Blog Post #6

The theory that my group designed and presented a discussion for is New Historicism, which basically states that history is subjective and the retelling of it depends on perspective.  The "pure" theory piece that we found explained some of the history behind the theory and used a couple pieces written about the Vietnam War as examples.  Old Historicism states that history is objective and that stories written about historical events are factual. When scholars in the U.S. once again became interested is using history to better understand literature, this way of thinking no longer worked for them.  With all of the social movements of the 1960's, they realized that they could "no longer study literature for 'universal' themes that invariably looked white, male, and heterosexual."  This is when New Historicism was "born" and became the practical way to incorporate history in literary analysis.

The author of this piece of "pure" theory used two piece of literature as examples for New Historicism; a poem by Elizabeth Bishop called "Twelve O'Clock News" and an excerpt from a book by Mary McCarthy.  Both pieces are written about the Vietnam War.  Bishop wrote her first draft while she was still in college, but she did not publish the poem until after she had taken a trip to Brazil and seen what it was like to live in an underdeveloped country.  She took the time to better understand the other side of the story before she published a piece based only off of her opinion as an American. The title of the poem "Twelve O'Clock News" refers to how the media had so much to do with how the war was portrayed and how it swayed many people's opinions by making things look worse, or better, than they were.  

 Mary McCarthy's book is also about the war, and like Bishop, she took the time to get to know the other side of things by taking trips to Vietnam.  Since these writers better understood the country and people that they were writing about, they could deliver more accurate accounts of what happened.  But there is still that subjectivity that will never go away.