Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" New Historicist Perspective
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Homework Questions: 168:
Who were the New Critics or formalists?
169:
What focus characterized New Criticism?
Who are the poststructuralists? What is their basic
perspective?
170:
How do new historicist critics differ from previous
historical
critics?
171:
Explain: "The new historicists . . . blur the
distinctions, not
only between history and other social sciences but also between
background
and foreground, historical and literary materials, political and
poetical
events" (171).
172:
Who is Michel Foucault?
Who is Friedrich Nietzsche?
Explain: "No historical event . . . has a single
cause;
rather,
it is intricately connected with a vast web of economic, social, and
political
factors" (172).
174:
What is "cultural poetics" (174)?
175:
Explain: "Like a work of art, a work of history is the
negotiated
product of a private creator and the public practices of a given
society"
(175).
Explain: "Any one change is connected with a host of
others, no
one of which may simply be identified as cause or effect, progressive
or
regressive, repressive or enabling" (175).
176:
Why shouldn't Foucault be considered the central influence
on
the new
historicism?
177:
Why must we "perpetually redefine categories and boundaries"
(177)?
178:
What procedures, according to Jerome McGann, must the new
historicist
follow?
What key assumptions, according to H. Aram Veeser, do most
new
historicist
critics incorporate?
Other Discussion Questions: 168:
Who are "The New Kids on the Block"?
172:
Explain: "It is difficult . . . to see present
cultural
practices
critically from within them, and because of the same cultural
practices,
it is extremely difficult to enter bygone ages" (172).
Explain: "Not even a tyrannical aristocrat simply
yields
power,
for the aristocrat is himself formed and empowered by a network of
discourses
and practices that constitute power" (172).
175:
What does "melioristic" mean?
What does "teleological" mean?
177:
What does "inchoate" mean?
179:
What similarities and differences exist between Modiano's
and
McGann's
readings of the "Rime" ?
181:
In what ways does Modiano's essay exemplify new historicism?