Category Archives: Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

My favorite novel is War and Peace, and part of the reason why I love it isn’t just because of the writing but because of the reasons why Tolstoy wrote it. Now I never considered that my love of the novel was in fact a part of what the new historicism critics were doing, but I think I can give a good example of how this works.

Barry says that, “the word of the past replaces the world of the past,” (Barry, 175) meaning that all we have to go on are the texts that have been left behind to us since the actual time in history no longer exists.

In Tolstoy’s case we could include in our analysis of War and Peace:

  • His wife’s daily journal. If you ever wanted to know what a pain in the ass Tolstoy was, as well as some insight into Tolstoy’s attitude towards women, serfs, the upper-classes, and how he behaved in general, read his poor wife’s journal.
  • We could look at Tolstoy’s military records (he served in the Crimean War 10 years previous to writing the novel) as well as his correspondence writing from that war in which we see him grow more disillusioned with war itself.
  • We could also look at the political reforms of the 1860’s, specifically the Russian Serf Emancipation of Emperor Alexander II.  

 

So armed with these additional texts we could get a better picture of what the author was living through at the time as well as give us extra insight into the author himself. Combined we get a bigger picture of not just what the novel is about, but why it exists in the world, why Tolstoy felt a book about the beginnings of the Decembrists Revolt was relevant half a century later.

War and Peace as seen through the old historicism lens could read:

  • The characters of the novel are constrained to act in accordance with their constrained social status under the ultimate rule of the Tsar and their desire to fight Napoleon’s invasion of their country.

 

War and Peace as seen through the new historicism lens could read:

  • The characters of the novel are greatly influenced by the new thinking of the age, such as nihilism, radical political reform, social justice, and the erosion of and political complicitness of the Orthodox church in regards to the power of the Tsar.

Feminism

Barry asks, “If normative language can be seen as in some way male-orientated, the question arises of whether there might be a form of language which is free from this bias, or even in some way orientated towards the female.”

Perhaps a difference can be seen in examining the stereotypes of how men and women use language. For example, men are seen as using language with a specific goal in mind, the stereotype being men try to fix their partner’s problems with “why don’t you just tell your boss X or Y?”. Conversely, the stereotypical female use of language is to use language as a way of expressing emotion, such as “I’m really frustrated with my boss.”

These of course are stereotypes and tropes in our society since men do express their emotions to their partners and women do explain to people how to perform tasks. And the same can be seen in art, such as the character Ripley in the Alien films who performs both stereotypically male and female roles, often at the very same time (protecting a child in her arms while firing a flamethrower).

So what then would be a non-masculine language? Marks and Courtivron seem to be saying that a whole new language – written through their (women’s) bodies – must be invented. Even “pronouncing the word ‘silence’” would be done away with since that would impose a syntax, or a male-dominated control over the language. What this language would be I could image as a form of dance, a physical expression of want and desire and feeling, sort of like bees using their bodies to tell the hive where the pollen is located. Of course this presents the problem of their still would be a language with a rigid syntax that has been imposed on the culture.

page 44 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Another critque here is by acknowleging we could have any number of finite descrptions in an infite universe of possibilities then we wind up with a Zeno’s paradox situation where the hare never catches the tortise or the arrow is never actually in a location. We have to pick something, no matter how arbitary,.

page 44 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Saussure makes the distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’, where parole is a part of the larger langue. The oedipus myth fits here in that the play itself is the parole but the whole cycle of plays connected to Thebes is the langue in which we find larger, greater context. Patterns emerge, motifs, contrasts, etc.

page 44 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Another example of how arbitary this is, is, for example, colors. We have 7 primry colors, but why not 14?Why only 4 seasons instead of 8? Langauge, then reflects the way we see the world, but is not objective reality itself. Of course, there is a definite moment of spring during the equinox, so these moments do exist.

page 43 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Saussure’s train analogy is good at illustrating what he’s getting at: What gives a train its identity? Every day the cars are different, the engine is different, the passangers are different, it leaves and arrives at different times, and in an emergency might be a bus to the next station. “A train doesn’t have to be a train.”

page 42 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Saussure also explained how words a relational. Context is derived from adjoining words related to it, such as “hovel, shed, hut, house, mansion, palace.” We know what a hut is because we understand how it relates to other types of dwelling/storage places, but it has little/less meaning without that context.

page 41 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Saussure says that langauge is (basically) arbitrary and is a system which sands apart from that which it attempts to define. The word ‘hut’ is not the same as a thing you can live in, it’s just part of the sign system used to identify verbally that thing people are living in. (even onomatopoeia is arbitrary)

page 28 of 288 of Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory

Basically what Eliot is saying as far as ‘originality’ is concerend is that poetry is not a “pouring out of personal emotion,”but rather, “transcending of the individual by a sense of tradition”, and that the poet’s “predecessors can be most clearly heard speaking through him.” Nothing new under Eliot’s sun