1

Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu

MA in English Language and Literature
The Evolution of Critical Trends in the 20th Century / Trends and Methods in 20th-century Anglo-American Criticism
Course convenor: Ana-Karina Schneider, PhD

Lecture X: Discourse and Power:

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism1

As Marxist cultural critique took a structuralist turn in the 1950s and 1960s under the sway of
Althusser and Gramsci, a number of significant conceptual changes occurred:

 the base-superstructure dialectics is superseded

 more subtle and complex view of how society works and of power dynamics
 awareness that ideology is disguised as common sense
 an element of assent on the part of the subjects is implied and relied on by the dominant
 political contest is replaced by ideological contest
 stress on language and representation / discourse as the site of power struggles

The two main new trends arising from Marxism in the decades to follow are New Historicism and
Cultural Materialism. The latter in particular has been defined as “a politicised form of
historiography” by Graham Holderness (qtd. in Barry 182), though that definition equally applies to
New Historicism. Its main tenets are:

 Culture = all forms of culture

 Culture = process, rather than a given
 Culture = a site of political argument with each side striving to establish plausibility for its
account of the world (i.e. ideology) (Alan Sinfield)
 Materialism ≠ idealism; Materialism: culture cannot transcend the material forces and
relations of production that produce it.

Cultural Materialism, essentially a Marxist theory of culture, is currently one of the most
influential critical currents in Britain. It started with the publication in 1973 of Raymond Williams’s
(1921-1988) The Country and the City. According to Williams, there is a dialectical relationship
between social order and the cultural forms it produces: not only does society stimulate the
development of certain genres (e.g. drama, novel) and cultural phenomena (e.g. periodicals), but the
idealisations of poetry and the regulatory function of genres, in their turn, contribute to the
consolidation of the social order. Moreover, nationhood was originally imagined into existence
through its representations in literature and cultural forms such as the newspaper (see Benedict
Anderson’s Imagined Communities). This is especially valid of the period of modernisation starting
around 1550 (the early modern period) and lasting until 1880 (the period of high nationalism and
imperialism) in Britain. This period of the emergence of modernity coincides with the development
of the nation-state by means of a range of centralised political and social institutions, as well as
technologies of communication (e.g. steam print) and transport (e.g. railway), which encourage
thinking in terms of belonging to larger structures than the local community of earlier days.

1
These are the respective names of the two roughly similar critical trends in the United States and the United Kingdom.
For detailed distinctions between the two, especially in terms of their use of the term ‘historicism,’ see the essay below.
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After Williams’ death, Lacanian theories of language acquisition, Freud’s analysis of the
sublimation of sexual desire, and Kristevian semiotics have been brought to bear on the development
of cultural materialism.

Cultural materialism = a critical method which has four characteristics: it combines an attention to:
1. Historical context
2. Theoretical method
3. Political commitment
4. Textual analysis (Dollimore & Sinfield qtd. in Barry 182-3)

“Cultural materialism particularly involves using the past to ‘read’ the present, revealing the politics
of our own society by what we choose to emphasise or suppress of the past” (Barry 184).

Important characteristics:
- Political optimism: belief that individuals are agents of their own history; cultural materialism
concentrates on the interventions whereby men and women shape history
- Rejection of the radical scepticism of post-structuralism: there is truth and it must be found
- Interest in how cultural productions of the past are read now, rather than how they were read
then.

Cultural theory = “a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life” (Williams qtd.
Hebdige 10)
Cultural theory = “the study of relationships in a whole way of conflict” (E.P. Thompson qtd.
Hebdige 10).

Ideology
- Definitions by Stuart Hall & Althusser (Hebdige 11 pass.)
- Ideology = system of representation
- Representations = “perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects” that “act functionally on
men” (Althusser qtd 12) = signs  semiotics (13)

What cultural materialist critics do (see Barry 187)

New Historicism has an equally exact birth date: “Born around 1982, the new historicism
quickly became one of the most vital modes of literary study in the 1980s” (Richter 1204). The
young Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) pioneered and gave the name to this new
orientation in the United States with the publication of his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More
to Shakespeare. In subsequent years, the trend’s focus extended rapidly to comprise the whole of
literary history, and its emphasis is on the inevitable subjectivity (or positionality) of
interpretation. It starts from Marxist dialectical criticism, as a reaction against the traditional
historicism of the 19th century, but it does away with the Marxist opposition between base and
superstructure and abandons the belief in history as mimesis (i.e. direct representation of events in
the world) in favour of a view of history, proposed by Hayden White (b. 1928), as narrative, as
text marked by inexplicable gaps and ruptures. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer explain:

This sequence of history itself elaborates relationships that belong to what Foucault calls an epistemé,
not a mode of thought that characterizes an age (as in the ‘old’ historicism), but the discursive limits
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on what can be thought or ‘discursivized’ at any particular moment, so that history as a discipline
necessarily traces ruptures rather than continuities and empty spaces within and between epistemés.
(1991: 212, my emphasis)

This demythologising of history has encouraged critics both to view history as a species of language,
as another genre existing side by side with literature, and to look beyond formalist aesthetics in order
to read literature in the context of power relations and practices. According to New Historicism,
history is not a sequence of facts, and it is not a mode of thought. In good Derridean and Foucauldian
poststructuralist tradition, ‘text’ is to be understood here not as an invention of the mind, but as
political and ideological practices operating a number of programmatic exclusions in the process of
narrativisation. It is all about whose history gets told (see Linda Hutcheon). As such, history is no
longer a Grand Narrative, but a series of little narratives or (hi)stories, in the plural, whose
constructedness is constantly at issue. The greatest merit of New Historicism is to have recuperated
the less visible stories of marginalized ethnic and gender groups, and to have foregrounded the
impact of ideology on the way in which history is constructed.
The method of New Historicism is to read the literary text as ‘embedded’ in other,
contemporary written texts, whether scientific, penal, medical or colonial documents. Read in
relation to such texts, literary works begin to “acquire new aspects, of being sites of power-struggle,
of being the sites of emerging classes and ruling orders, of being the sites of national, political and
cultural demarcations” (John Brannigan in Wolfreys & Baker 158). Unlike Cultural Materialist
readings, New Historicism usually shows the text to be the site of ideological struggles that end with
“the incorporation of the subversive within the dominant ideology” (172). In an essay titled
“Invisible Bullets,” Greenblatt argues that “though literary texts may communicate subversive ideas,
the dominant culture tolerated such subversion and incorporated it within itself as it allowed a
relatively harmless outlet for opposition to the dominant discourse of the culture. By distinguishing
the dissident from the subversive, [Cultural Materialist critic] Alan Sinfield argues that texts can
overcome such containment and thus challenge dominant discourses” (Newton 1998: 235), or at least
that traces of dissidence remain visible and enable the critic to articulate this subversion and contest
the dominant meaning (Brannigan in Wolfreys & Baker 174). These two positions illustrate a
significant distinction between the two trends.
Drawing on Foucault, Catherine Belsey recommends that the following questions be included in
any New Historicist reading of texts:

What are the modes and conditions of these texts?

Where do they come from; who controls them; on behalf of whom?
What possible subject positions are inscribed in them?
What meanings and what contests for meaning do they display? (qtd. in Wolfreys & Baker 175)

Influences: the later Sartrean existential phenomenology, Michel Foucault’s structuralism,

Derridean deconstruction, sometimes Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the anthropology of
Clifford Geertz, and 20th-century neo-Marxism.
Representatives: NH: Stephen Greenblatt, Hayden White, Stanley Fish, Wesley Morris, Roy
Harvey Pearce, Benedict Anderson, Fredric Jameson, Eric Sundquist, Linda Hutcheon; CM:
Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Brian McHale, Patricia Waugh, Tom Nairn, Alan Sinfield etc.
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Further reading:

The Return to History

History is something unpleasant that happens to other people.

(Arnold Toynbee)

Some of the recent avatars of the convergence of text and context will make the object of the present essay. I
focus in particular on conceptual series such as history-ideology-myth, ideology-language-knowledge, history-
narrative-ethics, and fiction-consciousness-ideology. My working premise is that the most seminal conjunction
of literary and historical studies is represented by the acknowledgement of the ideological conditioning of the
medium in which both literature and historiography exist – i.e., language. I therefore contend, like Paul de
Man, that the proper preoccupation of historicist readings of fiction is with the subtle social and cultural
mechanisms that have congealed language into certain patterns of meaning.
Late twentieth-century historicist readings attempt to answer a number of questions that could be
grouped, by and large, into three pairs: 1) How did historical circumstances shape the life and mind of the
author, and consequently his treatment of characters? And how did historical circumstances within the novel
shape the lives of the characters? 2) What definitions of history and ideology emerge from the text? And what
definitions emerge from my interpretation of the text? 3) What does a New Historicist reading of a literary text
add to the understanding of the text? And what does it add to the understanding of history? All three groups
can be subsumed to two larger issues: ideology’s embeddedness in language, and history’s presentness only
through narrative representation. I argue that all these questions are equally central to a self-conscious
historicist reading, with the caveat that the last one in particular is legitimate in literary criticism strictly in
conjunction with its pair in group three. I also propose that historicist readings of literature are particularly self-
critical due to the awareness of the high political stakes that they always involve and engage with, 2 but also –
perhaps especially – because of the recognition of the linguistic nature of history and ideology themselves. A
critique of such readings, therefore, can only be undertaken from inside the discursive practices that prompted
it.
In a history-making book on history and narrative entitled Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon
raises the crucial question, “Whose history gets told?” The answer to her question hails back to Karl Marx’s
suspicion that the events of the past as we come to know them are never quite ‘brute,’ that they reach us
through the mediation of the dominant class, who make them available, through an act of ideological
interpretation, in the form of what we regard as historical fact, the historical data provided by history books. In
Romania we have had first-hand experience of that distortion of historical fact – witness the need, after the
Revolution of 1989, for a re-writing of history books, and hence the alternative school textbooks, televised
debates, the revision of historical films, etc. Both Hutcheon’s question and Toynbee’s facetious definition
quoted in my epigraph point to the constructedness of history. Awareness of the artificiality of all such ‘grand
narratives’ has been the hallmark of late-twentieth-century thinking about the nature of ‘reality’ as the
dialectics of ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge.’ It has also incited literary critics to a reconsideration of key concepts such
as history, myth, and ideology in their imbrication with literature.
The late 20th-century return to history in literary and cultural studies, then, is to an equal extent a return to
ideology. History and ideology have become so tightly connected that it is impossible to discuss them
separately or establish chronological precedence. In fact, one of the most strenuously held tenets of such
readings is that history and ideology have come into existence simultaneously and are mutually informative.
Before them there was only myth. America is rather an exceptional case, in whose history myth is
contemporaneous with ideology; in which, in fact, myth could be said to be synonymous with ideology. 3 The
recognition of this equivalence in the wake of the disciplinisation of literary studies brings about the collapse of
the separation of art from politics and the consequent emergence of new interpretive methods, each having its
own theoretical and terminological apparatus to explain and justify its interpretive practices – i.e., the rise of
new theories. In Sacvan Bercovitch’s terms, it leads to a critical dissensus which has the potential for being

2
Fredric Jameson’s Political Unconscious and “Metacommentary” come to mind.
3
See Sacvan Bercovitch, “America as Canon and Context,” 1986, esp. p. 105.
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turned to good account (1986: 107).

When neither objectivity (because of bias) nor subjectivity (because of the fragmentation of the reading
community and the constructedness of the reading subject) can be invoked any longer as defensible
perspectives, ideological “principles of interpretation” are brought into the discussion to prevent
methodological relativism from running rampant – as well as to pre-empt accusations of arbitrariness. That is,
after all, the role of theory in disciplinised literary studies, as described by Hayden White: “to provide
justification of a stance vis-à-vis the materials being dealt with that can render it plausible. Indeed, the function
of theory is to justify a notion of plausibility itself” (in Davis 1986: 157). With such high stakes, professional
ethics and self-reflexivity become most pertinent issues in connection with criticism and theory with a socio-
political agenda. The ambivalence of historical readings of literature stems from the belief that literary studies
can add significantly to the understanding of history as a system of causality (in Walter Benjamin’s words, left-
wing ideology politicises art). They also have the advantage of liberating criticism from traditional standards of
canonicity and convention in favour of criteria of ‘relevance.’ Conversely, there is much critique of historicism’s
marginalisation of formal and subjective considerations which might be regarded as coming under the
incidence of other discursive methods.
Michel Foucault has had a crucial contribution towards the elucidation of the relationship between world
and language, structures of power and narrative forms. He discusses history as the sum of “discursive
practices” – i.e., “what it is possible to say in one era as opposed to another” (Davis 1986: 106) – and a
sequence of “epistemés” – “not a mode of thought that characterizes an age (as in the ‘old’ historicism), but
the discursive limits on what can be thought or ‘discursivized’ at any particular moment” (Davis & Schleifer
212). On this view, Paul Hamilton echoes Foucault in pointing out that the critique of historicism, too,
necessarily becomes historicist, “one which historicises the historicisers” (in Knellwolf & Norris 17). Critique
itself must have recourse to historicist tropes in order to build up its own discourse. As a result of this insight,
history has come in recent decades to be regarded as either a species of language (Hans Robert Jauss, Hans
Georg Gadamer, Eugene Vance), a pool of dialogised, potentially politically effective discourses (Georg
Lukacs, Raymond Williams), or a narrative marked by a series of inexplicable gaps and ruptures rather than
by continuities within and between epistemés (Michel Foucault, Hayden White). It is a set of ways of knowing
the world, or successive forms of discourse, whose origins, then, are elsewhere (in ideology, mentalities,
language, the literary tradition etc.). As Davis explains, history is

“thinking the Other,” a sequential elaboration of the lacunae in experience. Foucault cautioned that these gaps in history are
not lacunae “that must be filled.” He said that they are “nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in
which it is once more possible to think.” Fundamentally, then, history is a continual renewal of the grids for thinking and
constitutes an epistemological posture (a way of knowing – an “episteme”) toward the world, and this definition of history
holds true for the histories we write as well as for the immediate sense we have of history as reality. (1986: 106)

Thus, the traditional hierarchy of history over literature breaks down as the grand narrative of ‘History’ is
demythologised and replaced by ‘histories’ – ‘true’ and ‘fictional.’ This new status of history has encouraged
literary critics to look beyond formalist aesthetics in order to read literature in the context of power relations
and practices. Hippolyte Taine’s utilitarian view of literature in history is thus both recuperated and reversed:
literature indeed bares the devices of, while it also dramatises, existence in the world. This tension entails the
abandonment of the twin belief in history as a gnoseological discipline and in art as mimesis (i.e. direct
imitation of events in the world) and the obliteration of the ontological boundary between the two respective
types of texts.
A second consequence of the reinterpretation of history is the fact that the Marxist opposition between
base and superstructure is discarded. Hayden White pinpoints the moment of transition: “in Jameson’s
reformulation of the Base-Superstructural relationship, culture is to be viewed less as a reflection of the
modes of production than as simply another aspect of these modes” (in Davis 1986: 155). Hence the
historicist insistence on the literary artefact as ‘work’ rather than ‘text’ (157) – both in the sense of the final
product and of the concrete, socially-imbedded process of production. Hence, also, the deep self-
consciousness and sense of responsibility that pervades the work of the most important literary historicists. As
Robert Con Davis points out, most historicists “share a strong sense of history as an activity that deeply
involves the critic, so that the critic cannot stand apart from the text being read and interpreted but can only
choose to recognize his or her own effect on the text” (1986: 107).
The editors of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 9, postulate that the greatest challenge
that theory has had to face in the wake of French structuralism has been contestation of any grounds for a
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“confident appeal to matters of truth and historical fact.” The common denominator of all late-twentieth-century
theoretical approaches

is their commitment to one or another form of the linguistic discursive or textual ‘turn’ that has also been a prominent
feature of orthodox academic disciplines, not least philosophy and historiography. Where they chiefly differ is in the extent
to which they still find room for some residual notion of historical truth behind the otherwise infinite play of textual
significations, or how far they would endorse Fredric Jameson’s claim that history is an ‘untranscendable horizon’ which will
always in the end place limits on the scope for such forms of textualist licence. (Knellwolf & Norris 1-2)

The roots of this major turn, like those of Jameson’s influential theory, are to be sought in the conjunction of
Formalist celebration of form, late Sartrean existential phenomenology, Foucauldian post-structuralism,
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, and neo-Marxism. At the same time, recent
developments in all these fields of enquiry, even the ostensibly ahistorical and atopical deconstruction, claim
historicist credentials (see Hamilton in Knellwolf & Norris 19). Moreover, historicist criticism branches out into
a whole range of contiguous disciplines, from feminism to post-colonialism, and from post-communist to
African-American studies and studies of other marginal or migrant cultures. 4 This intense cross-fertilisation is
at the heart of all contemporary literary studies.
A few distinctions must be drawn here. The first has to do with the overlap between historical/
historicist criticism and Marxism. Hayden White’s “Getting Out of History” proves helpful: “Take the vision
out of Marxism and all you will have left is a timid historicism of the kind favoured by liberals and the kind of
accommodationist politics which utilitarians identify as the essence of politics itself” (in Davis 1986: 147). In
other words, the kind of historicism that is appropriate for the interrogation of the laws that govern the
dynamics of history, and implicitly of literature as its narrativised expression, must incorporate Marxism’s
“power to inspire a visionary politics.” A historicist himself, White here appropriates the position of Jameson’s
“Metacommentary” which had occasioned the writing of his own essay, and insists that Marxism is not, nor
ever was intended to be, “merely a reactive social philosophy.” Rather, it is a form of utopianism which can
participate in the betterment of the human lot through a thorough understanding of history (147).
In “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation” (1987), a text that is perhaps
more congenially Whitean, the scholar draws another important distinction: that between the Marxist social
utopianism and the fact that as a philosophy of history Marxism is not more visionary than its bourgeois
counterpart. The reason, according to White, is that Marxist studies, too, amount to a “disciplinisation” of
history based on the Hegelian rationalisation of historical process at the expense of the repression of the
historical sublime or affective/ aesthetic motivation as described by Schiller (see White in Richter 1306-11).
In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson corroborates this with a second important
distinction: that between Marxism and New Historicism. The former is based upon the assumption that
economics or political economy determines, in the last instance, both political power and cultural production.
New Historicism, on the other hand, relegates the economic to a “secondary and nondeterminant position
beneath the new dominant of political power or of cultural production.” Whether it accepts one or the other of
these two dominants depends on whether historicism takes its inspiration from the theories of Max Weber and
Foucault, or from Baudrillard and the American theorist of a “post-industrial society,” respectively (in Richter
1182-3).
In light of these differentiations, it would be interesting to inquire into the subtle motivations underpinning
the current open hostility, evinced by much Romanian criticism, to Marxist and historicist readings of literature,
and its relationship to the incommensurate interest taken by Romania’s intellectuals in politics. The latter
aspect was a foreseeable phenomenon after the “four decades of forced national amnesia” (Corniş-Pope 62),
justified by a psychological law of compensation, facilitated by the newly acquired freedom of expression, and
welcomed by a number of theoreticians who regard it as our only chance of overcoming the political impasse
otherwise known as “the age of transition.” At the same time, the resistance to historicism and Marxist cultural
dialectics has cultural implications that have not, as yet, been properly examined. I argue that Romanian
critical thinking itself has reached an impasse, which demands a radical redefinition of the concept of culture
that includes a historicist investigation of chronotopical boundaries.
The third, methodological but interrelated, distinction is between historical and historicist
approaches. Paul Hamilton proposes:

4
Naturally, marginality itself, like ideology, must undergo constant redefinition in order to remain an operative term,
otherwise these disciplines lose their recuperative prerogative.
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historicist criticism does not represent straightforwardly the literary expressions about which it wants to speak. Historicism
does not offer unequivocal interpretations of the text in front of it in accordance with concepts of literary criticism,
generalisations necessary to the coherence of its discursive practice. It is incorrigibly reflexive. For the historicist, criticism
is to be understood by way of its consciousness of its own relativism in each and every judgement it makes. (in Knellwolf &
Norris 21)

Historical criticism, on the other hand,

achieves its ends by contextualising its interpretation by reference to events or other discourses contemporary with that
expression. Historicist criticism, though, interposes another plane of interpretation which takes as its subject those present
prejudices or assumptions by which such historical critics decide that something is indeed historically relevant. (21)

I have quoted this at length because it provides us with a useful interpretive stipulation. The historical
approach is based, in good nineteenth-century tradition, on the belief in the generic separation of history and
literature and in their respective coherence and meaningfulness; at best, as in the discipline of American
Studies before the mid-1970s, the two fields, though discrete, are “mutually resonant,” to use Jehlen’s phrase
(vii). Historicism, on the other hand, is both relativising and self-consciously methodical as it draws a
hermeneutic circle around its ostensible object of enquiry – the literary text – without however penetrating to it.
Historicism’s radical distrust of final interpretations and hierarchies is compensated for by its propensity to
expose and juxtapose, based on the belief in the mutual validation of past and present, literature and
ideology, art and history. In British Cultural Materialism, however, the meaning of the operational term
‘historicism’ comes closer to Hamilton’s definition of historical criticism (witness Barry 2002: 184-7 and 2003:
72-4), that is, it promotes contextualisation and interrogates chronotopical concatenations.
Thus, not only do all contemporary theories claim historicist credentials, but they in fact exist, on the
historicist view, due to ideology, to the same extent to which they exist in language and due to developments
in linguistics. Historicist theories recognise what Mikhail Bakhtin described as the dialogic nature of language:
even within the individual voice there is a constant dialogue between what the voice has to say and what has
always already been said by others. To speak is to recognise that language is social, that it has meaning and
it functions precisely because it has been used and naturalised by others before us and imprinted by them;
that words have a history of their own, which they cannot relinquish, but carry with them in every “new”
formulation, in every new literary work. It is therefore nominally the function of linguistics to unmask the
aberrations of ideology made manifest in literature, Paul de Man states, but language itself is ideologically
tainted. The key questions we must ask about language are, on the one hand, by what means did linguistic
meaning become naturalised by historical reference? And on the other, how do we know that we can always
mark the boundary between linguistic and phenomenological reality? The interrogation of these issues is
historicism’s proper task.