Inquiry II Cultural & Historical Interrogation

1. Inquiry II Cultural & Historical Interrogation

2. Defining “Cultural and Historical Interrogation”

3. Ask questions! As with Close Critical Reading, INQUIRY (asking and exploring open-ended questions that are not overly broad nor overly specific) is vital to practicing Cultural Historical Interrogation. So, ask questions Before During After reading a text.

4. Level One Who wrote this document? Who is the intended audience? What is the storyline or message? Level Two Why was this document written? What type of document is this? What are the assumptions made in this document? Level Three Can I believe this document? What can I learn about the society that produced this document? What does this document mean to me?

5. Remember ENG 111? Cultural Historical Interrogation is very much linked to Rhetorical Analysis. You need to consider the context surrounding the author’s decision to write this particular document. In other words, you are identifying the rhetorical situation of this rhetorical act. Consider: audience, rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos), warrants (assumptions)

6. (nearly) EVERYTHING IS a “text” Throughout this unit and while writing your research paper, it is important to keep in mind that a “text” does not mean novels, articles, and poems only. A text can be a poster, e-mail, text message, blog post etc.

7. Cultural Poetics, or New Historicism By Charles Bressler

9. literature What is it? (definition) Whose interests does it serve? (function) How is it formed? (nature) Literature and History as disciplines should be analyzed together.

10. history Is much more complex than a list of important events occurring along a timeline Is less about what objectively occurred than what people think of what occurred and how people speak or write about life (i.e. is subjective) History is one of many “ways of seeing and thinking about the world” (181). “History is shaped by the people who live it” (183).

11. text ALL texts are examples of “culture in action” (183) An author is reflecting, shaping, questioning, assuming, making, and responding to culture Everything, including the individual, is a cultural artifact. “Cultural Poetics posits the interconnectedness of all our actions” (188).

12. CULTURE a set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions—that govern behavior and are used to interpret the world and act purposefully within it any group that shares common language, values, habits, mores, activities, and beliefs; “a shared way of life” (Johnson np) “As all society is intricately interwoven, so are critics and texts, both to each other and in the culture in which the critics live and the texts are produced. Since all critics are influenced by the culture in which they live, New Historicists believe that they cannot escape public and private cultural influences.” (Bressler 184)

13. Production Who made the text? How did they make it? What materials did they use to make, publish, and distribute it? Why did they make it? What were his or her intentions? Etc. RECEPTION How does the audience feel about the text? What are they doing in response to it? Who is accepting and who is rejecting its ideas (and why)? Etc.

14. DISCOURSE Each one of the various ways—artistic, social, political, medical, legal, etc.—that people think and talk about their world EPISTEME The principle or pattern guiding the way a specific discourse functions (and interacts with other discourses) in a particular time period

15. Let’s REVIEW… New Criticism, Old Historicism (the older approach) Cultural Poetics, New Historicism (the current approach)