1. Introduction
There are countless debates and publications on the relationship between literary criticism, literary theory and textual interpretation and analyses. Despite the numerous publications and debates Post Graduate students (PG) in the department of English, Faculty of Arts in University of Buea still have enormous difficulties navigating methodologically and consistently between literary criticism and theory and textual interpretation an analyses. The problems faced by PG students when it comes to reconciling literary criticism, literary theory and textual interpretation and analysis are multi-faceted. Of the 25 thesis and dissertations examined as the corpus of this paper (10 PhD Thesis and 15 Master’s dissertations), only three students (all PhDs) attempted to adequately and systematically blend literary criticism, literary theory and textual interpretation and analyses in their write up. The other 22 students whose thesis and dissertations I examined, barely managed to systematically and methodologically carry out this very pivotal research assignment. As it was observed, 8 students simply got mixed up with 10 of them completely confused in their attempts to discuss and differentiate between Literary Criticism and Literary Theory and how they can be appropriated in their thesis and dissertations. 12 of the students (5 Phds and 7 MA students) just found it difficult to navigate between literary theory and textual analyses in the body of their research works. In all the 22 thesis and dissertations examined, once a theory or theories are mentioned at the beginning of the research work, especially in the general introduction and a few definitions given, advocates mentioned and tenets outlined, they live and die at that level. For the 10 Phd thesis that were considered for this research paper, chapter one was exclusively dedicated to the examination of literary theories and the review of related literature. The title of chapter one in all the thesis was “Theoretical Framework (Paradigms) and Literature Review”. In this chapter, the students exhaustively define theories, state their advocates, leading proponents and discussed the major tenets and in a brief paragraph, pinpoint the relevance of the theory to their work. After this chapter, almost nothing is mention in relation to the theory throughout the thesis. In fact, there is thereafter, no interrelation between the discourse on theories in chapter one and the rest of the analyses in the thesis. The rest of the analysis in the preceding chapters is completely dissociated from chapter one and it is this analytical weakness that motivated this paper. Of the 20 students interviewed, only five actually read the text before choosing the theory best suitable for its interpretation. The 15 others either simply liked the theories or were asked to use them by their supervisors. The expression “Walking the Talk” is used in this paper to refer to the conscious move from theoretical discourse to practical textual interpretation and analysis. My principal argument here is that students should not only be familiar with the discourse on theories but should be able to practically and in a profound manner, in their thesis and dissertations, use and integrate the theories consistently throughout their analyses of the text. To effectively attain my objectives, this paper will attempt to provide answers to the following pre-occupying questions:
1) What is literary criticism and what is literary theory and what is the relationship between literary criticism and literary theory?
2) What determines the type of theory that should be used in the interpretation and analyses of a literary text?
3) How can theoretical tenets be translated and sustained in textual interpretation and analyses?
4) How can the use of theories be sustained from the beginning to the end of a thesis or dissertation?
5) What makes literary theory relevant to a piece of research work?
At the end of this paper, students and researchers should be able, with ease, to navigate in a methodological, consistent and logical manner between literary theories on the one hand, and textual interpretation and analyses on the other. If this is done and appropriately too, it will go a long way to improve the quality of students’ research papers, long essays, dissertations and thesis.
2. Literary Criticism, Literary Theory and Textual Interpretation and Analysis
I have started above in the introduction to this paper that for textual interpretation and analysis to be succinct and comprehensive, they must be an inseparable synergy between literary criticism, literary theory and textual interpretation and analysis and this must be sustained in a systematic and methodological manner from the beginning to the end of a research work. Profound literary interpretation and analysis cannot contain itself with simply defining or mentioning theories passively or only at specific areas or chapters of a research work. To ease understanding of the nexus of this paper, it will be useful preparation to contextualize the perspective from which some terms have been used here. Application is made of the principle laid down by Bernard Fonlon in “The Idea of Literature”, which states that the first step in any scientific work is a succinct definition of key concepts. This is to provide the researcher and any potential reader with a clear understanding of the issues involved. Literary criticism is considered in this paper simply as the act of analysis, interpretation and evaluation of a work of literature. It is therefore an opinion about a literary work which must be supported by empirical textual evidence which can relate to plot, setting, themes, characters, style, historical or political context of a literary work. In literary studies therefore, we can talk of Traditional Criticism, Sociological Criticism, Reader Response Criticism, Historical Criticism, Marxist Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Eco-Criticism, Postcolonial Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, New Historicism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, and Gender Criticism amongst many others. Literary theory on its part is considered in this study as a set of ideas, methods or tools used to interpret and explained a literary text. It is a way of interpreting or analyzing a text using a particular or specific lens or school of thought. Literary theories are therefore used in the practical reading of a work of literature and are mostly concern with the principles underlying the analysis and understanding of a literary work. We can therefore talk of Postcolonial theory, Marxist theory, Feminist theory, Postcolonial theory, Eco-critical theory, New Historicist theory, Psychoanalytical theory, Lacanian theory amongst many others. If literary criticism therefore “is the analysis, interpretation and evaluation of a work of literature, literary theories are the tools used in the analysis, interpretation and practical reading of the text”
| [5] | DORSEH, S. T. (Trans). Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle, Horace and Longinus. London: Penguin Books, 1965. |
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. If literary criticism is the act, literary theory is the tool use in carrying out that act. “If literary criticism deals with the approach, literary theory deals with the manner in which that approach is practical implemented”
| [6] | FONLON, Bernard. The Genuine Intellectual. Yaounde: Buma kor Publishing House, 1978. |
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In the course of history, literary criticism has been marked by dynamism of approaches. Countless critical approaches have been propounded and these approaches have appealed to critics differently. Some have gain worldwide popularity and have been accepted as orthodoxies, others have remained stagnant while some have evolved and adopted different nomenclatures. Gilbert Tarka Fai in his discussions on the relevance of literary criticism in his unpublished PhD thesis entitled “Nationhood and Representation in Selected Works of Wole Soyinka and Bole Butake” makes us to understand that:
Critical approaches should be seen as new ways of positing new hypotheses and solving new critical problems. Literature is in itself very complex because it is imaginative, reflective and draws nourishment from depths of the human mind. Because criticism is intimately reflective of literary complexity, it is presents a variety of investigative methods and approaches subject to debates. Some have remained essentially in the literary domain while others have found their way into domain of criticism through related disciplines like linguistics, sociology, psychoanalysis history environmental science amongst many others. Since the role of the critic is to shed light on some aspect of literary art that might have eluded readers, it is left for him or her to choose the approach suitable for that purpose | [25] | TARKA, Fai. “Nationhood and Representation in Selected Works of Wole Soyinka and Bole Butake”. (PhD Thesis). U of Yaounde 1, June 2013. |
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Situating the place of criticism in literary analyses, Bernth Lindfors posits that:
Literary criticism is a fickle and uncertain area in which no one has the final word. There are never any right or wrong answers as in elementary mathematics or physics, there are only good and bad arguments based on different interpretations of the same data. | [26] | BERNTH, Lindfors. "African Textualities, Texts, Pretexts and Contexts of African Literature." (1977). |
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Bernth Lindfors’ view above emphasizes the dynamic nature of literary criticism and Bernard Fonlon in “The Idea of Literature” goes further to insist that:
Genuine literary criticism is neither the pouring of lavish praise nor is it the pronouncement of sweeping condemnation. It is the fruit of a philosophical study and analysis of the text from all its bearings; each statement of either praise or blame must be buttressed by solid, syllogistic reasons why. There is no room for passion. Nor is there room for mindless judgment that spring without due ponderation from personal biases and preferences. Here unalloyed subjectivity is anathema. | [28] | FONLON, Bernard. "Idea of Culture." ABBIA: Cameroon Cultural Review 11 (1965): 5-29. |
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Lindfors like Fonlon is preaching the gospel of the force of an argument and not the argument of force. Chidi Amuta is amongst the many African critics who have given due prominence to the importance of theory in the interpretation and analyses of a literary work. He believes that literary study as one of the different aspects of human society needs a rigorous theoretical thrust if it is to be taken as seriously as other disciplines. He maintains that:
Criticism should be guided by theory, and theory, in turn, by philosophy. In the absence of this chain of relationship, writers and critics of the same epoch and even of the same broad class and ideological origins will display incoherence and indeterminacy in their pronouncements on literature and culture. | [2] | AMUTA, Chidi. Theory of African Literature. London: Zed Books Ltd, 1989. |
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Amuta further articulates his position on the debate about the relationship between literary criticism and literary theory with insistence when he states that:
As a vital component of the critical enterprise, the interpretations of the literary products of a given society can only command validity if they are rooted in theoretical paradigms that either organically derived from or are most directly relevant to the objective conditions of life in the society in question. Such a theoretical paradigm must in addition derive its relevance from its commitment to the freedom of members of the society, for freedom is the production of art which critical theory only intervenes to ratify and corroborate | [2] | AMUTA, Chidi. Theory of African Literature. London: Zed Books Ltd, 1989. |
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Amuta’s arguments above state clearly the functions of literature and the role of theoretical paradigms in the interpretation and analysis of literature. This paper will draw inspiration from New Historicism, to elaborate on the importance and relationship between literary criticism, literary theory and textual interpretation and analyses. It should however be noted that no single approach, no matter its claims and supposed validity can exhaust textual dynamism.
4. New Historicism as a Text Reading Tool
Another burning issue that was noticeable in the thesis and dissertations examined was the fact that students failed not only to sustain their discussions on theories throughout their write-ups but also, they failed to use the different tenets from different critics to navigate throughout the different chapters. We shall use the above theory in Derek Walcott’s Ti Jean and his Brothers to exemplify how students can conveniently navigate a theory and a research work in a manner that will be consistent, coherent, scientific and methodological in the analysis of a literary text. This section of this paper will first traced the background of the theory, how it has evolved over time, its major advocates, its principal tenets, its relationship with other theories and lastly, how a text can be interpreted and analyzed from a New Historicist Perspective.
Since the mid-1980s, literary critics have come to read literary texts more and more as material products of specific historical conditions and circumstances. The expression New Historicism, Cultural materialism and most recently, Cultural Poetics, have all been used to describe a critical practice which has drawn on earlier Marxist, structuralist and Feminist works. Phillip Rice and Patricia Waugh argue in
Modern Literary Theory that the practice of New Historicism is mainly associated with two main groups of critics: one arising within studies of Romanticism (Marilyn Butler, Majorie Levinston, Jerome Mcgann and David Simpson) and the other within Renaissance studies (Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Andrian Montrose). The first group is concerned with offering a critique of romanticism’s own self-presentation, its sublime or poetic autonomy. The second group uses “colonialism and theatricality both as political concepts and as looser metaphors to examine strategies of subversion and containment in renaissance texts”
| [24] | WAUGH, Patricia. Modern Literary Theory. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1992. |
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Though Stephen Greenblatt named the theory New Historicism, it has been developing throughout the 1980s. For example, in 1987, Marilyn Butler had called for a New Historicist practice in her Cambridge Lectures “Reposing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History”, in which she advocated the study of actual literary communities as they function within larger communities in time and in particular places. Butler and Greenblatt emphasize that political and social needs shape literary production and reception and argue that criticism must therefore examine the ways in which traces of social circulation are effaced to produce the illusion of the “autonomous’’ literary work.
| [29] | BUTLER, Marilyn and Rebels Romantics. "Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830." Oxford 17 (1981): 19-31. |
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Rice and Waugh further posit that New Historicism emerged or was influenced by the American Formalist critical thoughts of M. M Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, Hayden White, Gardamer, Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. According to Rice and Waugh, Althusser’s notion of ideology as contradictory and his concept of the relative autonomy of the text and the interpellation of subjects in history, Gardamer’s hermeneutic understanding of the past as ever constructed in relation to a present which is also a development out of the past, Hayden White’s view of history as narrative construction or stories and Bakhtin’s articulation of all human utterances “including literary texts as social acts which are multi-accentual and available for divergent uses”
| [22] | TILLYARD, Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall. "Shakespeare's History Plays (1944)." Richard II. Routledge, 2015. 23-43. |
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, all influenced the emergence of New Historicism.
New Historicism as a text reading approach differs radically from traditional Historicism and New Criticism. To better understand New Historicism as a theoretical paradigm, it is useful to highlight some of the basic assumptions of traditional historicism and New Criticism as text reading approaches. This is important because New Historicism flourished as a result of the limitations of the traditional historical approach and New Criticism to objectively analyse literary texts.
In traditional historicism, the literary text was seen “in the context of social, political and cultural history’’
| [27] | Selden, and Peter Widdowson. A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory. Routledge, 2014. |
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. Thomas Caryle, an advocate of traditional historicism, argues that literature plays a very important role in the representation of history. In his opinion, “the history of a nation’s poetry is the essence of its history, politics, science and religion’’
| [27] | Selden, and Peter Widdowson. A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory. Routledge, 2014. |
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. Traditional historicism therefore viewed a literary text or literature as an imitation of society. It was concerned with historical facts that happened within a particular space and time. Its main focus was to establish factual and accurate stories that could be rendered valid and as a result, traditional historicism was therefore geared toward literary objectivity and truth. This truth to traditional historicists should “manage to capture the sense of the entire age”
| [4] | DOBIE, Anne Dobbie. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism, Boston: Thomes Heinle, 2001. |
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. From the views above, one realises that traditional historicism in an attempt to avoid any biases in literary interpretation and analysis, concentrated on historical facts. In other words, traditional historicists believed that the best way to understand a society and its history was to read that society’s literature because literature to them was supposed to be fact-oriented. This view is overtly criticised by Michel Rolph-Trouillot in
Silencing the Past, where he states that the fundamental error of traditional historicism is that it” told the story of the victor and not that of the vanquished”
| [30] | TROUILLOT, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 2015. |
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. This means therefore that traditional historicism ended up being biased and hegemonic because it looked at historical interventions in literary text from a one dimensional perspective.
Traditional historicism therefore became prescriptive as it narrated events made to capture the world view that was used to interpret literature, arts, politics and social behaviour. It also advocated that stories should serve as tools of enlightenment that will lead an age toward positive progression. In this case, the text should reflect the ideas that are upheld within the time and space of its production.
E. M. W Tillyard is amongst the most popular advocates of traditional historicism. In
The Elizabethan World Picture, Tillyard sees literature as a representation of its age of production because to him, “the literature of a period expresses the spirit of an age’’
| [27] | Selden, and Peter Widdowson. A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory. Routledge, 2014. |
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. His argument here views literature first as a text that interprets literature and secondly, as not being independent as it captures societal happenings. In summary, traditional historicism was a fact oriented theory, which considered literature as an imitation of its history and society. This theory has as a major weakness the fact that it completely undermines the creative imagination of a writer; an aspect which is at the heart of New Criticism.
The weaknesses of traditional historicism acted as a spring board for the spread of New Criticism. Unlike traditional historicism, New Criticism, a theory that emerged in the 1920s as an Anglo-American version of Russian formalism, concentrated on the literariness of a literary text. New critics are completely disinterested in any out of text analysis because to them, as Roland Barthes has suggested:
Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. | [3] | BARTHES, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. |
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Quoting Mellarme, Barthes further argues that in a literary text, “it is language that speaks and not the author and what is important is the destination of the language (the reader) and not its origin (the author)”
| [12] | BARTHES, Roland. “The Death of the Author”. In Dennis Walder. (ed) Literature in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 259-263. |
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. Barthes as a staunch advocate of New Criticism concludes that ‘’to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with the final signified, to close the writing’’
| [3] | BARTHES, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. |
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To Barthes therefore, as to most New Critics, there is no out of text analysis because any attempt to attribute meaning to a text which takes into account the author, his society and historical realities becomes subjective. The above views are very similar to those made by Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson to whom New Criticism is:
Clearly characterised in premise and practice: it is not concerned with context-historical, biographical, intellectual and so on; it is not interested in the ‘fallacies’ of ‘intention’ or ‘effect’; it is concerned solely with the ‘text in itself’, with its language and organisation; it does not seek a text’s ‘meaning’, but how it speaks itself | [27] | Selden, and Peter Widdowson. A Practical Reader in Contemporary Literary Theory. Routledge, 2014. |
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New criticism therefore differs tremendously from traditional historicism because of its rejection of any out of text analysis. To New Critics, for textual interpretation to be objective, the reader (whom to them is the person who gives meaning to a text), should concentrate in analysing the internal organisation of a text, its language and general structure which are the areas where the meaning of a text is found. New Critics advocate therefore that a text be read as an object of its own, independent, and not related to its author, reader, the historical time it depicts, or the historical period in which it is written. This is because they consider a text as existing in a world of its own, with all meaning and value based on it and everything else extraneous.
Mathew Arnold, T. S Eliot, and F. R Leavis are amongst the pioneer advocates of New Criticism as a tool for literary interpretation and analysis. The rejection of traditional historicism by New Critics and opting to handle a text as an entire entity means they place the text over the society and rejects its author. The views of traditional historicists and New Critics are subjected to overt criticism by New Historicists. For example, Frank Lentricchia simply refers to New Criticism as a moribund criticism
| [8] | LENTRICCHIA, Frank. After The New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. |
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, while Robert Langbaum concludes that New Criticism is dead and to him:
We are all New Critics nowadays, whether we like it or not, in that we cannot avoid discerning and appreciating wit in poetry, or reading with close attention to words, images, ironies and so on... There is more to criticism than understanding the text, (which) is neither where criticism begins, nor where it ends...instead of insisting upon literature’s autonomy, we must resume relating it to life and ideas. | [21] | LANGBAUM, Robert. "The Poetry of Experience: the Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition." (1959). |
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Another overt criticism of New Criticism is that of Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray who in
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms consider New Historicism as “A type of literary criticism that developed during the 1980s, largely in reaction to the text-only approach pursued by Formalist New critics and the critics who challenged the New Criticism in the 1970s”
| [17] | MURFIN, Ross et al. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. |
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. New Historicists like Formalists and their critics acknowledge the importance of the literariness of literature, but also analyse the text with an eye on history. As Murfin and Supryia stipulate, New Historicism is not “New” per say because a majority of critics between 1920 and 1950 focused on a work’s historical content and based their interpretations on the interplay between the text and its historical context.
To Murfin and Supryia therefore, unlike traditional historicism, New Historicism assumes that works of literature “both influence and are influenced by historical realities and they share a belief in referentiality; a belief that literature “both refers and is referred to by things outside itself”
| [17] | MURFIN, Ross et al. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997. |
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. Murfin and Supryia conclude their discussion on New Historicism by affirming that New Historicism has discarded the old distinctions between literature, history and the social sciences and has erased the line dividing historical and literary material.
In addition, Ross C. Murfin in “Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Study in Contemporary Criticism” highlights the difference between New Historicism and traditional historicism. To her:
New Historicism isn’t the same as the historical criticism practiced forty years ago. For one thing, it is informed by recent critical theory: by Psycho-Analytic Criticism, Reader Response Criticism, Feminist Criticism and perhaps especially, Deconstruction. The New Historicist critics are less fact-and-event oriented than historical critics used to be, perhaps because they have come to wonder whether the truth about what really happened can ever be purely and objectively known. They are less likely to see history as linear and progressive, as something developing towards the present. | [16] | MURFIN, Ross C. "What is New Historicism?" in Heart of Darkness: A Study in Contemporary Criticism”. New York: St Martins, 1989. |
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Murfin’s observations highlight the fact that New Historicists look at history as subjective, non-linear and progressive. New Historicism is therefore interested not just in history but more about how history is interpreted.
New Historicism therefore emerged as a counter discourse to the traditional historical approach and New Criticism. As a critical tool, New Historicism has been described as a multi-disciplinary approach because it draws from history, politics, anthropology, culture and sociology given their interest in government institutions and cultures. Anne Dobie validates this assertion when she states that “Sometimes, it [new historicism] seems to be grounded in Sociology, sometimes in Psychology or Economics; but the scope of investigation by New Historicists is never limited to any field of study”
| [4] | DOBIE, Anne Dobbie. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism, Boston: Thomes Heinle, 2001. |
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One of the most conspicuous trends in the recent history of contemporary literary and cultural theory today has been the extraordinary institutionalization of the movement of New Historicism. Proclaimed by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982 as a novel reading method that will shy away from the critical deficiencies of both the traditional historical school and the various Formalist movements by which it was replaced, New Historicism, as it was practised by Greenblatt and many Anglo-American Renaissance scholars, gained the immediate interest of those who had become dissatisfied with the stringent textualist ideology upheld by most American deconstructionists.
Post-structuralist thoughts, like those of Michel Foucault, Derrida, De Carteau, and Roland Barthes amongst others served as a spring board for the genesis and development of New Historicism. As Greenblatt himself puts it, Post-Structuralism in its deconstructing guise “was not only the negative limit but the positive condition for the emergence of New Historicism”
| [13] | GREENBLATT, Stephen. “Shakespearean Negotiations" in The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988, pp. 304-406. |
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Stephen Greenblatt’s and Louis Andrian Montrose’s contributions to the emergence of New Historicism are quite outstanding. Greenblatt’s book Renaissance Self-Fashioning is a major document in the understanding of New Historicism. In the book, Greenblatt considers literature as a social force that contributes in the making of individuals because to him, literature has a moral contribution in shaping people’s lives. New Historicists question the traditional view of literature as an autonomous realm of discourse as they segment the literary text into its social and political context. This view is vividly expressed by Anton Kaes who considers New Historicism as:
A critical method that perceives the literary text as a communal product rather than the expression of an author’s intention; that disputes the autonomy (an isolation) of the work of art and reconnects it to its cultural context; that scrutinizes artistic production as social intervention; that draws on recent theoretical work and nevertheless seeds historical and textual specificity. | [14] | KAES, Anton. “New Historicism and the Study of German Literature” in German Quarterly 62, 1989, pp. 210-219. |
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According to Kaes therefore, New Historicism perceives the literary text as a communal product and reconnects it to its cultural context. Kae’s view resembles that of Greenblatt when he says “works of arts, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsession of individuals, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange”
| [13] | GREENBLATT, Stephen. “Shakespearean Negotiations" in The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988, pp. 304-406. |
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. By drawing attention to the collective and communal aspect of art, New Historicists also connect the text to its cultural context. Kae’s view is very much similar to that of D. G Myers who in an online article “New Historicism in Literary Studies” concludes that the central task of New Historicism is to call into question the traditional view of literature as an autonomous realm of discourse and to dissolve the literary text into the social and political context from which it is issued.
In addition, Greenblatt contends that New Historicism as a text reading approach is based on four main contentions. Firstly, that literature is historical. What this implies is that the literary text is a product of a society and not an author. Secondly, that literature is part and parcel of human activity because the writer’s psychology, society, religion, education and class influenced the literary text. This view is very similar to that held by Marxist critics who argue that a writer’s social class determines the way he writes. Thirdly, man like a literary work is a social construct, a sloppy composition of social and political forces. To him therefore, there is no such thing as human nature that transcends history because Renaissance man belongs inescapably and irretrievable to the renaissance. History thus becomes a series of ‘’ruptures’’ between ages and men. Fourthly, that the historian/critic is trapped in his own “historicity”. No one can rise above his own social formations, his own ideological upbringing, in order to understand the past on its own. Literature then, to Greenblatt, as Catherine Belsey once suggested becomes “a basis for the reconstruction of an ideology”
| [20] | BELSEY, Catherine. "Textual analysis as a research method." Research methods for English studies 2 (2013): 160-178. |
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. It is worth noting that Belsey’s views as expressed here are very similar to that of Marxist critic Plekanov who concludes that literature is nothing but an ideological conception of the world.
Talking about ideology, Louis Andrain Montrose in his essay “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture” interprets Shakespeare’s
A Mid-Summer Night Dream as an ideological representation of the Elizabethan society at the time. To her, the play is a reflection of the power structured Elizabethan society and a vivid expression of male authority within Elizabethan cultures. As a New Historicist, Montrose believes that literary works are a representation of the cultures from which they emerged. Thus, literary works are both what a culture produces as well as what reproduces the ideology. New Historicism, Montrose concludes, is therefore concerned “with the historicity of text and the textuality of history”
| [15] | MONTROSE, Louis Adrian, “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture” in Representations 2, 1983, pp. 61-94. |
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Another thought provoking study on New Historicism is that of Judith Newton in “History as Usual? Feminism and ‘’New Historicism’’ in which she highlights three major contentions of the theory. Firstly, she argues that there is “no transhistorical or universal human essence and that human subjectivity is constructed by cultural codes which position and limit all of us in various and divided ways"
| [19] | NEWTON, Judith. "History as Usual? Feminism and the" New Historicism"." Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 87-121. |
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Here, unlike the traditional historical critics, history is seen not as facts but as narratives and as such, texts like the history they represent are subjective positions that are socially and linguistically constructed, given a particular time and space. Secondly, that there is no “objectivity” and that we experience the “world” in language, and that all are representations of the world. Our readings of texts and of the past, are informed by our own historical position, by the values and politics that are rooted in them
| [19] | NEWTON, Judith. "History as Usual? Feminism and the" New Historicism"." Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 87-121. |
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. The basic argument here is that the literary critic is called upon to understand the circumstances that lead to creativity in order to understand the text’s ideology. Thirdly, that representation “makes things happen by shaping human consciousness” and that, as forces acting in history, various forms of representation ought to be read in relation to each other and in relation to non-discursive “texts” like events”
| [19] | NEWTON, Judith. "History as Usual? Feminism and the" New Historicism"." Cultural Critique 9 (1988): 87-121. |
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For New Historicist therefore, there can be no such seamless overarching unity, but only the shifting and contradictory representation of numerous “Histories”. History becomes a narrative construction involving a dialectical relationship of past and present concerns. This means that the critic is neither a transcendent commentator nor an objective chronicler because he/she is always implicated in the discourses which help to construct the object of knowledge.
Bonnie KLomp Stevens and Larry L. Stewart in A
Guide to Literary Criticism and Research summarize the intrinsic elements that New Historicist will take into consideration in analysing a text. In their opinion, studies in literary history, in which the concept of New Historicism is inherently embedded, consider elements which contribute to the composition of literary works at a given time. Such intrinsic elements which New Historicism takes into account include: the author’s life, the culture and ideas of the time when the work was written and the possible influences of previous literary works. KLomp and Stewart argue that knowledge of these elements is indispensable to the understanding of a literary text. They further explain that the meaning of any work is inextricably bound to its nature as a statement from and of the past. This, to them, is because a work is not simply “a monument of the past, but it cannot be read meaningfully without recognising its context”
| [31] | KLOMP, S. Bonnie, and L. Stewart Larry. "A Guide to Literary Criticism and Research." Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers (1992). |
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. Consequently, they conclude that New Historicism is the influential results of the critical debates on the relationship between the present and past and of text and culture that generated during the 1980s.
From the views above, it becomes clear that New Historicism rejects the traditional historicist views that history is factual and objective since to them ‘’all history is subjectively known and set down’’
| [4] | DOBIE, Anne Dobbie. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism, Boston: Thomes Heinle, 2001. |
[4]
. Lois Tyson’s articulations as to what New Historicism is all about becomes very relevant to corroborate the above views. To him:
[N]ew historicism views historical accounts as narratives, as stories, that are inevitably based according to the point of view, conscious or unconscious, of those who write them. The more unaware historians are of their biases-that is, the more “objective” they think they are – the more those biases are able to control their narratives. | [9] | TYSON, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide. London: Garland Publishing, 1999. |
.
The above biases, as Tyson argues, comes from the complexity of culture that guides the world view of the narrator. It is for this reason that New Historicist ‘’see all parts of a given culture as shaping and being shaped by each other’’
| [4] | DOBIE, Anne Dobbie. Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism, Boston: Thomes Heinle, 2001. |
[4]
. As far as the New Historicist cited above are concerned, there is nothing as ‘’truth’’ in a text or about a historical event. For example, in the play of Walcott, Caribbean history is projected from the playwright’s subjective point of view. This is partly because their plays do not exhaust their societal histories and even the versions of history which inspires the plays under study are not presented in terms of factual evidence but as references to selected historical events. History as exemplified in these plays becomes a narrative and one which can better be interpreted only from the playwrights’ perspective. The New Historicist views of Klomp, Stewart and Tyson become very relevant in the interpretation of Walcott’s play. Stewart’s and Tyson’s views very much resemble that of Micheal Meyer in
Bedford Introduction to Literature, in which he argues that New Historicism as a text reading approach “acknowledges and then explores the various versions of history, sensitizing us to the fact that the history on which we chose to focus is coloured by being reconstructed from our present circumstances”
| [18] | MEYER, Michael, and Daniel Quentin Miller. The compact Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1994. |
[18]
. What Meyer is emphasizing here is the subjectivity of historical interpretation.
From the forgone discussions, it is fairly clear that while New Historicism outrightly rejects traditional historicism, it however does not in any way, devalue the importance of the literary text. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt in
Practicing New Historicism argue that New Historicism acknowledges the importance of the literary text when they state that the project of New Historicism is not about “Demoting art and discrediting aesthetic pleasure, rather it is concerned with finding the creative power that shapes literary works outside the narrow boundaries in which it had hitherto been located, as well as within those boundaries”
| [7] | GALLEGHER, Catherine & Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. |
[7]
. What this means is that New Historicists in advocating a historically based interpreta”tion of a literary text are conscious of the fact that the writer is a “creator and has the liberty to create as the muses lead him/her”
| [7] | GALLEGHER, Catherine & Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. |
[7]
. New Historicists therefore are of the opinion that a literary text is not only shaped by history but also shapes history and the worldview of society. It will, from Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s views, be a major oversight for anyone to think that New historicists underestimate the importance of the literary text because:
Our project has never been about diminishing or belittling the power of artistic representations, even those with the most problematic entailments, but we never believe that our appreciation of this power necessitates either ignoring the cultural matrix out of which the representations emerge or uncritically endorsing the fantasies that the representations articulates | [7] | GALLEGHER, Catherine & Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. |
The above New Historicist views in one way or the other all challenge the idea of seeing literature as a sphere of autonomous aesthetic forms sealed off from other kinds of historical and cultural influences. While New Historicists appreciate the artistic potentials of a writer, they openly reject art for art’s sake.
5. From Theory to Practice: A New Historicist Reading of Derek Walcott’s Ti Jean and His Brothers
To effectively carry out a New Historicist reading of a play, the student is expected to focus attention on the relationship between literature (drama) and history and reiterate the significance of the past, particularly, slavery, slave trade, colonialism and Neo-colonialism as sources of inspiration for Derek Walcott’s play. The student will need to place the play under study within it’s historical contexts and argue, amongst other things, that the level of historicity in postcolonial literature is not limited to particular authors, periods or geographical locations. Postcolonial writers, as exemplified in Walcott’s Play are almost unanimous in their attempt to explore the past to explicate the present.
Produced in 1958,
Ti-Jean and His Brothers (henceforth simply referred to as
Ti Jean) is an allegorical play based on a popular West Indian myth of the duel between three brothers and the Devil. The prologue in the play provides background information about the characters and introduces the main source of conflict. We are told that the play is about three boys “who live with their mother in abject poverty in a hut on the fringes of a magical forest”
| [1] | WALCOTT, Derek. Ti Jean and His Brothers. New York: Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. |
[1]
. We are also made to understand that the boys all individually attempt to take up the Devil’s challenge. The challenge is that each of the boys should make the Devil to feel anger, compassion, or any kind of human emotion for a reward, while their failure to achieve this aim would lead to the boy’s death.
The Devil, who can be likened to the slave masters in the hay days of slavery, is presented in the play in awesome terms. He has dead eyes and his skin is as white as that of a leper. He is described as the owner of half of the world and seat of intrigue, evil and destruction. In the play, the Devil appears in the guise of Papa Bois, the owner of the forest, the white planter and colonialist. He wreaks havoc over the entire world of the play as he lures blacks into his plantation, exploits, outwits and finally eliminates them. By doing this, the Devil keeps the blacks (represented by the three Jeans and their mother) in perpetual bondage. As a true slave master, the Devil tries to perpetuate the anonymity of the blacks as is evident when he calls Gros-Jean everything except by his real name. The implication here is that, by imposing names on somebody or something, one distorts his identity to suit his/her purpose, and submerge his original identity. This attitude was very notorious of slave masters and the institution of slavery as a whole. As a means to completely eliminate the identity of the slaves, the slave masters changed their names and imposed new names on them. This situation is vividly captured in Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe where “Crusoe imposes a name on Friday without even consulting him to find out if he ever had a name”
| [23] | DEFOE, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Vol. 2. Cooke, 1836. |
[23]
. This attitude becomes part of colonial brain-washing and is one of the evils Walcott sets out to protest against in
Ti - Jean.
In
Ti- Jean therefore, Walcott projects the theme of slavery through the three brothers who are sold into slavery by their mother. “Gros Jean, the eldest of the three brothers, symbolically stands for those slaves that were transported from Africa to the New World”
| [11] | ASHAOLU, Albert. “Allegory in Ti-Jean and His Brothers” in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Colorado: Lyne Reinne Publishers Inc, 1997, pp. 118-125. |
[11]
. Like most slaves that were transported from Africa, Gros Jean is physically very strong and Walcott’s projection of Gros Jean’s strength validates the comments made by John Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr in
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans when they state that “It is to be remembered that traders would have none but the best available natives. They demanded the healthiest, the largest, the youngest, the ablest, and most culturally advanced…”
| [32] | MOSS Jr, Alfred A., and John Hope Franklin. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. McGraw-Hill Humanities, Social Sciences & World Languages, 1994. |
[32]
. The incidences in this play validates the New Historicist claims that literature reflects both within and without itself and that a literary text is a text of referentiality. It equality validates the New Historicist argument that literature is nothing but the textuality of history and the historicity of text. These three tenets can be used to interpret and analysis
Ti Jean as the play that draws excessive inspiration from the history of slavery and slave trade, the West Indian society and the life experiences of the playwright. History is seen as a source of inspiration to the playwright. In summary therefore, a New Historicist reading of
Ti Jean and His Bothers will warrant that the student should interpret the text with an eye on history (the author’s background, history, society, culture etc) while acknowledging the artistic splendor of the work. Students can then use each of the numerous tenets by the different advocates discussed above to integrate in their analyses and these tenets must resonate and continuously be rekindled in every part of the work and not just in the introduction or chapter one as we have earlier observed.
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