I will be using New Historicism in Literary Studies and the principles underlying New Historicism used in Classical Studies to examine the need for questions here at DePaul’s University Center for Writing-based Learning (the UCWbL). Asking questions is one of the core practices at the UCWbL, and it is a great way to guide writers and help enhance their skills.
Background
New Historicism is a response to New Criticism or Formalism. New Criticism’s approach only considers the text, not its context or its author’s background. New Historicism, on the other hand, does account for these contexts. Often times this makes it inherently political, because, for example, a New Historicist reading of a work by a queer, black author is going to also be a Queer and African American reading as well. This literary criticism style was developed in the 80’s mainly by Stephen Greenblatt and Svetlana Alpers, and it’s all about “historical preconditions” (Kaes). An example of something a New Historicist might say is “This line proves Sir Something’s claim that Shakespeare had a cat, and this deepens this sonnets meaning, because…”
Formalism boxes scholars into what is contained in the text. After a while, this is going to get old, because there is only so much in a text. Once we start asking New Historicist questions, like where were they from, what were their contemporaries doing, how did this author’s upbringing affect X work, we open up a portal to newer and deeper meanings.
Diving In
My first source comes from Anton Kaes, and Kaes spends a lot of time outlining the history of New Historicism, its contemporary counterparts, and the “worn-out paradigm of New Criticism.” He is also interested in Foucault’s concern with “the very fact that a certain discourse had come into existence, that it represented articulations of specific needs and intentions” (150). This is an important consideration in Writing Center work, and this is closely related to the UCWbL’s 6th Core Belief (Writers produce written texts in many different contexts, using many different genres of writing. Understanding these contexts and genres can help writers as they write).
In the Classical Studies of the past, instruction and this subject as a whole used to be elitist as Kelley points out in his “Revolution in Classical Studies.” He details how Greek and Latin teachers stayed only within the text of their language guides. They only concerned themselves with grammar and translations from the “sacred triad of Caesar, Cicero, and Vergil.” Similarly to New Criticism, this can become boring and has a restricting effect on the subject. This quantification of knowledge can become elitist, because of the isolation of the subject. Obviously only the most driven will be inclined to learn a dead language.
We have to get people excited — and we are, claims Kelley — about subjects like Classics by making them intertextual. This intertextuality opens more doors. There are more ways to access the knowledge, and thus we are making it more exciting for more people. “Even in elementary and intermediate [Greek and Latin] courses classicists recognize that the language is basically a means to an end, the cultural inheritance of the Greco-Roman world,” Kelley says. This is actually more extreme than New Historicism; this is history. But this historical approach to classics would not exist if it was not for the principles underlying New Historicism.
As peer writing tutors, it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming a grammatician or expert rhetorician of your own writing style. It is easy, using myself as an example, to become a “Chris Schafale Essayist,” instead of a peer tutor. Just as only teaching Latin with three very old tools can become formulaic and derivative, so too will your tutoring techniques if you only teach your own style of writing.
I would venture to say that Latin is a dead language now, partly because of the hackneyed techniques used to teach Latin. People often say that a language dies when it stops evolving; the rigidity of Latin teaching and Latin rules did not allow for it to continue evolving. We don’t want writing center theory to become a dead language, so we must continue its evolution by asking questions of the writer and using ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) theory. This theory states that every learner is different, and teachers must determine the writer’s “zone” (what they know and what they don’t know).
Using Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal Development, and Scaffolding theory, we should inquire until we have a detailed profile of the writer. Then we can begin to assist. In terms of Literary Studies, we can begin to analyze after we establish the context that the writer is composing in. In terms of Classical Studies, we can begin to analyze history by using languages that were once elitist in their teaching practices
Works Cited
Kaes, Anton. “New Historicism: Writing Literary History in the Postmodern Era.” Monatshefte, vol. 84, no. 2, 1992, pp. 148-158, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.depaul.edu/stable/30161347.
Kelley, David H. “Revolution in Classical Studies.” The Classical Journal, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 149-152, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3295828.
Markels, Julian. “‘King Lear,’ Revolution, and the New Historicism.” Modern Language Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 11-26, DOI: 10.2307/3194867.
Scheick, William J. “The Ethos of New Historicism.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 76, no. 4, pp. 571-589, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.depaul.edu/stable/41178863.