same conclusions as the scholars arrived. So let's wrap this up. The new
historicism erodes the firm ground of post-criticism and literature. It
tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions and those
of others. In the present case, for example, it might encourage us to
examine the ideological situation not only of Richard II but of Dover
Wilson on Richard II. Moreover, recent criticism has been less concerned to
establish the organic unity of the historical system. Of literary works and
more open to such works as places of dissent and shifting interest,
occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses, the
Elizabethan playhouse, playwright and player, writes Louis-Adrien Montrose.
Exemplify the contradictions of Elizabethan society and make those
contradictions their subject. If the world is a theater and the theater is
an image of the world, then by reflecting upon it. The drama is holding the
mirror up to the nature. Okay, so I hope that reading the two critical
essays, you've come to a better understanding. I think that in this case
it's fairly easy to, this unit is easier to understand than the previous
unit. I want to remind... I want to remind you that you have to advance as
quickly as possible reading The Awakening. How far have you gotten? You
finished it, no? You read it before the course? Have you started? Oh my
gosh. Have you started, Loda? No? You started it? Yes, again? Not so much,
okay. Try to get it read by... I don't know. Three weeks from now, because
I want to deal with it at the beginning of December. So I'm going to go
over all the theories to give you time and weeks in the middle. And I think
it's possible to help you when producing the text. Okay? So thanks a lot.
Have a fantastic week. Thanks a lot, Ricardo. God bless you.