New Historicism (Guides to Biblical Scholarship Old Testament Series) [Paperback]

Gina Hens-Piazza (Author)

Book Description

Series: Guides to Biblical Scholarship | Publication Date: April 1, 2002

New Historicism has been a highly controversial and influential movement in university literature departments for almost twenty years. Biblical studies now wrestles with this force and evaluates its potential for interpretation. With lucid and jargon-free description, this study sets forth New Historicism for the nonspecialist. Defining New Historicism as a mindset rather than a method, it traces the development, discusses recurring features, and offers illustrations of this new literary approach. Here biblical texts are plunged back into the swirling currents of historical context only to disclose their plural, contradictory, fragmentary, and heterogeneous character. This includes the histories associated, represented, and embedded in those texts. In the process, the carefully guarded distinctions between text and context, history and literature, past and present, fade. In exchange for the loss of these tidy categories, New Historicism promises sufficient compensation-namely, a potential venue where the sharply drawn border currently separating historical investigations from literary studies in biblical interpretation can be negotiated.

Product Details

• Paperback: 102 pages
• Publisher: Fortress Press (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0800629892
• ISBN-13: 978-0800629892
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,282,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Quest for an Interdisciplinar Art of Reading, November 14, 2003

By 

Clivaz Claire (Lausanne, CH and Belmont, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Historicism (Guides to Biblical Scholarship Old Testament Series) (Paperback)

Giana Hens-Piazza presents to the biblical scholarship the so-called "New Historicism" in a very fine and correct way. The reader will enjoy the opportunity of the New Historicism to construct an interdisciplinary platform of reading, that integrates the critics of the postmodernity and the challenge of history. The author demonstrates the opportunities of the New Historicism to affront the question of history in a postmodern and multicultural context : these book is a must for all the biblical scholars interested in the debate about the interpretations and the arts of reading.

After the presentation of the features of the New Historicism, Giana Hens-Piazza presents the recent history of the New Historicism and discusses about the similarities and the differences between Historicism and New Historicism. The 4th chapter tells us about the diverse background of the New Historicism (Foucault, Bakthin, Geertz, Turner) and signals the important etudes in this movement that has been started by the works of Stephen Greenblatt in the 80's. After the pertinent questions of the Reader-Oriented Criticism addressed to the New Criticism, we assist now to the return of the challenges of ethic and politic in link with "the return of a new history", if we can speak so. The chapter 5th tells about the first biblical new historicist readings (three examples of the Old Testament).

The last chapter tries to evaluate the future of New Historicism that has been already called «passed» by certain critics. This is not the opinion of G. Hens-Piazza who feels very optimistic for this approach, even the first contact between biblical scholars and literary scholars in New Historicism were not good. I think it is the task of everybody to keep open a platform of thinking, and even the so-open New Historicism is tempted to want to keep his territory.

The book has only two disadvantages : firstly, it doesn't speak about the European ways of thinking and reading that are near of the New Historicism (for example "la nouvelle historiographie française"). This point is important, because the challenge thinking history after postmodernity is common to diverse cultures and fields of studies now (ethnohistoricism, anthropology, historiography, aso). Secondly, the author doesn't present systematically the difficulties or non-explored questions of the New Historicism. Personally, I think that the New Historicism risks to stay at the point of "the reading of the reading". This movement wishes to give a sense for the future, as it says it explicitly, but it is not evident how it tries to make it. Proposing senses for the future is linked with the challenge to think our collective memory and with the challenge to consider ourselves as a community (cf. La communauté affrontée of the French philosoph Jean-Luc Nancy). The question of the construction of our collective memory leads to consider the place of the narrativity and its analyze in the literary and historical criticism.

3.0 out of 5 stars a post-modern epistemology of text, culture, and interpreter, July 18, 2010

By 

Jordan Pariah - See all my reviews

This review is from: New Historicism (Guides to Biblical Scholarship Old Testament Series) (Paperback)

What is a text? What is history? How do they influence one another? And what parts do the various creators and interpretors of them play in the formation of their meaning? These are fundamental questions. How we answer them provides the structure or context in which we do what we do and think what we think. This book gives the "New Historicist" answer to those questions and turns it's perception on biblical and other texts.

Since "NH" is more of a world-view than a method, and the goal is to provide a meaningful comprehension of it, the book is light on biblical or other exegesis, analysis, or interaction and heavy on theories of interpretation. In other words, it is more concerned with sketching a way of thinking than thinking about anything in particular. Those who want to move on from foundational questions to the answers that come by them may find a book like this too much like navel gazing. Those who don't mind spending time to develop a firm foundation before proceeding to sought-after answers may find the book a refreshing starting place and the deposit likely to yield a much greater return in the long-run.

As a literary epistemology, I was happy to learn of something that corrected errors of methods like New Criticism and Structuralism. As a historical or cultural epistemology, I was happy to learn of something that corrected the errors of methods like Source Criticism and Tradition Criticism. It has elements of Reader-Response, but it isn't that. It has elements of Social-scientific, but it's not that either. It echoes many things in Feminist and Post-colonial Criticisms. The benefit of this perspective is the way it enables one to make use of the good available in almost any different "Criticism" while having the potential to move beyond problems inherent in them. In many ways, I felt that I was looking at something in terms of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament (though certainly not confined to those arenas) that was very much similar to Critical Realism in New Testament studies. But I also have some concerns...

"NH" is heavily constructed by post-modern thought and as such, has the potential to become entirely Post-modern. As an example, Gina Hens-Piazza recalls at the end of the book a response from H. Aram Veeser to a collection of "NH" essays centered around biblical studies. Veeser faults the biblical scholars for failing to surrender their epistemology to Nietzsche. While Gina Hens-Piazza is probably correct in thinking that this represents a departure from "NH" as it had hitherto been known, it is not a departure that "NH" cannot take. No reason has been given why "NH" should not take that route, only that such a route cannot define it. If it is true, as "NH" views it, that there is no over-arching truth or unifying interpretation--that all is selectivity, limitation, and imposition of structure and meaning, it is not unreasonable to suggest that "NH" can become pure phenominalism.

I have not (yet) read the articles she summarizes and discusses that actually put "NH" to work with biblical and related texts, so this concern may be misguided, but based on her summary and discussion, it appeared that "NH" could also go too far in promoting the reader interpretation so that it left little or no room for "struggle" and the "multi-vocal." For instance, Harold Washington's essay on violence and gender apparently shows us that war and violence are male symbols or carry social connections to that gender, whilst the feminine is representative of the defeated and powerless. Men are, apparently, the subjects of violence and women are, apparently, the victims. This is quite a tidy and monolithic evaluation. One could draw on numerous examples that put these neat principles to question like the violent warrior goddess Anat, brother of Baal and daughter of El, who slays Mot and kills many men such as Aqhat. There is a hidden danger, therefore, that in seeking a particular marginal perspective on a text, that this marginal perspective is unwittingly made into the controlling idealogical force of the whole.