“New Historicism” and Rudolf Ankersmit’s Postmodernist Historical Concept

Abstract

This paper reflects on the modern historiographical situation of perceiving comprehensive historical theories as an obstacle to highly specialized research. On the philosophical level, priority has been given to structuralism and language philosophy, thereby resulting in almost unlimited supremacy of the hermeneutic approach in culture, i.e., in the prevalence of textocentrism. The Dutch philosopher Rudolf Frank Ankersmit argues that postmodernism is both a theory of history and a “theory for history.” According to him, historicism is a theory of “historical forms”. Thus, the morphology of culture is directly related to historicism. The transformation of historical forms occurs in conditions when the distinction between the text and reality (represented in the text) is erased, and the reality becomes “superfluous” in the context of the overproduction of meanings and interpretations. Therefore, representation ousts the reality. The New Historicism movement emerged in the United States during the second half of the 1980s as a response of literary criticism to the “challenges” of cultural materialism, feminism, or social history. The historical context is considered by the representatives of the New Historiography project as a system of culture, i.e., social institutions and practices (including political ones) are interpreted as functions of this system, and not vice versa.