UGC NET English literature MCQs on New Historicism
Q. It blurs distinctions among literary, non-literary and cultural texts, showing how all three intercirculate, share in, and mutually constitute each other. Whatdoes it in this statement stand for ?
(A) Marxism
(B) Structuralism
(C) Formalism
(D) New Historicism
Answer: D
New Historicism: New Historicism is an approach to literary criticism and literary theory based on the premise that a literary work should be considered a product of the time, place, and historical circumstances of its composition rather than as an isolated work of art or text.
Q. Which writer applied the term ‘cultural poetics’ to his own critical contribution to make literature and arts as part of social practice?
1. Stephen Greenblatt
2. Mikhail Bakhtin
3. Jonathan Dollimore
4. Raymond Williams
Answer: 1
Q. Who among the following theorists talks about “the circulation of social energy” ?
(A) Raymond Williams
(B) Stephen Greenblatt
(C) Antonio Gramsci
(D) Haydon White
Answer: B
Stephen Greenbelt, in his essay “The Circulation of Social Energy”, argues that art — or in his case, Shakespearian plays — produce social energy and gain it through a period of time. Firstly it is important to understand what Greenblatt means by “social energy”. He describes it as things that can be circulated in society: “Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe, free-floating intensities of experience: in a sense the question is absurd, for everything produced by the society can circulate unless it is deliberately excluded from circulation.”
Q. The terms ‘resonance’ and ‘wonder’ are associated with
(A) Stephen Greenblatt
(B) Terence Hawkes
(C) Terry Eagleton
(D) Ronald Barthes
Answer: A
Resonance and Wonder 1990: In this article Stephen Greenblatt explores two of the most central concepts that inform a museum-goer’s experience: resonance and wonder.
Resonance marks the object as a representative of a distant culture or time, as a trace in foreign lands or in the past, into which it draws visitors and offers them new discoveries.
Wonder refers to the recipient’s astonishment and is related to the emotional effect of an object
Q. Which of the following statements is not applicable to the definition of New Historicism? New historicist critics
(A) Remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was – rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe the way it was.
(B) Are less likely to see history as linear and progressive, as something developing toward the present.
(C) Tend to view history as literature’s background.
(D) Are unlikely to suggest that a literary text has a single or easily identifiable historical context. Answer: (C)