“Literary into Cultural Studies” ❤️

Excerpted & Abridged From “Literary into Cultural Studies” 

By Antony Easthope 

Introduction: Antony Easthope was Professor in English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, England. In this seminal book titled, Literary into Cultural Studies, (1991) Easthope argues that for fifty years, the “paradigm of literary studies” relied on a strict binary opposition between the canon (literature) and its “other,” popular culture. The theory wars of the 1980s changed all that. 

With the advent of post-structuralism, the opposition between high and popular culture became untenable, transforming the field of inquiry from literary into cultural studies. Antony Easthope also argues that the new discipline of cultural studies must have a new, decentred paradigm for the common study of canonical and popular texts together.

The Basic Opposition between What is Literary and What is Not!

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. Leavis did spell out this basic opposition 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 only a few who are capable of unprompted, first-hand judgment. 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.

Citing F.R. Leavis as the exemplar of this old model, Antony Easthope opines that, “minority culture” (Dante, Shakespeare) was seen as embodying “human experience” and “genuine personal response,” while “mass civilisation” was viewed as standardised and deficient. Instead of studying “literature” as a special, transcendent category, cultural studies examines “signifying practices”.

The term “signifying practice” refers to the active process by which meaning is produced and exchanged within a culture. Instead of looking at a text (like a book or film) as a static object that simply “contains” meaning, Cultural Studies looks at it as a practice. A “signifying practice” hence, transforms a raw material (a sound, a gesture, a piece of cloth) into a meaningful sign through cultural codes. For example, the raw reality of a physical action or object, has a cultural ‘rule’ applied to it, and this results in ideology, identity or status.

The Failure of the Humanistic Model of Literature

Just as linguistics studies all language rather than just “good” speech, cultural studies must accept “every form of signifying practice as a valid object for study” to be a serious discourse of knowledge. 

Relying on Raymond Williams, Easthope argues that cultural studies must follow the democratic principle that the discourses of all members of society - not just an educated elite - are worthy of study. Moreover, he argues that the old “humanist project” (that studying literature makes you a better person) failed. He cites the fact that men who administered Auschwitz read Shakespeare and Goethe as proof that literary study does not inherently civilise or moralise the reader.

The Collapse of the Old Paradigm

In 1975 Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics explained that all local interpretations of the literary text took place according to much more deeply imbedded protocols for reading which he described as ‘literary competence.’ He shows how a banal newspaper story, arranged into lines like a poem, attracts a literary reading from which an entirely new sense of its significance emerges - set up as a poem, he says, the text claims that it is ‘atemporal’, ‘complete in itself’ and will ‘cohere at a symbolic level.’ In line with this, in 1975 Fish proposes that texts are constituted by ‘interpretive communities’, shared intersubjective protocols. Therefore, literature and literary value does not exist except as what the community imagines it to be because in the first place the text has no material identity. Fish recounts how a list of names was on the blackboard after one class when students came for another -

Jacobs-Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohman (?)

- so he told the second group this was a religious poem and asked them to interpret it. Which they did, pretty well in his account, by exercising their ‘literary competence’ within the interpretive community, thereby claiming that there are no texts, only interpretations to a text.

Methodological Shift: From “Reading” to “Critique”

The transition from Literary into Cultural Studies, also changes how texts are read. Literary Studies sought to find a unified, “empiricist” meaning within the text itself, often ignoring the context. Whereas, Cultural Studies views reading as a construction between text and context.

Authored versus Collective Texts

Accordingly, in authored texts, the material, institutional conditions for literary production - sales of the novels of Dickens, the contemporary reception of Jude the Obscure, the price of entry to Shakespeare’s theatre - are relegated to the ‘background’ while the creative works become the essential inside and are thus ‘foregrounded’. Cultural studies can assume no such foundation. 

A film is manifestly a collective production, involving (in no particular order), producers, director, stars, camera operators, script writers, sound and lighting engineers, set mechanics, ‘front office’, promoters, advertisers, distributors, theatre managers, and so on. This distinction in Literary Studies, was used politically to maintain a hierarchy. 

By privileging the “individual” author, the old paradigm championed the idea of the unique, autonomous subject (often aligned with bourgeois individualism). By dismissing “collective” texts, it devalued forms of culture that were mass-produced for the working class or general public.

Conclusion

The object of cultural studies exhibits a shift from the author towards a decentred account of social production, displacing identification in the transcendent authority of self-creation with a necessarily more dispersed identification. A discourse of knowledge begins to develop which can make no such claims to authority and power but rather installs its subject as relative rather than transcendent, collective, rather than sovereign.