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Perspectives on Senior English: English and Cultural Studies
Peter Goodall
- What is Cultural Studies?
- English and Cultural Studies: a joint project?
- An Optimistic and a Pessimistic Conclusion
Perspectives on Senior English: English and Cultural Studies[1]
It is now widely believed among teachers that one of the ways in
which senior English will develop in schools in the next few years
is in the direction of 'Cultural Studies'. This is certainly in
line with some of the developments which have happened in university
departments, but, if schools do follow this trend, unless they are
fortunate, they will almost certainly encounter the kinds of ideological,
professional and personal conflicts which have attended these developments
in universities.
In many universities, the development of Cultural Studies has been
accompanied with prolonged, demoralizing territorial disputation,
professional dislocation and, all too frequently, schism and the
partitioning of departments. My own department at Macquarie University,
a sizable and vigorous department of English and Cultural Studies,
was eventually restructured by the University into a small department
of English, in the 'division' of Humanities, and an even smaller
department of Critical and Cultural Studies, in the division of
Cultural and Social Enquiry. Other departments of English have trodden
the same path[2]. Although, as I
shall argue in this article, Cultural Studies is, in part at least,
a natural, emergent growth from English and wholly compatible with
it, in many institutional contexts these different perspectives
have not been in harmony, nor even in constructive dialogue, but
in conflict, contesting authority, sometimes even within the same
areas of knowledge and skills.
An additional complication, with particular significance for the training of future teachers of English, is that few of the newer universities, the post-Dawkins universities as they are sometimes called, contain anything recognisable as departments of English literature. If English literature is taught at all in these departments of Humanities, Communications, Cultural Studies or Textual Studies as they are variously called, it is seldom as a substantial body of knowledge and skills in its own right, with its own claim to disciplinary status, let alone a claim to a canon of texts. It is hard to imagine that graduates from these departments will not in due course be employed as 'English' teachers. There is no reason to belittle the knowledge and skills that they will have, for in my experience these students have been through courses which are intellectually sophisticated, socially engaged and imaginatively taught, but whatever they have learned, it will be significantly different from the knowledge and skills produced by English departments in the past.
What is Cultural Studies?
One of the problems in answering this question is that the term
'Cultural Studies' is itself contentious. Within the broad field
of this interdisciplinary term, there are many different positions,
agendas and intellectual traditions. Few would argue that Cultural
Studies is a discrete body of knowledge in itself, like history
or biology. Rather, it is a distinctive way of conceptualizing,
addressing, connecting and prioritizing knowledge which is often
already available in established disciplines like English, Sociology,
Philosophy and Media Studies. Nevertheless, there are ways of describing
the phenomenon of Cultural Studies, and I have identified four broad
areas of development here: the need to find new ways of teaching
a new class of learners; the importance of analysis of the media
and its impact on society; the emergence of 'communications' as
a field of study; and the encounter of existing Humanities disciplines
with 'theory' from the late 1970s.
New knowledge for new students
Major paradigm shifts in the teaching of English have usually been
accompanied by a sense of crisis, that the subject was failing to
meet the needs of an emergent class of learners. English (and other
'modern' subjects like history and modern languages) first emerged
as a school and university subject in the latter part of the nineteenth
century when a series of reforming education acts in both the secondary
and the tertiary sectors, against a background of widespread agnosticism,
identified the need for a broadly based Humanities education, less
specialized and more relevant in a contemporary setting than the
study of Latin and Greek, subjects which not only made large demands
on the training of teachers themselves but which were felt to be
inappropriate for the numbers of students entering the education
system. Likewise, the English tripos (program of undergraduate study)
established at Cambridge immediately after the first world war,
was widely seen as a curriculum newly conceived for a generation
changed utterly by the experience of mass warfare. In a similar
spirit, one of the first areas to identify itself as Cultural Studies
developed in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, conscious
of the changed nature of post-war society: a time of full, yet often
mentally deadening, employment; a society increasingly affected
by mass migration from parts of the former Empire; a globalizing
society in which fears for the survival of national cultures, both
high and popular, were increasingly voiced. An important date is
the foundation at Birmingham University in 1963 of the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. The key texts of this movement are
Raymond Williams's Culture and Society (1958), Richard Hoggart's
best-seller The Uses of Literacy (1957), and E. P. Thompson's The
Making of the English Working Class (1963). Although all three authors
found their way into conventional (and eminent) academic jobs, it
is very significant that they were all from working-class backgrounds
and had all had long experience teaching outside the educational
mainstream, in the extension work of university departments and
in the field of adult education. The liminality of Cultural Studies
in professional, personal as well as in intellectual terms (in Australia,
its early rapid growth in the former 'college' sector of the tertiary
system) is an important aspect of its sense of identity.
Analysing the media and mass culture
One of the social phenomena which Hoggart's Birmingham Centre addressed
continually was the impact of the new mass media and the development
of mass culture. Media Studies has remained central to the project
of Cultural Studies ever since; indeed, in some institutional contexts,
the two terms are to all intents and purposes interchangeable. But
the responses to the media have not all been the same. Hoggart's
attitude, as set out in the Uses of Literacy, was basically hostile.
At a time when society had belatedly realized the quality and vitality
of English working-class culture--its rich personal and family life
conducted often in unlovely industrial settings, its chapels and
trade unions, its football teams and colliery bands--mass-produced
American films and television, not to speak of hamburgers and milk
bars, threatened to blow it all away. It was Hoggart's hope that
the methods of literary criticism could be brought to bear on the
products of popular culture, sifting in a comparable way the good
from the bad. In making a movement in the direction of the study
of contemporary culture (popular and mass culture, as well as the
traditional study of high culture), the English department would
play its part in the raising of national consciousness.
Hoggart's famous book is still lively reading but his views now seem, inevitably, a little quaint. One of the things which this first generation of work in Cultural Studies made anglophone audiences aware of in the 1960s and 1970s was the presence of a rich vein of continental philosophy and cultural commentary. Because critics like Williams and Thompson were affiliated with the British New Left, it was naturally the continental marxist commentators who were influential first, in particular the work of the Frankfurt School and its peripheral members, such as Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin. Benjamin is interesting because, like all the members of the Frankfurt school, he was not only a deeply 'cultured' man in the most traditional sense but, at the same time, more circumspect than British commentators about the role and nature of the mass media. In his classic essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', first published in German in 1936, but not available in English translation until 1969, Benjamin saw in the development of film, for example, not just a new art form, but a form which threw into question the nature of art itself, its connections to the society which produces it, and the ways it can be studied.
In Australia, study of the mass media in higher education got
underway early on and took a rather different form. In contrast
to the skepticism of British writers like Hoggart or the circumspection
of continental writers like Benjamin, the house style of Australian
cultural criticism has always been populist. This has been particularly
conspicuous in writing about television, for example, focussed less
on the 'quality' end of television than on the game shows and soaps
of the commercial networks, sometimes disconcertingly defensive
of the commercial media and its resistance to government attempts
to control its broadcasting. The conceptual backbone to this kind
of native populism has been provided by cultural theorists such
as Mikhail Bakhtin and, more specifically, Michel de Certeau[3].
De Certeau's studies of 'everyday life', in which ordinary people
are not at the mercy of dominant social forces but who find all
sorts of ways of bucking the system, has generated many studies
of the effects of television, such as in the work of John Fiske
and John Hartley, in which the consumers of mass culture are not
seen as passive recipients of pre-digested views marketed from America,
but as active participants in the construction of resistant meanings,
co-opting an alien material in support of their own values and social
position.[4]
Communications
A third strand in the development of Cultural Studies has been the
emergence in the last twenty or thirty years of 'Communications'
as a field of study. As with Media Studies, it is sometimes very
hard to say, especially in an institutional context, where Cultural
Studies begins and Communications, or Media Studies for that matter,
ends. There are many strands to Communications and different institutions
strike their own balance and their own level: in some places, communications
is constructed in a stronly vocational environment as part of a
matrix of studies oriented towards journalism, business, and public
relations. It's clearly a subject attuned to the information age.
There are many consequences of the growth of this kind of subject-matter
for the study of English, but underlying all of them is the significance
of a shift away from a focus on the textual object itself, on the
literary work and its author, towards the process of communication.
This can take many forms: one of the most basic is a focus on language
as a signifying medium; another is on the process of reading, as
a social or as a personal phenomenon, on the way in which meaning
is created by the reader, in the act of reading itself, rather than
by the author. One aspect of this, in the form of reader-response
criticism, has already had a deep impact on the teaching of English
in schools. There is a famous essay by the French critic Roland
Barthes which he ends provocatively with the comment: 'the birth
of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author'[5].
Some writers have observed sardonically that the death of the author
seems to have been accompanied by the birth of the (mega-star) critic.
One thing which seems to me beyond doubt is that the shift away
from author and work to process has led to the downgrading of literary
aesthetics generally. An increased focus on communicative process
in textual study seems inevitably to lead to a decline of interest
in issues of textual value. For good or ill, one text can be very
like another if what we are looking at is essentially language and
communication.
The importance of 'theory'
In general, the development of Cultural Studies since the 1980s
in Australia has been bound up with the encounter of Humanities
departments with French critical and cultural theory. Various critical
movements, often bringing with them their own formidable intellectual
traditions and methodologies'semiotic, feminist, postmodern, postcolonial,
marxist, queer theory etc.'have thrown into relief the narrowness
and lack of sophistication of traditional schemes of knowledge in
the Humanities. The subsequent enlargement of the theoretical horizons
of Humanities study has, of course, affected the study of literary
texts as well, stressing the need to position and contextualize
literary study in a philosophical framework and contributing to
the recovery and study of texts other than those by 'dead white
males': non-literary texts; film and television; popular culture;
writing by women, by indigenous cultures, by ethnic minorities,
by disadvantaged groups. But one of the paradoxes of this development--and
one of its problems for English as a discipline--is that few of
its intellectual leaders have been trained scholars and teachers
of literature, let alone English literature teachers. They have
most usually come from such disciplines as linguistics, philosophy,
psychology, sociology and anthropology. On the other hand, however,
the study of 'text' and 'textuality' has been central, although
it has not necessarily, or even usually, been the literary text,
still less the great work, and it has very seldom been the English
literary text.
English and Cultural Studies: a joint project?
I began this article by alluding to some of the institutional traumas
which have attended the development of Cultural Studies in the university,
but, despite everything, there is cause for optimism that English
and Cultural Studies could share the same or, at least, contiguous
spaces, offering mutual support, without one or the other feeling
that it is locked in a struggle to the death. From the point of
view of Cultural Studies, it is self-defeating to regard the literary
text, English literature or high culture generally as an enemy to
be vanquished. A study of culture which deliberately excludes its
high art is a fatally flawed project. Many of the academics in Cultural
Studies departments are trained scholars and teachers of English
literature; there is no reason why they should abandon their skills
or confine them purely to their private research. But just as worrying,
on the other hand, is the prospect of Cultural Studies going its
own way, policing its institutional boundaries, while, at the same
time, continuing the study of literary texts in a fugitive and oppositional
way, locked in a struggle with the English department for students
and academic space.
But there are compelling reasons other than administrative and managerial why English and Cultural Studies should co-operate. At least one of the major strands in Cultural Studies is a development from English. The pioneers of the subject in England in the 1950s and 1960s saw their work as a logical outgrowth of the traditional concerns of the discipline of English: both Hoggart and Williams were or became professors in English departments. From their origin in the late nineteenth century, English departments were concerned with 'culture' in a broad way, as a defining term in an anthropological sense as well as an aesthetic[6]. The early development of English as an academic discipline was closely bound up with the study of related areas such as philology and linguistics, on the one hand, and social history, on the other. 'English' departments have historically provided a home base for specialists in various fields beside English literature: for social historians, for linguists and philologists, for philosophers on occasion, and for creative writers long before there were courses in creative writing for them to teach. The idea that the exclusive focus of the English department should be on a narrow band of great literary works--a hybrid of some aspects of the work of F. R. Leavis with American New Criticism--is a much more recent development, the product of a particular historical moment, in the ascendency only really from the time of the end of the second world war to the mid 1970s, and falsifies the complex institutional and intellectual traditions of the subject.
A particularly troubling confusion is the conflation of some vague idea of 'traditional English study' with a formalist focus on the literary art object, invoking the names of Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, and labelling the whole lot the 'Cultural Heritage' model of English. I have already commented on the partiality and ahistoricity of using 'New Critical' perspectives as a shorthand for traditional English. Citing Arnold and Leavis in this way is another muddying of the waters. Arnold never held a conventional academic position, in English or anything else, but was both poet and (interestingly enough for teachers) for thirty-five years a career inspector of schools. In his writing, he was first and foremost a theorist and critic of 'culture'. His classic work, often cited as if it were some kind of founding manifesto for the university English department, in fact makes almost no reference to literature--one of the few references is to worry that in contemporary society the meaning of culture has been artificially narrowed to a question of what one reads--but there is abundant reference to pressing contemporary issues such as the disestablishment of the Church in Ireland. Leavis did think that one of the duties of the English department was to train a sensibility able to discriminate great literature from the rest and this did lead to a narrowness and rigidity in some of his later work, but this is hardly the same thing as identifying in an uncritical way some notion of a nation's cultural heritage. Leavis's early work especially championed the case of new (or newly-discovered) writers like T. S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins and D. H. Lawrence, and his life-long commitment was to the interdisciplinary goals of the revolutionary English tripos established at Cambridge after the first world war, in which he was successively one of the first students and one of the first teachers. The full name of that tripos was 'English Literature, Life and Thought' and it was Leavis's constant lament that the second and third parts (dealing with philosophy and social and cultural history) did not get as much attention as the first part. It should also be remembered that both F. R. Leavis and his wife Q. D. Leavis were pioneers in the study of popular culture: both did PhDs on seventeenth-century journalism and the title alone of Q. D. Leavis's seminal study Fiction and the Reading Public (1933) gives some idea of their 'culturalist' interests and methods.
In a similar way, much of the work done in the name of Cultural Studies has for some time been part of the research and teaching project of the university English department. Courses in literary, critical and cultural theory have been one of the main growth points in the last decade or so and one of the few areas of job opportunities. Courses in writing by women and feminist theory have likewise become part of the regular stock of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. There are few courses, even in the most traditional of literary areas, which do not feel under pressure, often from the students themselves, to include writing by women and to address questions of gender. Nor is there any reason to believe that there is some natural antipathy between the texts of literary high art and critical theory, as if the one were by its nature reactionary and the other naturally avant-garde. In the U.S.A. some of the main advances in critical theory have been associated with some of the most ivy-league of campuses: deconstruction, for example, was strongly associated with eminent professors at Yale, and with the reinterpretation of Romantic poetry; another branch of post-structuralism, new historicism, has been particularly influential on the study of Shakespeare and on Renaissance literature generally. There are also now a significant number of courses in the English department which cross the divide between high culture and popular culture. Most first-year courses in English at least include some film study. At Macquarie, the first-year English course begins with Pulp Fiction: it is not simply a popular and unthreatening text to start things off, but its complex structure of flashbacks and ellipses provides us with an introduction to the study of narrative technique and its foregrounding of its own textuality as 'pulp' gives us a basis for discussing issues of literary and cultural value.
An Optimistic and a Pessimistic Conclusion
I have tried to argue here that English and Cultural Studies are
natural allies, that at least some of the work in the agenda of
Cultural Studies has grown naturally out of the English department,
and that historically the project of English has been a broad study
of culture, in which the literary text has had a prominent but not
exclusive role. At the same time, it needs to be said that the very
breadth of understanding of what 'English' is has sometimes worked
against it, not just in terms of an enervating vagueness, lack of
focus and self-examination, but in the practical sense of nourishing
cuckoos within its nest. Let me end with a comment from the autobiography
of Frank Kermode, Not Entitled. Kermode was and is one of the most
distinguished scholars and literary critics of his generation. He
retired as professor of English at Cambridge, but he was a lifelong
outsider: working-class, with a career as student and teacher outside
Oxbridge, and always a champion of new ways. He was one of the first
English academics to have some sense of the importance of French
critical theory and to make space for it in his own departments;
his early retirement was hastened by his disgust at the denial of
tenure at Cambridge to Colin MacCabe, a young literary theorist
and, subsequently, professor of Cultural Studies at another university.
And yet Kermode strikes a note of warning:
The academy has long preferred ways of studying literature which
actually permit or enjoin the study of something else in its place,
and the success of the new French approaches has in many quarters
come close to eliminating the study of literature altogether.[7]
In many ways, the intellectual strengths of English, its breadth and openness, have become a source of its vulnerability, its habit of actually permitting or enjoining the study of something else in its place. English should not need to fear the development of Cultural Studies; literature ought to be central to the study of culture. But, if the study of English literature is not to slip into the role of minor option, it will have to do two things which are in some ways contradictory: remain faithful to the broad culturalist traditions of the English department and watch that the study of something else is not permitted in its name.
[1] An expanded version of the arguments
here can be found in `Zones of Contestation: English and Cultural
Studies', chapter 6 of Peter Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture:
the Long Debate (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995).
[2] The University of Wollongong
most recently, for example.
[3] The important texts are Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1968) and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988).
[4] See, for example, John Fiske,
`Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life', in Cultural
Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York and London:
Routledge, 1992) pp 154-73, and John Hartley, `Continuous Pleasures
in Marginal Places', in his collection of essays Teleology: Studies
in Television (London: Routledge, 1992), pp 158-80.
[5] The Death of the Author', in
Image, Music, Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen
Heath (London: Flamingo, 1984): 148.
[6] This aspect of `English' is revealingly
studied in Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism:
1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
[7] Frank Kermode, Not Entitled
(London: Flamingo, 1995, p 219.
Peter Goodall
School of English, Linguistics and Media
Macquarie University
N.S.W. 2109
02 9850 8769
pgoodall@pip.elm.mq.edu.au