Literature and History (4): Cultural Materialism

1
Literature and History (4)Cultural Materialism

• Shakespearean Discourses

2
Starting Questions

• What is Discourse according to Foucault?
• Why is history textualized?
• What do you think about the first lecture quoted
  in our textbook, chap 2(pp. 236-237)?
• What is New Historicism?
• How about Cultural Materialism? Cultural
  Poetics?

3
Outline

• Cultural Materialism
• e.g. 1 Browns reading of The Tempest
• e.g. 2 Barker, et als reading of The Tempest
• e.g. 3 Shakespeare and Education
• History as Time Travel and Costume Drama
• Your Journal Possible Approaches
• References

4
Cultural Materialism

• a literary criticism that places texts in a
  material, that is socio-political or historical,
  context in order to show that canonical texts,
  Shakespeare supremely, are bound up with a
  repressive, dominant ideology, yet also provide
  scope for dissidence.
• examines ideas and categorize them as radical or
  non-radical according to whether they contribute
  to a historical vision of where we are and where
  we want to be. (Wilson 35-36).

5
Example (1) Paul Browns reading of The Tempest

• Instead of aesthetic harmony, truth and
  coherence, he sees the text as
• riven with contradictions which bear the traces
  of social conflicts.
• an intervention in contemporary colonialist
  practices
• Foregrounds what it seeks to cover (conflicts in
  colonialist ideologies).

6
An example Paul Browns reading of The Tempest
(2)
Kermode Prospero a disciplined artist Césaire Caliban is the productive natural man, the slave that creates history.
Brown does not do a humanist reading of the characters. Instead, he -- sets The Tempest in the context of contemporary colonial discourses of sexuality, masterlessness and savagism. -- Caliban unifies the heterogeneous discourses of masterlessness, savagism and sexuality. Brown does not do a humanist reading of the characters. Instead, he -- sets The Tempest in the context of contemporary colonial discourses of sexuality, masterlessness and savagism. -- Caliban unifies the heterogeneous discourses of masterlessness, savagism and sexuality.
7
Example (1) Paul Browns reading of The Tempest
(3)

• discourses of sexuality John Rolfe and
  Pocahontas (1614) . .. The strive with all his
  body is in no way led . . . With the unbridled
  desire of carnal affection but for the good of
  this plantation, for the honour of our countrie,
  for the glory of God, for my own salvation, and
  for the converting to the true knowledge of God
  and Jesus Christ, an unbeleeving creature, namely
  Pocahontas (Brown 49)
• masterlessness Look Upon me London (1613)
• Savagism e.g. the Irish 1) as beast-like,
  requirement the management of the British
  husbandman. 2) with natural simplicity. (without
  any qualities of civility)

8
Example (1) Paul Browns contradictions and
ambiguities

• Prosperos island Ireland, placed between the
  American and the European discourse
• The play produces colonial stereotypes which
  refuse to be contained.
• E.g. Prosperos education of Miranda (e.g. the
  romance trope in Prosperos speech?
  powerlessness)
• Ariel freed only to be bound
• The plays class hierarchy and aesthetic ordering
  as euphemization (e.g. colonization as education,
  colonialist re-organization as family romance).
• Calibans my island speech desire for power
  and powerlessness
• Prosperos dream speech colonialist narrative
  revealed as forgery. ? yet he goes on.

9
Example (2) Barker, et al.

• To de-mystify contemporary Shakespeare --as shown
  in
• midsummer tourism at Stratford-upon-Avon ?
  construction of an English past which is
  picturesque, familiar and untroubled.
• Arden series of Shakespeare (eternal values of
  the texts vs. their historical backgrounds)
• through examining his intertextuality or thrus
  con-textualization.

10
Example (2) Barker, et al. (2)

1. the inter-textual relations between Prosperos
   versions of history with that of Ariels,
   Mirandas and Calibans
2. The moment of disturbance when Prospero calls a
   sudden halt to the celebratory mask. ? the real
   dramatic moment because Prospero is anxious to
   keep the sub-plot of his play in its place.

11
Contemporary Shakespearean Discourses in UK
as a ground for discrimination

• GCE (General Certificate Exam) A level at least
  one Shakespeare play
• Those on GCE O level and CSE (Certificate of
  Secondary Education) should be steered away from
  Shakespeare (Sinfield 138)

12
Contemporary Shakespearean Discourses in UK
forming a hegemony?

• According to a survey done in 1968, only 1/8 of
  800 level students showed any wish to keep on
  reading literature
• Most of the A and O level students have light
  private readings. (Sinfield 137)

13
Contemporary Shakespearean Discourses in UK
exam questions

• At the center of King Lear lies the question,
  What is a man? Discuss.
• The Winters Tale is much more concerned with
  the qualities of womanhood, its virtue, its
  insight, and its endurance. Discuss.
• Compare Shakespeares treatment of the problem
  of evil in any two plays (Sinfield 138-39.

14
History as Time Travel as Costume Drama

• To read the past, to read a text from the past,
  is thus always to make an interpretation which is
  in a sense an anachronism (????). Time travel is
  a fantasy. We cannot reproduce the conditions .
  . . of another century. To do so would be, in
  any case, to eliminate the difference that makes
  the fantasy pleasurable. . . .

15
History as Time Travel as Costume Drama (2)

• The real anachronism, then, is of another kind.
  Here history as time travel gives way to history
  as costume drama, the reconstruction of the past
  as the present in fancy dress. The project is to
  explain away the surface strangeness of another
  century in order to release its profound
  continuity with the present (C. Belsey qtd
  Wilson 13)

16
Your Journal Possible Approaches

• choose a text to study its interaction (under a
  certain subject) with its authors life and its
  society (rules, norms and socio-economic
  conditions). The text can be contained or
  controlled by its conditions, but it can also
  intervene in it actively by utilizing different
  and conflicting discourses consciously or
  unconscious
• Stories of time travel, its historical methods
  and underlying ideologies
• Discuss one of the views of history, time, truth,
  culture, discourse, and/or their interactions,
  discussed in class and give examples to support
  your argument.

17
References

• Alan Sinfield, "Give an Account of Shakespeare
  and Education . . . ," in Dollimore and Sinfield,
  Political Shakespeare. Eds. Jonathan Dollimore,
  Alan Sinfield. Methuen 1984 134-57.
• This thing of Darkness I acknowledge mine The
  Tempest and the Discourse of colonialism.
  Political Shakespeare.
• Barker, Francis and Peter Hume. Nymphs and
  Reapers Heavily Vanish The Discursive Con-texts
  of the Tempest. Kiernan Ryan (ed.), New
  historicism and cultural materialism a
  reader(London and New York Arnold, 1996).
• Scott Wilson. Cultural Materialism Theory and
  Practice. Blackwell Publishers, 1995.