Blog Post #6

My group is doing our presentation on New Historicism. A piece of pure theory that contributes to this theoretical framework is "Twelve O'Clock News" by Elizabeth Bishop. In the writing, Bishop comes back to the United States after living in Brazil for two decades. It is at the same time that Americans are getting involved in the Vietnam War and she understands how terrifying it must be for the citizens of Vietnam because she has seen how chaotic an underdeveloped country can become. The premise of New Historicism is that every individual has their own interpretation and opinion of an event. In Bishop's poem, she states that a Vietnamese man on a bike started firing at an American plane. The American plane decides to fire on the man with enough ammunition for a platoon. If an American read this, they would probably praise the pilot for destroying the man, however, a Vietnamese person would have a different belief on the circumstance and think that the American was wrong for killing him. My group plans on incorporating this into our presentation with other examples of conflicts throughout history.