A dumb question? Help!

I'm applying to Cambridge and have just read about a Fellow whose literary interests are 'religion and biography of the sixteenth, seventeenth and early twentieth centuries'. This may sound stupid, but I'm not entirely sure what is meant by this - anyone care to explain/give examples?

Also, the website stresses 'the historical study of literature as an art in relation to other arts and intellectual practices', and calls its approach 'historicist'. It states that they stress "very close reading of texts, 'close' in the sense of 'paying attention to the medium of writing' as a way of understanding the nature, implications, and responsibilities of artistry."

I feel really stupid asking this, particularly as I desperately want to study English at uni, but what exactly would be a 'historicist' approach? And can anyone explain the various statements made above?

Thanks :redface:

Reply 1

Mrs Rickman

Historicist critics are concerned with placing texts very much within their social, cultural and of course historical contexts looking at outside influences on the writer. New historicists discuss the idea of how with certain texts the only knowledge we have of that particular time and/or society is the text itself and the implications of this.

Reply 2

etherised

Mrs Rickman

I think your description of new historicism is a little off. The point is rather the privileging of material which has traditionally been thought of as non-literary, and the examining of such material with the sort of attention usually reserved for 'literary' texts. And then using conclusions drawn from that to inform your reading of a literary text. So if you wanted to explore, say, colonial attitudes in Renaissance plays, you might first look at an official report written by on the experiences of English forces overpowering Native Americans, and then compare the attitudes you find there with Shakespeare's treatment of colonialism in his history plays. (Stephen Greenblatt, who was the leader of the new historicist movement, does precisely this in an essay of his.)

The point is supposedly that cannot examine literary texts in isolation from the social forces that shaped them. Though new historicists also point out that the 'literary' texts are not only inevitably influenced by social, economic, and political forces - they also in turn affect society. It sounds a bit of an obvious point, but it's a reaction against 'traditional' criticism, which had tended to act in a bit of a vacuum and think of literature as this exalted ideal which rose above all the sordid matters of real life, and to examine it in isolation.

Don't, however, expect to find too much of this sort of stuff discussed at Cambridge. The Cambridge English course is resolutely untheoretical.

the website stresses 'the historical study of literature as an art in relation to other arts and intellectual practices', and calls its approach 'historicist'. It states that they stress "very close reading of texts, 'close' in the sense of 'paying attention to the medium of writing' as a way of understanding the nature, implications, and responsibilities of artistry."

'Historicism' isn't a distinct movement or school in the way that 'new historicism is. I guess it means both looking at a broad range of texts (so, you might look at Milton's religious writings as well as <i>Paradise Lost</i>, and putting works of literature into historical context. Traditionally speaking, this approach has been more associated with Oxford scholarship. I find it curious that Cambridge should claim this as its approach, since actually the general force is very much towards "close reading" - which, in its most extreme sense ("practical criticism") means looking at the text in isolation.

Sorry, this is really long. I hope some of it is helpful. It's truly not a stupid question; all these terms get very muddy and ill-defined.

You might have a look at the first chapter of Terry Eagleton's <i>Literary Theory</i>. It's a history of how English developed as a university subject, and might answer some of your questions.

A dumb question? Help!

Related discussions

Latest

Trending

Trending

Articles for you