LITERARY INTO CULTURAL STUDIES Antony Easthope For fifty years the paradigm of literary studies has relied on an opposition between the canon and its other, popular culture. The theory wars of the 1980s changed all that. With the advent of post-structuralism and the ‘death of literature’ the opposition between high and popular culture became untenable, transforming the field of inquiry from literary into cultural studies. Antony Easthope argues that the new discipline of cultural studies must have a new, decentred paradigm for the common study of canonical and popular texts together. Through a detailed criticism of competing theory, including British cultural studies, New Historicism and cultural materialism, he shows how this new study should—and should not—be done. Easthope’s exploration of the problems, possibilities and politics of cultural studies takes on the often evaded question of literary value; also in a reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness alongside Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes he demonstrates how the opposition between high and popular culture can be deconstructed. Antony Easthope is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has held visiting fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford, the University of Adelaide and at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of Literary and Cultural Change at the University of Virginia. His publications include Poetry as Discourse (1983), The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (1986) and British Post-Structuralism (1988). LITERARY INTO CULTURAL STUDIES Antony Easthope London and New York First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Antony Easthope All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-39274-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-39557-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-06641-7 (Print Edition) For L.C. and R.C. and the Commonwealth Center for the Study of Literary and Cultural Change Humanism, the creation of bourgeois culture, finally separates from it… humanism must either pass into the ranks of the proletariat or, going quietly into a corner, cut its throat. Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix Part I Collapsing the literary studies paradigm 1 CONSTRUCTING THE LITERARY OBJECT 3 2 DISSOLVING THE LITERARY OBJECT 21 3 THE QUESTION OF LITERARY VALUE 41 Part II High culture/popular culture 4 THE CANON AND ITS OTHER: ERODING 63 THE SEPARATION 5 HIGH CULTURE/POPULAR CULTURE: 73 HEART OF DARKNESS AND TARZAN OF THE APES Part III Towards a new paradigm 6 HISTORY AND SIGNIFYING PRACTICE 105 7 TERMS FOR A NEW PARADIGM 127 8 ANALYSING CULTURE 139 9 THE SUBJECT OF LITERARY STUDIES 161 AND THE SUBJECT OF CULTURAL STUDIES 10 THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL STUDIES 177 Appendix 1: Time and different times 183 Appendix 2 191 vii References 193 Index 203 PLATES 1 Still of Sean Connery from Diamonds are Forever (British 124 Film Institute) 2 Still of Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway from Chinatown 142 (British Film Institute) 3 Diagram of a Benson and Hedges advertisement 152 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all those who were at the Commonwealth Center for the Study of Literary and Cultural Change in 1990 for their support and constructive criticism when I was working on this book, Carlos Betancourth, Alice Gambrell, Ravindra Khare, Martin Kreiswirth and Roland Simon, as well as visitors to the Center, Stephen Bann, Maud Ellmann, Toril Moi, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Stephen Railton, Andrew Ross, Brian Stock and Hayden White. My largest debt is of course to Ralph Cohen, whose benign and enabling authority makes the work of the Center possible. I am also deeply grateful to people who found time to read the manuscript: Kate Belsey, Stewart Crehan, Nancy Loevinger and Ray Selden. Kate McGowan, Stephen Priest, Hugh Silverman and Janet Wolff made valuable comments on particular sections. A discussion with Richard Rorty led to changes in Chapter 3, though I suspect his influence throughout has been greater than ‘I’m aware. Through both agreements and disagreements, I have been helped by all of these, though it remains the case that what goes into a text is one thing, what comes out of it another. Some of the material for Chapter 2 appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics, 25 (4) (Autumn 1985). Chapter 5 began as joint work with Margaret Beetham and as such was given as a paper at the Cultural Value conference at Birkbeck College, London, in July 1988; Margaret has since decided to concentrate on her work on women’s magazines but I am glad to acknowledge how much I learned from collaborating with her. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in Textual Practice, 4 (3) (Winter 1990). Part of Chapter 8 was given as a paper at the Anglistentag 1989 at Würzburg and published in the Proceedings edited by Rüdiger Ahrens (Max Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1990). Some ideas drawn on for Chapter 9 appeared in Theory/Pedagogy/Politics: Texts x for Change edited by Donald Morton and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh for the University of Illinois Press. For giving permission for the reproduction of copyright material I wish to thank: Pierre Leyris and Editions du Seuil for the French translation of The Windhover’; Paramount Pictures for a still from Chinatown; United Artists for a still from Diamonds are Forever; and Chatto and Windus for the text of ‘The Framework-knitters Lamentation’. Part I COLLAPSING THE LITERARY STUDIES PARADIGM 2 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 4 LITERARY INTO CULTURAL STUDIES 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, pp. 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