I am not too sure how to address the reading for this week
but I will make some attempts to do so seeing that I am not too sure if I
comprehended it. From what I understood
it seems that all the readings are concerned with showing the complexity of new
historicism in that certain accounts such as anecdotes cannot necessarily be
taken as fact but must also be considered as constructions with “tropes”. In addition,
it seems like new historicism challenges Marxist or symptomatic readings by
showing that the works cannot be reduced to simply a power or class structure
but are rather, for lack of words, more complex than that. In short, history
has the same fictitious principles as literatures and works under the same model
or something like that.
Now
with a very rudimentary understanding of my own reading I am going to focus on
certain quotes to see if I can parse more understanding from them. The first,
being Spivak and their reading. What I found interesting was how Spivak
positioned his reading through parataxis calling it a reading that resisted “the
reading in black and white, the reading of the story as race-class- gender
predicament”, From my understanding, it seems that Spivak illustrates a reading
that avoids forms of essentialisms or the absolutely obvious that could be said
of a novel written by someone that is not a colonial power. Spivak avoids
reading that attempt to show class struggle or racial tension but instead shows
the complications found through his paratactic reading, a reading that
illustrates a negotiation of historical context. This may be explained with an
another quote from Spivak as they explain the reading through parataxis: we can
even read that historical narrative itself as two ‘sentences’, describing the
same space, once as ‘pre-colonial’, and again as ‘colonial’, one after the
other, one over the other . . . an
enabling violation, the imaginative sedimentation of the civilizing mission . .
. Lucy wants to save that parataxis from the too- quick ministration of the
metropolitan multiculturalist”. What the parataxis, and Spivak’s reading of it
seems to do is shows an avoidance to reduce this novel and similar literature
to a sort of transnational diasporic work but rather allows a difference and
division to exist within the work as a functioning contradiction that looks
beyond itself to the history that creates it. What leads me to this though is
the following quote and surmises what I believe the article is stating “yet, if
what happens in the literary text is the singularity of its language and that
singularity is in its figuration that figuration can point to the depth of the
content by signaling that the content cannot be contained by the text as
receptacle” (367). To my understanding this seems the most enlightening aspect
of Spivak’s work. What they seem to say is that a text is meant to signal to
something greater than itself and with that signaling it shows the reader
something that is outside the text, that is not reducible to simply conflicts
of race, gender, production etc. Rather, it signals a sedimentation of history that
is very complex. Hopefully that is a sufficient and close approximation to what
Spivak might be saying.
Green
Blatt seems easier to understand in his intentions to define “new historicism”.
Greenblatt makes an interesting point with the Scott’s account by showing that
it is difficult to “differentiate” between a historical and fictitious text
leading one to see fiction as a fictive construct can lead to literary
applications. This thought is reinforced
when Green Blatt states that “new historicism” has an “intensified willingness
to read all of the textual traces with the attention traditionally conferred
only on literary texts” By giving historical text the same attention as
literary texts it seems that Greenblatt pushes for collapse between what we consider
is real and fiction making for a more critical introspection of history as a
text itself. With this in mind I quickly turn to Hayot who seems to perform a
narratological approach to the reading of Green Blatt reading by showing that
Goldsmith’s endurance is a trope found in many other accounts and fiction. In
summary Hayot shows and does something similar to Spivak by signaling outside
of the text itself. I understand that I did not covered the aspects of “thick”
and “thin” descriptions that is something I hope the class will help me
understand a bit more.
Your observation that Hayot and Spivak are similar that they signal outside of the text is one that I found as well. It was hard at first to see the common denominator between the Spivak and the other two texts. Yet their importance lies in what the text does not specifically offer - the absence for Spivak and the pertinent historical truth for Hayok. I think for Greenblatt, there is significance in what he does not mention (i.e. the whole version of the anecdote) but perhaps he just leaves it out intentionally, which Hayok sees as a lack of credibility.
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