Neohistoricism

Neohistoricism or new historicism (in English, New Historicism) is an approach to literary criticism and literary theory, based on the premise that a literary work should be considered as the product of a time, place, and from the circumstances of its composition, rather than as an isolated creation. It had its roots in the United States, in a reaction against the New Criticism (New Criticism) of the formal analysis of literary texts, which were seen by a new generation of professional readers from another perspective. Newhistoricism developed in the 1980s, initially from the work of critic Stephen Greenblatt, and its influence expanded over almost the next ten years.

The neohistoricists attempted to simultaneously understand the work from its historical context, and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas. Michel Foucault based his approach both on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining a wide variety of documents in order to understand the episteme of a particular era. It has been argued that neohistoricism is a more neutral approach to historical facts, and that it is sensitive to different cultures.

Study

New historicist scholars begin their analysis of literary texts by attempting to look at other texts—literary and nonliterary—to which a literate public had access at the time of writing, and what the original author of the text must have read.. The purpose of this search, however, is not to derive a text's direct sources, as the neocritics did, but to understand the relationship between a text and the political, social, and economic circumstances in which it originated. A major focus of neohistoricist critics led by Moskowitz and Stephen Orgel has been to understand William Shakespeare less as a great independent author in the modern sense than as a clue to the conjunction of the world of Renaissance theater—a collaborative free-for-all. and anonymous—and the complex social policies of the time. In this sense, Shakespeare's works are seen as inseparable from the context in which they were written.

In this aspect of concentration, a comparison can be made with the best discussions of decorative arts works. Unlike the fine arts, which have been discussed in purely formal terms, comparable to New Literary Criticism, under the influences of Bernard Berenson and Ernst Gombrich, the nuanced discussion of the design arts since the 1970s has been linked with social and intellectual contexts, taking into account fluctuations in luxury businesses, the availability of design prototypes for local artisans, the patron's cultural horizon, and economic considerations—"the limits of the possible", the famous phrase by the economist historian Fernand Braudel. An outstanding pioneering example of such a contextualized study was Peter Thornton's monograph, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England, France and Holland (1978).

Prehistory

Undoubtedly, in its historicism and its political interpretations, neohistoricism owes something to Marxism. However, while Marxism (at least in its most superficial forms) tends to see literature as part of a superstructure in which the "base" economic (e.g. material production relations) is manifested, the thinkers of neohistoricism present a more nuanced vision of power, seeing it not only as related to classes, but also in its social extension. This point of view was first presented by Michel Foucault. In his tendency to see society as made up of texts related to other texts, without a fixed literary value above and below the way in which specific societies read them in concrete situations. In this, the neohistoricist school has borrowed elements from postmodernism. However, neohistoricists tend to exhibit less skepticism than postmodernists, and show more willingness to perform "traditional" of literary criticism: explaining the text in its context, and trying to demonstrate what it meant to its first readers.

Newhistoricism also has something in common with the historical criticism of Hippolyte Taine, who maintained that a literary work is less the product of its author's imagination than the social circumstances of its creation, Taine's three main aspects called race, environment and time. It is also a response to early historicism, practiced by early 20th century critics, such as John Livingston Lowes, who sought to demystify the creative process by reexamining the lives and times of the canonical writers of Western literature. However, neohistoricism differs from both trends in its emphasis on ideology: the political disposition, unknown to the author himself, that prevails over his work.

Foucault Base

Following Foucault, neohistoricism often points to the idea that the lowest common denominator for all human actions is power, so the neohistoricist seeks to find examples of power and how it is dispersed within the text. Power is a means through which the marginalized are controlled, and it is the thing that the marginalized, therefore, seek to obtain. This goes back to the idea that because literature is written by those who have the most power, there must be details in it that demonstrate the perspectives of ordinary people. Newhistoricists seek to find "sites of conflict" to identify which is the group or entity with the greatest power.

Foucault's discussions of the panopticon, a theoretical prison system developed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, are particularly useful for neohistoricism. Bentham claimed that the perfect prison/surveillance system would be a cylindrical-shaped room with cells on the outside walls. In the middle of this spherical room there would be a large security tower with a light shining on all the cells. In this way, the prisoners will never assume that they are being watched, so they would protect themselves, and would be like actors on a stage, giving the appearance of submission, although they are probably not being watched.

Foucault included the panopticon in his discussion of power, to illustrate the idea of lateral surveillance, of self-control, that appears in the text when those who are not in power are forced to believe that they are being observed by those who are. They are. His proposal was to demonstrate that power would often change the behavior of the subordinate social class, and that a link will always fall regardless of whether or not there was a need to do so.

Although the influence of philosophers such as the French Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser, and the Marxists Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, was essential in shaping the theory of neohistoricism, much credit must be given to the work carried out by Foucault. Although some critics believe that these early philosophers have had a great impact on neohistoricism as a whole, there is popular recognition that Foucault's ideas have penetrated neohistoricist formation in history as a succession of epistemes or structures of thought that they shape everyone and everything within a culture (Myers 1989). Furthermore, it is evident that the categories of history used by neohistoricists are academically standardized. Although the movement publicly disapproves of the periority of academic history, the uses to which neohistoricists put the Foucauldian notion of episteme apply to little more than the same practice under a new and improvised label (Myers 1989).

By far, Greenblatt has been explicit in expressing a theoretical orientation; He has identified the ethnography and theoretical anthropology of Clifford Geertz as highly influential. His work, Invisible bullets , has pointed to the relationships that the British colonists maintained with the Amerindians of the New World in the Virginia campaign. This essay tells how the indigenous people were exploited by the Europeans to comply with their requests, therefore subordinating a class that was considered culturally and socially inferior. Finally, this analysis is applied to the study of Shakespeare's play, The Tempest.

Criticism

New historicism has suffered criticism, most particularly due to the clash of perspectives of those considered postmodernists. Newhistoricism denies the claim that society has entered a postmodern or posthistorical phase, and gives rise, as a result, to the culture wars of the 1980s (Seaton, 2000). The main points of this argument are that neohistoricism, unlike postmodernism, recognizes that almost all the perspectives, anecdotes, and historical facts that they employ, contain bases that derive from the position regarding that point of view. As Carl Rapp argues: "New historicists often seem to be saying, 'We are the only ones willing to admit that all knowledge is contaminated, even our own'" (Myers, 1989).