Week 3 post

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.