GRADO

GUA DE ESTUDIO: COMENTARIO DE

TEXTOS LITERARIOS EN LENGUA
INGLESA
UNIT 2 | INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM

2014-2015
Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI)

Isabel Castelao (Coodinadora), Jess Cora y Ddac Llorens

GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES : LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA

Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

UNIT 2: INTRODUCTION TO NEW HISTORICISM. STUDENT MATERIALS

TEXTS AND AUTHORS
Literary author: Elizabeth Bishop, 12 OClock News (the text is available on the curso virtual);
Co-text: excerpt from Mary McCarthy, "Report from Vietnam II: The Problems of Success", The

New York Times, May 4, 1967 (see below).

Introduction to critical and literary theory: Peter Barry, Ch. 9, New historicism and cultural
materialism (pp. 166-184).
Critical authors: Hayden White, The Historical Text as Literary Artifact (extract); Stephen
Greenblatt, Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (extract).

Self-assessment exercises: literary text ("12 O'Clock News")

ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911- 1979)
12 OClock News was published in the 1976 collection
Geography III. In a 1977 interview, Elizabeth Bishop said:
Actually that poem, "Twelve O'Clock News", was another that
had begun years earlier. In a different version. With rhymes, I
think. Yes, I got stuck with it and finally gave up. It had nothing
to do with Viet Nam [sic] or any particular war when I first
wrote it, it was just fantasy.
(https://www.pshares.org/read/articledetail.cfm?intArticleID=420).
1. Read the text and try to understand it by checking the words you don't
understand in a good dictionary. Read the text closely. If necessary, make sure
that you understand the syntactical relationships of the different sentences in
the text.
2. Listen to the mp3 audio file of this poem that is available in the Unit 2 section
of the curso virtual.
3. Then read the prose extract in the frame on the following page. Pay attention
to the notes and, again, check the words you don't understand.

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

Mary McCarthys "Report from Vietnam II: The Problems of Success",

The New York Times, May 4, 1967:
The Saigonese 1 themselves are unaware of the magnitude of what is happening to their
country, since they are unable to use military transport to get an aerial view of it; they only
note the refugees sleeping in the streets and hear the B-52s pounding a few miles away.
Seeing the war from the air, amid the crisscrossing Skyraiders, Supersabres, Phantoms,
observation planes, Psy-war 2 planes (dropping leaflets), you ask your self how much longer
the Viet Cong can hold out; the country is so small that at the present rate of destruction
there will be no place left for them to hide, not even under water, breathing through a
straw. 3 The plane and helicopter crews are alert for the slightest sign of movement in the
fields and woods and estuaries below; they lean forward intently, scanning that ground. At
night, the Dragon-ships come out, dropping flares and firing mini-guns.
The Air Force seems inescapable, like the eye of God, and soon, you imagine (let us hope
with hyperbole), all will be razed, charred, defoliated by that terrible searching gaze. 4
Punishment can be magistral. A correspondent, who was tickled by the incident, described
flying with a pilot of the little FAC plane that directs a big bombing mission; below, a lone
Vietnamese on a bicycle stopped, looked up, dismounted, took up a rifle and fired; the pilot
let him have it with the whole bombload of napalm 5 -enough for a platoon. In such
circumstances, anyone with a normal sense of fair play cannot help pulling for the bicyclist,
but the sense of fair play, supposed to be Anglo-Saxon, has atrophied in the American here
from lack of exercise. We draw a long face over Viet Cong "terror," but no one stops to
remember that the Viet Cong does not possess that superior instrument of terror, an air force,
which in our case, over South Vietnam at least, is acting almost with impunity. The worst
thing that could happen to our country would be to win this war.

You can read the whole article in the Javous Arcades Projects website:
http://javous308.blogspot.com.es/2011/05/report-from-vietnam-ii-problemsof.html

Saigon was the capital of South Vietnam. After the war and the victory of Viet Cong in 1975 and the unification of
the country under communist rule, it was renamed Ho Chi Minh City (1976) after Ho Chi MInh (1890-1969), the first
president of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam and founder of the Vietnam Popular Army and the
Viet Cong during the Vietnam War (1955-1975).

Psywar: psychological war.

This was a common part of guerrilla tactics used by the Viet Cong to ambush American soldiers in the rice fields.

The Americans used toxic chemical products to defoliate the Vietnamese jungle. The most infamous chemical
weapon was Agent Orange. It provoked miscarriages and phoetus deformations, cancer and many other illnesses
among the Vietnamese population. American soldiers were also affected. Many cases of cancer, respiratory
illnesses as well as impotence and sterility were reported, but the US government refused for a long time to accept
Agent Orange as the cause. Nowadays, Vietnam War Veterans are eligible for compensation for their illnesses.

Napalm: flammable liquid based used in incendiary bombs used by the American forces in the Vietnam War. The
Napalm girl images show the terrible effects of napalm and became one of the many iconic moments in the
Vietnam War that fostered the opposition to American intervention in Vietnam in the USA (warning, these are
explicit images of violence, suffering, injuries, and death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev2dEqrN4i0).

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

4. Write down the connections you think can be made between McCarthy's prose extract

(co-text) and Bishop's writing (text). Remember, a connection can be a similarity or a

contrast, a parallel or a difference, a presence or an absence.
Examples:
Co-text

Text

no title

title

prose

(seeming) prose

"lone Vietnamese on a bicycle"

"unicyclist-courier"

1. The co-text represents a specific place at a specific moment Vietnam being bombed by
the US Air Force while the speaker in the text avoids naming either the place or the
time being alluded to. How does knowing where we are, on the one hand, and not
knowing where we are, on the other, affect our reading? How does the author
manage to indicate the place to the reader?
2. In general, how is our reception affected by reading the two texts together?
3. 12 OClock News is included in Bishops The Complete Poems. You may find its form
disconcerting the fact that it has paragraphs and not stanzas or verses (= estrofas), or
the italicised (= en cursiva) words in the margin. How does this unusual form influence
your reading? Why do you think 12 OClock News is included in a poetry collection?
What makes it a poem?
(Suggestion: look for the same poetic devices you would in any poem: repetitions,
rhythm, assonance, etc.).
4. 12 OClock News is, in a sense, two works in one: the list of italicised words in the
margin and the paragraphs to their right. Can you spot any connection between the
two?
Example:

gooseneck lamp this connects to the image of the full moon which hangs motionless
in the sky in the paragraph to the right.
You may find the following images helpful to "picture" what the text describes:

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

Typewriter eraser with brush.

http://www.amazon.com/Venus-CircularTypewriter-Eraserscustomer/dp/B003KEFV02

Typewriter Eraser, Scale X. 1999, By Claes

Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
Stainless steel and cement. Approximately 20'
high. National Gallery of Art, Sculpture
Garden, Washington D.C.
http://www.designscience.ca/LODs/LOD_Spatial_Sc
ale/interpretation.html

A Soldiers nest. Chinese defenders of

Shanghai in 1937. This image belongs to an
earlier period than that reflected in Bishops
text, but it is useful to understand the image.
http://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=533

5. Say briefly what you think 12 OClock News is about. Consider the following: is it about
war, pure and simple? Or is it (among other things) about how war is represented, i.e.
told or described? Can we identify the voice of the paragraphs on the right of text with
the author? Why? To answer these questions, you must bear in mind your own answers
to the previous questions. Also, click on the virtual course links that give access to
Vietnam War newsreels and consider if there is a relationship between the text and
these news segments. What is the intention, if any, of the text? How is this achieved?

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

Further resources:
http://projects.vassar.edu/bishop/
(An excellent website dedicated to one of Vassars most famous alumnae).
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_highbrow/2006/06/casual_perfection.html
(Excellent article on Elizabeth Bishop's precise style. Unfortunately, half of the article is
available only on subscription).
https://www.pshares.org/read/article-detail.cfm?intArticleID=420
(A wide-ranging interview with Bishop, with revealing comments about some of the poems on
this course).
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/7
(Academy of American Poets website).
http://www.laprogressive.com/mary-mccarthy-in-vietnam-barack-obama-in-afghanistan/
(LA Progressive general information on Mary McCarthy in Vietnam).
Films: The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Killing Fields (1984). These are not
compulsory materials for the course. Remember that the emphasis is on the set literary texts,
Barry's book, and the critical texts or excerpts included in this Unit 2 Study Guide.

Introduction to Critical and Literary Theory

REMEMBER: read only the chapter page numbers indicated.

Read Barry, Chapter 9, New Historicism and cultural materialism (pp. 166-184).
Now re-read: New and old historicisms some differences (Barry pp. 168-169) and What new
historicists do (Barry pp. 172-173). Paraphrase Barrys points substituting each one with your
own words.
Example:
1. New historicists study literary and non-literary texts in conjunction, interpreting the
former through the latter.

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

Critical Authors
Read the following extract carefully
HAYDEN WHITE (b. 1928). From The Historical Text as Literary
Artifact (1978)
[I]n general there has been a reluctance to consider historical
*narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the
contents of which are as much invented as they are found and
the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts
in literature than they have with those in the sciences. []
Considered as potential elements of a *story, historical events are
value-neutral. Whether they find their place finally in a story that
is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic [] depends upon the historians decision to configure them
according to the imperatives of one *plot structure [] rather than another. The same set of
events can serve as components of a story that is tragic or comic, as the case may be, depending
on the historians choice of the plot structure that he considers most appropriate. []

The important point is that most historical sequences can be emplotted in a number of different
ways, so as to provide different interpretations of those events and to endow them with
different meanings. []

How a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historians subtlety in

matching up a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow
with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentially a literary, that is to say a fiction-making,
operation. []
In the process of studying a given [set] of events, [the historian] begins to perceive the possible
story form that such events may figure. [] The reader, in the process of following the historians
account of those events, gradually comes to realize that the story he is reading is of one kind
rather than another: *romance, *tragedy, *comedy, *satire, *epic, or what have you. And when
he has perceived the class or type to which the story that he is reading belongs, he experiences
the effect of having the events in the story explained to him. He has at this point not only
successfully followed the story; he has grasped the point of it, understood it [].
This is what leads me to think that historical narratives are not only models of past events and
processes, but also metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between
such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events
of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings. []
The overall coherence of any given series of historical facts is the coherence of the story, but
this coherence is achieved only by a tailoring of the facts to the requirements of the story
form. []
The historical narrative does not image the things it indicates; it calls to mind images of the
things it indicates, in the same way that a metaphor does. When a given concourse of events is
emplotted as a tragedy, this simply means that the historian has so described the events as to
remind us of that form of fiction which we associate with the concept tragic. []

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

What all this points to is the necessity of revising the distinction conventionally drawn between
poetic and prose discourse in discussion of such narrative forms as historiography and
recognizing that the distinction, as old as Aristotle, between history and poetry obscures as
much as it illuminates about both. []
The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the
representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual, must give
place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it with or likening it to
the imaginable. (SOURCE: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton,
2001, pages 1713-1728).
Self-assessment exercises
REMEMBER: unless otherwise indicated, all your answers should be in English.
1. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an *asterisk.
2. Re-read the following terms and expressions in context and explain briefly what you
think they mean within the context of the passage:
verbal fictions (paragraph 1)
value-neutral (par. 2)
emplotted (par. 3)
fiction-making (par. 4)
tailoring (par. 7)
3. Hayden White is clearly interested in the relationship between historical and literary
documents. Explain what you think he means by the following statements:
a. [H]istorical narratives are not only models of past events and processes, but also
metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events
and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of
our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings (par. 6).
b. When a given concourse of events is emplotted as a tragedy, this simply means
that the historian has so described the events as to remind us of that form of fiction
which we associate with the concept tragic (par. 8).
c. The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the
representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual,
must give place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by contrasting it
with or likening it to the imaginable (par. 10).
4. Summarise the text, taking into account your answers to the above questions.
REMEMBER: your answer should be shorter than the text itself.

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

STEPHEN GREENBLATT (b. 1943). From Introduction to The

Power of Forms in the English Renaissance (1988).

Read the following extract carefully:
I am Richard II. Know ye not that? 6 exclaimed Queen Elizabeth
on August 4, 1601, in the wake of the abortive Essex rising. 7 On
the day before the rising, someone had paid the Lord
Chamberlains Men forty shillings 8 to revive their old play about
the deposing and killing of Richard II. 9 As far as we know, the
play almost certainly Shakespeares was performed only once
at the Globe, but in Elizabeths bitter recollection [] this
tie
10
tragedy was played 40 times in open streets and houses. []
The story of Richard II was obviously a highly charged one in a society where political discussion
was conducted [] with [deviousness]. Clearly it is not the text alone [] that bears the full
significance of Shakespeares play, [] [but] rather the storys full situation the genre it is
thought to embody, the circumstances of its performance, the imaginings of its audience that
governs its shifting meanings. 40tie times in open streets and houses: for the Queen the
repeatability of the tragedy, and hence the numbers of people who have been exposed to its
infection, is part of the danger, along with [] her conviction that the play had broken out of the
boundaries of the playhouse, where such stories are clearly marked as powerful illusions, and
moved into the more volatile zone the zone she calls open of the streets. []
Modern historical scholarship has assured Elizabeth that she had nothing to worry about:
Richard II is not at all subversive but rather a hymn to Tudor 11 order. [According to John Dover
Wilson] [t]he play, far from encouraging thoughts of rebellion regards the deposition of the
legitimate king as a sacrilegious act that drags the country down into the abyss of chaos. 12
[] But in 1601 neither Queen Elizabeth nor the Earl of Essex were so sure: after all, someone

Know ye not that?: Dont you know that? In Elizabethan English the use of the auxiliaries do and does
was not that common yet and negative sentences could be formed by just adding not to the verb. Ye is either
the old plural or the singular formal form of the second person pronoun, you.
7

An attempted rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I (1523-1603; reigned 1558-1603) in February 1601, led by Robert
Devereux (1566-1601), the 2nd earl of Essex. When the citizens of London failed to come to his small armys aid,
Essex and his followers fled; Essex was executed for treason [NATC note].

Forty shillings was the equivalent of two pounds and refers to the old British Imperial System of weights and
measures which was in use in the United Kingdom from 1824 until 1965. There were 20 shillings to a pound and 12
pence to a shilling, thus a pound was the equivalent to 240 pence. Forty shillings or two pounds would have been
considered a considerable sum of money at the time.

Richard II (ca. 1595). The Lord Chamberlains Men: Shakespeares theatre company [NATC note].

10

40tie: forty.

11

The English royal dynasty that begins with Henry VII (1457-1509) in 1485 and ends with Elizabeth I [NATC note].

12

John Dover Wilson, The Political Background of Shakespeares Richard II and Henry IV, Shakespeare Jahrbuch
75 (1939): 47 [Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism note].

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

on the eve of a rebellion thought the play sufficiently seditious to warrant squandering two
pounds 13 on the players, and the Queen understood the performance as a threat. []
How can we account for the discrepancy between Dover Wilsons historical reconstruction and
the anxious response of the figures whose history he purports to have accurately reconstructed?
[] Dover Wilson[s] historical research has the effect of conferring autonomy and fixity upon
the text, and it is precisely this fixity that is denied by Elizabeths response.
Dover Wilsons work is a distinguished example of the characteristic assumptions and methods
of the mainstream literary history practiced in the first half of our century, []. [T]he new
historicism, [is] set apart from both the dominant historical scholarship of the past []. The
earlier historicism tends to be monological; that is, it is concerned with discovering a single
political vision, usually identical to that said to be held by the entire literate class or indeed the
entire population []. This vision, most often presumed to be internally coherent and consistent,
[] has the status of an historical fact. It is not thought to be the product of the historians
interpretation []. [T]his vision can serve as a stable point of reference, []. Literature is
conceived to mirror the periods beliefs [] from a safe distance.
The new historicism erodes the firm ground of both criticism and literature. It tends to ask
questions about its own methodological assumptions and those of others: in the present case,
for example, it might encourage us to examine the ideological situation not only of Richard II
but of Dover Wilson on Richard II. []
Moreover, recent criticism has been less concerned to establish the organic unity of literary
works and more open to such works as [] places of dissen[t] and shifting interests, occasions
for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses. The Elizabethan playhouse, playwright,
and player, writes Louis Adrian Montrose 14 [], exemplify the contradictions of Elizabethan
society and make those contradictions their subject. If the world is a theatre and the theatre is
an image of the world, then by reflecting upon its own artifice, the drama is holding the mirror
up to nature. 15 (SOURCE: Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York: W. W. Norton,
2001, pages 2251-2254).

* * *

13

See Footnote 2.

14

Louis Adrian Montrose, an American literary critic who specialises in English Renaissance literature and
representation. He was one of the early critics who proposed New Historicism.
15

The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology, Helio, n.s., 7 (1980): 57 [Greenblatts
note].

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Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2014-2015. Unit 2 Study Guide

Self-assessment exercises
REMEMBER: unless otherwise indicated, all your answers should be in English.
1. Read again the highlighted lines in paragraph 2. What do you think Greenblatt means
here? Explain this in no more than 50 words.
Suggestion: see Barry p. 166 (paragraph 2, A simple definitionliterary texts) and p. 167
(paragraph 2, Typically, a new historianinterpreted accordingly); also, Barry p. 172-3: What
new historicists do, especially points 1 and 3.
2. In paragraph 4, Greenblatt mentions a discrepancy. Explain in your own words what
discrepancy you think he is referring to.
3. In paragraph 5, look for and identify words and phrases associated with what Greenblatt
calls mainstream literary history (what Barry refers to as old historicism).
4. What, according to Greenblatt, does the new historicism do?
(Suggestion: base your answer on paragraph 6 [The new historicism erodes] of the
extract).
5. Summarise the entire extract, taking into account your answers to the above questions.

END OF UNIT 2 STUDY GUIDE

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