discourse

Why We Read

New Historicists want to understand the complex set of connections that
intersect a text at the time of its production. New Historicists reject the idea
that there is a single, monolithic ideology, attitude, set of beliefs, or way of using
language. Instead, they want to examine and understand the relationship among
political, economic, social, and aesthetic concerns which constantly overlap
each other. To be reductive, we could say that they want to describe the way a
specific form of power works within a specific historical moment. After reading
a New Historicist essay, readers will know as much about the conditions and
relationships of a specific context as they will about a specific literary text. The
larger aim of this kind of reading has to do with liberal politics in that the end
result of much of their work shows how power works (and this awareness may
lead to a revaluing or restructuring of present power relations). In many ways
New Historicists are sophisticated Marxists in that New Historicists ask a lot of
the same questions about power, ideologies, and institutions, but they are
keenly aware that they are not revealing the past as it really was. Greenblatt
notes that "the new historicism erodes the firm ground of both criticism and
literature. It tends to ask questions about its own methodological assumptions
and those of others."

What We Read

New Historicists read literary texts (but there is no reason that they couldn't
read a shopping mall or an advertisement), but they read them along side
historical "texts" (documents, events, actions, etc.). There is a leveling of texts in
that the literary text does not explain the historical context, and the historical
text does not explain the literary text: they are intertwined, like two sides of a
sheet of paper. Greenblatt and his buddies are Renaissance scholars, so there is
a great deal of New Historicists who focus on Shakespeare, etc. but New
Historicism knows no disciplinary bounds.

How We Read

Michael Ryan summarizes the task of New Historicism by saying, "there is no
single historical discourse of a period; instead, the critic must trace out the
multiple and complexly interconnected histories that make up an age." In other
words, keep in mind that there are multiple "discourses" operating at the same
time. For example, one could argue that there are such things as "legal
discourse," "military discourse," "patriarchal discourse," "religious discourse,"
"sports discourse," "academic discourse," "patriotic discourse," "Marxist
discourse," "medical discourse," and so on, for one could argue that there is a
discourse that belongs to any identifiable group of people. By "discourse," we
mean not only the way we use language, but also the assumptions, attitudes,
values, beliefs, and hierarchies that are attached to way language is used. Your
task is to show how a text functions within a discourse or show how a text
attempts to negotiate among competing discourses.

Writing Suggestions:

Part One: Gather Data/Prewrite

Don't open your history text book as much as find archival historical
documents, primary texts, or "co-texts." You could see this as a kind of
intellectual challenge: pick a co-text (and it should be contemporary to the other
text) and link it with your other text at the level of discourse. Once you find a
text and co-text, you may want to be a structuralist for a while again as a way
to link ideologies, but you will need to find other ways to link the texts.

Link the texts at the level of discourse by asking yourself these questions (which
I borrow in part from Dino Felluga's web site):

What are the relations of power suggested by the text?

How is power operating explicitly or implicitly? What might threaten that
power?

How do those in authority attempt to contain, co-opt, or appropriate attempts
to subvert that authority? This question leads to a discussion of the various
strategies employed to maintain or legitimize authority. In other words, how
does the text function? How does it reinforce the dominant discourse or how
does it subvert it?

What historical or cultural events illuminate the text?

What does the text reveal about the connections between language,
knowledge, and power in a particular culture at a particular moment?

How does the text reveal a historically specific model of truth and authority?

Part Two: Recognize Relationships

As with all these ideologically-oriented readers, you need to make some claim
as to how the text functions within a specific context. Importantly, you will
make a claim not only about the text but about larger "discursive practices" or
about a certain kind of "discourse." You want to demonstrate how this "web of
relations" functions or works together.

Think of the kinds of claims Greenblatt makes and follow his lead: "My interest
here is not in these details which have been noted since the eighteenth century,
but in the broader institutional implications of Harsnett's text and of the
uses to which Shakespeare puts it." "Harsnett's detailed identification of
exorcism as theatre... is more than a satirical analogy; it is a polemical
institutional analysis whose purpose is not only to expose the fraudulence of
exorcism but to link that practice to the pervasive theatricality of the
Catholic Church." " Shakespeare's play is itself a secular version of the
ritual of exorcism." "The force of Shakespeare's theatrical improvisation is to
appropriate the power of the traditional, quasi-magical practice and of the
newer, rationalized analysis and then ... to raise questions about ..."

See how Greenblatt links Harsnett's text with Shakespeare's by claiming that
both deal with the discourse involving exorcism, theatricality, deviance, and
authority, among other things? Notice as well that Greenblatt talks about how
the play functions, how the play doesn't just reflect what is going on at the time
but actually intervenes in the "conversation" about exocism. When you make
claims, use verbs that foreground a text's role: "King Lear suggests, reinforces,
challenges, celebrates, defends, serves to, responds to, attempts to, etc."

In other words, begin your essay with an interesting anecdote, usually a non-
literary text from the same historical moment, that you will link with the literary
text by demonstrating that both texts are involved in a web of historical
conditions, relationships, and influences. Again, this web of interconnected
issues, values, attitudes, beliefs, hierarchies (ideology) and ways of speaking is
called "discourse." The unveiling of how this discourse functions is your primary
task. The use of the anecdote points you in this direction. Use a common or
existing discourse (i.e. legal, religious, domestic, legal, patriarchal, etc.) or coin
your own term that identifies a particular way language is intertwined with
ideology.