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History as Usual? Feminism and the New Historicism To write about new historicism is to encounter a problem of definition and of self-definition as well. What do we mean and what are we to mean by this term? The critical assumptions and techniques currently identified with new historicism inform a variety of critical practices, but new historicism, as articulated by those who identify themselves as II new historicists" or cultural materialists or materialist-feminists, produces readings of literature and history that are as marked by difference as by sameness.1 Are new historicists to be identified as a new school and new historicism itself as a unique, and hot, commodity , fast becoming the "newest academic orthodoxy" and promising to secure for those who can produce it the power to define a new inner circle of acceptable critical practice? (Montrose 1986, 7). Or is new historicism to be defined as a set of widely held, loosely postmodernist assumptions and strategies that may be given very different articulation depending on the politics of the practitioners? Both possibilities for the term are in the air.2 Many of the postmodernist assumptions3 currently identified with new historicism, of course, are intensely familiar. The new historicism , we are told, generally assumes that there is no transhistorical or universal human essence and that human subjectivity is constructed by cultural codes that position and limit all of us in various and divided ways. It assumes that there is no lI objectivity," that we experience the IIworld" in language, and that all our representations of the world, our readings of texts and of the past, are informed by our own historical positions, by the values and politics that are rooted in them. It assumes that representation "makes things happen " by "shaping human consciousness" and that various forms of representation ought to be read in relation to one another and in relation to other social practices such as "events." All are assump- 28 Starting Over tions that inform and have informed a number of critical practices for many years.4 The constructions of history attributed to new historicism are also familiar from other contexts. There is the notion that history is best told as a story of power relations and struggle, a story that is contradictory, heterogeneous, and fragmented. There is the (more debated) notion that hegemonic power is part but not all of the story, that history is a tale of many voices and forms of power, of power exercised by the weak and the marginal as well as by the dominant and strong. Even the technique of "cross-cultural montage,"S or the juxtaposition of literary, nonliterary, and social texts, is not unknown . In the afternoon, indeed, when I am no longer writing this essay, I sit at my well-laden desk, patiently working through a series of connections between essays on political economy, parliamentary debate, women's manuals, medical writing, novels, and the formation of the modern state. It's enough to make me think I'm a new historicist too. But self-definition in this case is contingent upon the larger process of defining what new historicism itself is to mean. And in the histories of new historicism that I have read so far, whether new historicism is defined as a school or more loosely as a set of assumptions and techniques given different articulation depending on the politics of the practitioners, my own entry into these same assumptions and techniques has only partially been mapped, my own articulation of them barely hinted at. New historicism, we are variously told, comes out of the New Left, out of cultural materialism, the crisis of 1968, and the postmodernist response to that crisis, out of poststructuralism as part of that response, and most particularly out of the historiography of Foucault.6 New historicism is also to be read as a reaction to the formalism of structuralism and poststructuralism and as a response to the perception that American educational institutions and culture, in particular, with their focus on technological and preprofessional training, are rapidly forgetting history. New historicism , finally, has also emerged out of fear on the part of literary critics that they are being further marginalized within their culture (Montrose 1986, 11). Since this fear is particularly well grounded for literary critics in the United States, where the study of literature has been "trivialized," according to some, by the conservative institutionalization of the latest reigning orthodoxy, deconstruction, the upshot [18.223.43.142] Project MUSE (2024...

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