Historicisms

1. Historicisms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am6TghIrYEc

2. Michel Foucault(1926-1984) • Biography: Ecole Normale Supérieure, educationboth in Philosophy and psychology. ResearchstaysatUppsala, Warsow and Hamburg. Doctorate in 1961 Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age. His first publications are major successes. Foucault is equated to a group of “French intellectuals” formed by Sartre, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes. Mai 68 activist: tenure at University of Vincennes and promoter of the GIP (prison group information) Influences: Nietzsche, Freud through Ludwig Binswanger, thathe met in Paris, Marx through Althusser, his first mentor, French historian Georges Dumézil. Major work: Birth of the clinic (1963); the order of things (1966); Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (1975); the history of sexuality (1968) Thesis: power producesknowledge and knowledgeproduces power. But since power generallycontrolsknowledge, knowledgeis not free and becomes part of an « historical discourse ». An archeology of knowledgeenables Foucault to degrade the modern power of the state, whichhedescribes as being « biopolitical».

3. Discipline and punish (1975) • Modern states have replaced “torture” as a public display of force by “disciplinary punishments” . The later still resorts to violence but confine it into closed institutions such as schools, hospitals or prisons. Public institutions educate to discipline. They take control of individuals’ bodies to subject them inwardly. • Bentham’s panoptic (1975):”The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap”

4. Michel Foucault’s tradition: Foucauld deeply influenced Post-modernism in France (Deleuze, Baudrillard) the Cultural materialism in Great Britain (R.Williams), genders studies (N. Armstrong) Post-colonial studies and New Historicism (E. Sundquist). Objections: 1) Is the State necessarily an instrument of oppression? (Gladys Swayn, la pratique de l’esprithumain (1980): the foundation of the first asylums coincide with the rise of a psychiatric science) 2) Shall literary studies look into the texts for evidences of historical oppressions? 3) Was the original use of literature to entertain us or to nurture our historical resentments?

5. Raymond Williams(1921-1988) • Biography: leftwing, Welsh critique. Often related to the field of studiesundertaken by the Frankfurt School in Germany (T.W. Adorno,M. Horkheimer, H. Marcuse, W. Benjamin). Influenced by K. Marx and A. Gramsci. • Thesis: cultural materialism. Culture is made undereconomiccircumstances and far fromdenouncing a relation of power, culture isproduced to justifyit. A literarytextis a translation of an historicalcontext but at the same time. Literatureis a fiction thatparadoxicallyreproduces the real ladders of a society. • Analysis: the country and the city (1973). Love is not a problem as long as the British society remains rural: “Her fortune and her personwere the sole objects of his wishes, of which he made no doubt soon to obtain theabsolute property “ (exemple of Blifil and Sophia in Fielding’s Tom Jones). => a woman’s hand is begged for the plot of land she brings.

6. Love becomes an issue when women aren’t attached to a part of land anymore. They are a bone of contention between men when the transition from a rural to anindustrial society starts. Industrialization and urbanization are seen as a “kind of fall, the true cause and origin of our social suffering and disorder “. Romantic love arises in the novels as a manifestation of a double loss: land and women. “Richardson’s Clarissa is an important sign of that separation of virtue from anypractically available world” Objections: Does a literarytextnecessarilyreflecthistory? cultural materialismis a « politicizedform of history » (G. Holderness). Does an artistspeaks for the collective unconcious? Is culture inevitablyshaped by material productive forces?

7. Nancy Armstrong(b. 1938) • Biography: professor of English at Duke. Fields of interests: 18th and 19th c. literature, Empire and sexuality, the rise of genres and their interrelation to genders. Influences: Michel Foucauld, feminism. • Analysis: Desire And Domestic Fiction: A Political History Of The Novel (1987). Objection to Williams’ argument asserting that “historical events take place inthe official institutions of state or else through resistance to these institutions, and bothforms of power are exercised primarily through men.” According to Armstrong, culture is also shaped by the domestic realm, that is to say by the spheres of privacy. In England 18th and 19th c., division between the “inside of a society” and the outside of it, drew a line between publicity and domesticity: the task of politics were only endorsed by men while the field of the “personal” was supposed to be regulated by women. From there departs the formation of masculine and feminine domains of culture. • If a protestant culture such as the British one at the end of 19th c., laid stress on the “equality of sexes”, it paradoxically distributed different cultural roles for each of them. Objections:

8. Womensuch Charlotte and Emily Brontë, or Maria Hedgeworthwriteduring the Victorianperiod, they gave howevertheir fictions ” a good name, a name free of politics, andoften the name of a woman such as Pamela, Evelina, Emma, or Jane Eyre” Objections: 1) Can literature provide us a realistic insight on an history of genders? 2) Can this history be deconstructed through a feminist critics? 3) Are feminist critics carving out their new public sphere inside of literary studies?

9. Eric J. Sundquist • Biography: American scholar of the literature and culture of the • United States. Professor of English at UCLA. Director, UCLA/Mellon Program on the Holocaust in American and World Culture (2008-10). • Influences: Stephen Greenblatt, Michel Foucauld, New Historicism. • Major work: To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993); Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (2005). • Main thesis: history is only available as a collection of discourses. Literature can shape our social perceptions anew. • Analysis: “Melville, Delany and New World Slavery” , an excerpt from To wake the nation (1993). Sundquist draws a comparison between: -> Martin R. Delany: first published black writer in the U.S. with Blake or, The Huts of America (1859). ->Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, a short novel published in the Putnam’s monthly (1855). Melville’s novel depicts a slave mutiny on the board of a Spanish ship in 1799.

10. To Sundquist, Delany’sBlake and Melville’sBenito Cerenocould historically be related to the revolt of slaves against Napoleon preceding the independence of Haïti in 1804. But those two novels also directly pertain to the wake of a civil right movement that took place in the U.S. during the 1850’s. • By diplomatically recognizing Haiti in 1862, Lincoln manages to end up the Session war and to extend the abolition of slavery in the South. According to Sundquist, fictions such as Delany’s and Melville’s had contributed to stress a political progress. By portraying slave’s revolts, they would induce fears of rebellion among their potential proslavery readers. • O bjections/ infirmations : • Does the novel, as a genre, fit in to the models of political utopias? • Can literary critics reconcile historical conflicts? • How do crossed-cultural studies of genocides serve social peace? Battle on Santo Domingo., January Suchodolsky