Literary into Cultural Studies

Antony Easthope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134919970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Modern Literary study was founded on an opposition between the canon and its other, popular culture. The theory wars of the 1970s and the 1980s and, in particular, the advent of structuralist and post structuralist theory, transformed this relationship. With `the death of literature', the distinction between high and popular culture was no longer tenable, and the field of inquiry shifted from literary into cultural studies. Anthony Easthope argues that this new discipline must find a methodological consensus for its analysis of canonical and popular texts. Through a detailed criticism of competing theories (British cultural studies, New Historicism, cultural materialism) he shows how this new study should - and should not be done. Easthope's exploration of the problems, possibilities and politics of this new discipline includes an original reassessment of the question of literary value. By contrasting Conrad's Heart of Darkness with Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes, Easthope demonstrates how textuality sustains the opposition between high and popular culture darkness.

Part I

COLLAPSING THE LITERARY

STUDIES PARADIGM

1

CONSTRUCTING THE LITERARY

OBJECT

‘What are you studying, dear?’

‘History.’

‘What a luxury!’

Margaret Thatcher to a woman student at the London School of Economics, 1987

In 1962 Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions showed that most of the time the scientific community sails along happily within a paradigm, a consensus about methods and ends. From time to time, however, new evidence or contradictions within the paradigm accumulate until the paradigm itself falls into doubt. At this point there is a crisis, a return to ‘first principles’ and an intense interest in theory (for which there is no need while the paradigm rides high). Thereafter, a new paradigm is established, theoretical questions are put on the shelf and things return to normal.

Something like this has happened in literary studies during the past two decades. Twenty years ago the institutionalised study of literature throughout the English-speaking world rested on an apparently secure and unchallenged foundation, the distinction between what is literature and what is not. While other aspects of F.R. Leavis’s criticism are not universally accepted by literary studies, he did spell out this basic opposition in an exemplary way in a pamphlet he published a year after the economic collapse of 1929. In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture Leavis wrote:

In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response… The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time… Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go. In their keeping…is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such language.

(1930,3–5)

The position taken is unmistakable. Society is not to be thought of as a democracy but rather as an oligarchy with concentric circles of the elite (a ‘very small minority’ at the centre is surrounded by yet another ‘small minority’). Just as there can be no masters without slaves, so no term can be privileged apart from a correspondingly denigrated term on which the first relies: minority culture is defined in a binary opposition with mass civilisation; works of literature consist of ‘human experience’ and so contrast with the texts of mass or popular culture; created by individual authors literature can evoke a ‘genuine personal response’ in the reader—as Leavis explains elsewhere (see Leavis and Thompson 1933), popular culture, collectively and commercially produced, is stereotyped, formulaic, anonymous and deficient in ‘human experience’.

Just how far the older literary paradigm has shifted in the past two decades can be seen at once if the words of Leavis are set alongside a typical statement from a powerfully influential contemporary critic, Terry Eagleton, once an undergraduate in the very English faculty Leavis did much to create:

My own view is that it is most useful to see ‘literature’ as a name which people give from time to time for different reasons to certain kinds of writing within a whole field of what Michel Foucault has called ‘discursive practices’, and that if anything is to be an object of study it is this whole field of practices rather than just those sometimes rather obscurely labelled ‘literature’. I am countering the theories set out in this book not with a literary theory, but with a different kind of discourse—whether one call it of ‘culture’, ‘signifying practices’ or whatever is not of first importance—which would include the objects (‘literature’) with which these other theories deal, but which would transform them by setting them in a wider context.

(1983, p. 205)

Only two generations separate Leavis from Eagleton here. Yet in those fifty-three years modern literary studies was invented, institutionalised in the academy, fell into crisis, and is now being transformed into something else, cultural studies. In this book I mean to review critically the whole development separating the positions of Leavis and Eagleton. In a sentence: I shall argue that the old paradigm has collapsed, that the moment of crisis symptomatically registered in concern with theory is now passing, and that a fresh paradigm has emerged, its status as such proven because we can more or less agree on its terms and use them. In part, therefore, this will be a history but a history which means to make some active intervention in the present process of transition. ‘Pure’ literary study, though dying, remains institutionally dominant in Britain and North America while the more comprehensive analysis of what I shall prefer to call signifying practices is still struggling to be born. In advocating a kind of ‘unified field theory’ for the combined study of literary texts and those from popular culture this book will welcome the opportunity to be polemical. My title is intended as both indicative (‘Literary into cultural studies’) and an imperative (‘Literary into cultural studies!’).

For much of this century the radical intelligentsia has weakened itself politically by its refusal to take popular culture seriously, as Andrew Ross has argued persuasively in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). Beside this wider political question there are three main reasons for studying popular culture alongside canonical texts in the form of an enlarged cultural studies, reasons which now leave it up to literary studies to defend its position. Negatively, the binary which excludes popular culture as an outside while conserving as an inside a canon of specially literary texts simply cannot be sustained as a serious intellectual argument (a position that will be justified in more detail in a later chapter). Positively there are two associated but different reasons for now refusing this exclusion.

Leavis tries to pre-empt the term ‘culture’ for literature by equating popular culture with something else, ‘civilisation’, but the manoeuvre is weak because its barely disguised class-bias makes it too easy to contest. T.S.Eliot in Notes towards the Definition of Culture manages much better when he defines ‘culture’ not in terms of an individual or a class but, more plausibly, as ‘the development…of a whole society ’ (1948, reprinted 1962, p. 21) which, thinking of England after the Second World War, he substantiates with the following well-known if bizarrely populist listing:

Culture…includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.

(p. 31)

It is the innovation of Raymond Williams in Culture and Society (1958) to reject this pastoral and consumerist definition of culture by invoking against it exactly the criterion that the concept of culture supposes the development of a whole society: to represent the whole even of English national culture in 1958 Eliot’s list would need to encompass ‘steelmaking, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coalmining and London transport’ (1958, p. 234), that is, forms of production along with consumption, and the activities of the working class along with those of the gentry.

Implicit here are two positive reasons for studying popular culture, one cognitive, one political. Just as the ancient study of rhetoric refused to draw hard boundaries at the limits of what comprised rhetoric and as, similarly, modern linguistics takes the whole of language practice as its purview, so cultural studies must be prepared to consider every form of signifying practice as a valid object for study if it is to count as a serious discourse of knowledge. And cultural studies must act on the democratic principle assumed by Williams that the discourses of all members of a society should be its concern, not just those of an educated elite. It is one sign that the paradigm of literary studies is defunct that many will now find it hard to know quite how it came into existence in the way it did.

THE RISE OF LITERARY STUDIES

Russian Formalism and its history, so brutally curtailed, is a good benchmark for getting a sense of the rise of literary studies in Britain and North America. As part of its avowedly scientific project Formalism did not set out with a preconception about the value of literary over popular culture—rather it was prepared to take up the two together with the specific intention of theorising literariness (literaturnost) as a linguistic feature. Though criticised by Marxists for its exclusions, Russian Formalism was not anti-Marxist, while literary study both in the United Kingdom and in the United States developed during the 1930s as a means to deflect the contemporary challenge of Marxism. One way to understand the paradigm shift away from literary study might be to view it as just a return of the repressed, accompanied by a radical politics and concern with other oppressions (gender, race) besides those enforced through class.

When literary study marks off its field from other disciplines by separating the literary canon from the texts of popular culture it reproduces an already existing cultural distinction which has come to segregate a specialised domain of the aesthetic from the rest of life. Originating in the Latin litera, a letter of the alphabet, the word ‘literature’ at first meant no more than the form of written as opposed to oral communication, a sense retained in the opposition between literacy and illiteracy. As Raymond Williams shows (1977, pp. 45–54), the word acquired progressively more specialised connotations. At first associated with polite learning and the skills of reading, in Romanticism the idea of literature became transformed, connected now to notions of art, the aesthetic, the creative and the imaginative. In the nineteenth century the study of literature replaced classical studies because it could reach a newly active and threatening working class. Largely because it seemed able to support and guarantee a transcendental domain literature acquired a new social and political importance, for which Matthew Arnold was a strikingly unsubtle proponent.

In 1869 in Culture and Anarchy Arnold distinguishes between our ‘ordinary’ and our ‘best’ self on the basis of their participation in class war. ‘Our ordinary selves’, he writes, ‘do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the class to which we belong’; in these ‘we are separate, impersonal, at war’; but ‘by our best self we are united, personal, at harmony’ (1960, pp. 94–5). Culture, defined generously as ‘sweetness and light’ and promoted by the state, will bring out our best selves by keeping our ordinary class identities in the background. Within this definition of culture literature in England takes on a directly political role by affirming national harmony through effacing class conflict. Study of the national literature, as a Victorian handbook for teachers of English says, will help ‘to promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes’ (cited Eagleton 1983, p. 25), a view still around many years later to be echoed in all innocence by E.D.Hirsch when he claims that American national culture ‘transcends dialect, region and social class’ (1987, p. 87). Though the rise of Englit. is uneven, its history is now well known (and narrated by Mulhern 1979, Baldick 1983 and Doyle 1989); in the United States the story is a bit different but comes to much the same thing (there are differences again for Ireland, Scotland and Wales though I have not developed these).

Given the more advanced capitalist society which is the United States, the study of literature there conformed rather less to the Arnoldian ideal of keeping the working class in its place and rather more to ensuring upward social mobility according to individual merit; in a Harvard Presidential address in 1869 Charles William Eliot urged a role for the teaching of English because it might enable men (sic) to ‘leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit’ (cited Ohmann 1976, p. 126). Unlike England, the United States faced the issue of mass immigration, as well as that of replacing the study of the classics first with English literature and then with the national literature. Another difference, in a more entrepreneurial culture, followed from the associated need for professionalisation and proving that literature did not teach itself but was a serious study, an emphasis strengthened in the nineteenth century by the prestige of Germanic scholarship. Nevertheless, after a very similar struggle to that in England against literary history spiced with personality (‘chatter about Shelley’) literary study won ascendency from the 1930s. And with the same hegemonic effect. Gerald Graff, the present authority, concedes ‘there is some truth in this “social control” theory of academic literary studies’ since many members of the founding generation did conceive these studies explicitly ‘as a means of reinstating cultural uniformity and thus controlling those unruly democratic elements that were entering higher education for the first time’ (1987, p. 12). By ‘unruly democratic elements’ he presumably means the American working class—there is certainly a space for a less timorous history of literary study in the United States more like those Chris Baldick and Brian Doyle have written for England. Yet literary study has a difference in the United States, one I shall have to keep referring to.

In both the Arnoldian and American emphasis literary study gathered up a traditional humanism as this extends back through Romanticism to the Renaissance. Studying literature was supposed to make you a better person, to develop your ‘imagination’ so you could enter imaginatively into the experiences of others, thus learning to respect truth and value justice for all. If this is its moral aim literary study simply does not work. George Steiner has pointed out that ‘some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been trained to read Shakespeare and Goethe’ (cited Doyle 1989, p. 116). Or as Richard Ohmann discovered in the spring of 1967 when he tried to get his colleagues to oppose the war in Vietnam, ‘If humanistic culture really is a civilizing force, why wouldn’t the college I worked for and the profession I worked in TAKE A STAND?’ (1976, p. 21, typography original). And the ineluctable failure of this humanist project is one major reason the paradigm of literary study has now become visible for critical interrogation.

THE PARADIGM OF LITERARY STUDY

Kuhn does not say quite what a scientific paradigm is except that it is sufficiently unprecedented to attract adherents and sufficiently open- ended to give its subscribers interesting problems to solve. Responding to criticism that his use of the term was too vague Kuhn explained in the second edition that by paradigm he meant both theory and practice, both an ‘entire constellation of beliefs, values’ as well as the ‘concrete puzzle-solutions’ that took place within them (1970, p. 175). But a universal definition of paradigm may be neither possible nor desirable, since to some extent theory and to a much larger extent ways of demonstrating facts will be appropriate and specific to a particular object and mode of knowledge. ‘Paradigm’ may be preferable to the wider notion of an organised body of questions and answers assumed by the term ‘problematic’ given currency by Althusser. ‘Paradigm’ also neatly signals the dependence of understanding on discourse while including the idea of knowledge, and so, crucially, an epistemology involving a subject/object relation. In trying to identify the paradigm of literary study I shall go in search of its particular conception of its object, the subject posed in correspondence to this object, and the method ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Collapsing the Literary Studies Paradigm
• Part II High Culture/popular Culture
• Part III Towards a New Paradigm
• Appendix 1 Time and Different Times
• Appendix 2
• References
• Index