section of my university’s library and are never checked 
out, except by the intrepid literary scholar. Conversely, 
the works quoted in “cultural” journals line the literature 
sections of the library and enjoy occasional outings. I be­
lieve that cultural studies should be viewed as an area of 
interest separate from but cognate with literary studies. If 
literary studies should motivate interest in the factors in­
fluencing the constitution of texts, cultural studies should 
yield an even larger picture, which exposes the agencies 
affecting the emergence of other art forms and reveals 
the connections between these forms. The indistinct in­
termingling of the cultural and the literary may be very 
“cultural,” but it is not particularly helpful for achieving 
the aims of either cultural or literary studies.

MORADEWUN ADEJUNM0B1 
University of Botswana

There is evidence for the old idea that some literature 
transcends culture: works have been read with delight in 
different periods. Shakespeare was warmly received in a 
nineteenth-century America that hated kings, although 
there are few “Americans” in Shakespeare, few characters 
below the aristocracy, almost none with ideals of social 
mobility. And what of the reception here of Jane Austen, 
whose novels include almost no characters below the 
landed gentry? Perhaps the nineteenth-century Americans 
who enjoyed Shakespeare and Austen were ignorant of 
cultural studies and thus could encounter European class 
assumptions without disgust. The bliss of reading in­
volves a good deal of ignorance—or of imagination, of 
suspension of disbelief. The teacher of literature, as a 
teacher of pleasure, can set the weight of the world aside.

Literature that does not transcend culture may benefit 
greatly from cultural studies. The appreciation of satires, 
epigrams, and sermons from earlier periods depends on 
historical notes, a kind of attenuated cultural studies. One 
might argue that cultural studies tends to turn all literature 
into satire or sermon. Measure for Measure, which does 
not transcend its context, can be read as satire or as com­
mentary on the spousal Canons of 1604 or on the change 
of reign. The issues in the play—handfast marriage, sex­
ual passes or harassment, and the change of political 
authority—make Measure for Measure teachable. My 
freshman students delight to recognize some of their 
concerns in it. But Othello is not on my freshman read­
ing list, because in transcending culture the work forgoes 
this appeal.

Literature that transcends culture may be damaged or 
undermined by cultural studies. I think this has happened 
to Austen, whose early admission to the canon made aca­
demic rediscovery impossible. And it has not helped her

recent fortunes that Austen’s main, almost her only, sub­
ject is the marriage of true minds. 1 believe that Austen 
now is less assigned (in high school and college), though 
more read, than ever; film has "taught” her works in a way 
that our classrooms cannot. One could argue that lilm 
and TV set the curriculum now. No wonder cultural stud­
ies seems important: it shows how culture dominated lit­
erary production and reception in the past, just as media 
culture controls us.

ALAN POWERS
Bristol Coniitutnilv College, MA

I have a career in English largely because 1 serendipi- 
tously mentioned my interest in British cultural studies 
when I went on the job market in the mid-1980s. The lit­
erary academy was just discovering the work of the Birm­
ingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, as the 
sessions on cultural studies organized by the Sociologi­
cal Approaches to Literature group for the 1988 MLA 
meeting signaled. 1 had been drawing on Birmingham 
cultural studies since I read a review of Dick Hebdige’s 
Subculture: The Meaning of Style in Trouser Press in 
1979, and the appearance in PMLA of my article featur­
ing the Sex Pistols, in 1991, might have seemed a sign 
that cultural studies had influenced literary studies. In 
fact, I was realizing that cultural studies was dead on ar­
rival in the United States.

The effort to relate cultural studies and the literary, 
which has largely been futile, started at least with Ray­
mond Williams’s The Long Revolution, in which Williams 
held that “it is with the discovery of patterns” running 
through a variety of texts “that any useful cultural analy­
sis begins.” The goal of reconstructing these patterns 
should be to “reveal unexpected identities and corre­
spondences in hitherto separately considered activities” 
([Penguin, 1965] 63). The subsequent effort of British 
cultural studies to enlarge the range of cultural forms 
that counted was a political intervention, intended to 
counteract the views of other leftists—including, ironi­
cally, the founder of the Birmingham center, Richard 
Hoggart—that youth culture was worthless. In Hiding in 
the Light, Dick Hebdige describes a general “cartogra­
phy of taste,” in which “by pursuing a limited number of 
themes . . . across a fairly wide range of discourses it 
may be possible ... to modify the received wisdom,” 
both within the academy and outside it ([Routledge, 
1988] 48). When confronting the literary, cultural studies 
ought to reveal “the extent to which one of the major 
functions of literary criticism as an institution” is to cor­
don off “those cultural forms based on mechanical and 
electronic reproduction” (Colin MacCabe, The Linguis­



tics of Writing [Manchester UP, 1987] 301). Cultural 
studies ought to demonstrate just how full a life the liter­
ary has in popular culture, a project that will often re­
quire building from sources and incidents beneath the 
notice of scholars—the citation of Graham Greene in a 
biography of the Sex Pistols, for example. The primary 
problem with much of the academic work identified with 
cultural studies simply because it makes forays into mass 
culture is that it does not reconsider the disciplinary ter­
rain. In a scathing review of psychoanalytic and post­
structuralist interpretations of Madonna, Daniel Harris 
points out that in “spurning the pieties lavished on the 
canon, academics demonstrate how incomplete the post­
modern break with traditional forms of artistic analysis 
has been, how abysmally they have failed to take popular 
culture on its own terms” (“Make My Rainy Day,” Na­
tion 8 June 1992: 792).

As a result of academic careerism, cultural studies in 
the United States was conflated with postmodern theory, 
another trendy field, though a far more dominant one, and 
quickly became a bandwagon for academic leftists. Stu­
art Hall noted that ‘“cultural studies’ has become an um­
brella for just about anything” in American scholarship 
(“The Emergence of Cultural Studies,” October 53 [1990]: 
22). University presses, for instance, are free in labeling 
their publications “literary and cultural studies.” Still 
worse, according to Barbara Epstein, chair of the History 
of Consciousness program at the University of Califor­
nia, Santa Cruz, cultural studies enacts what it’s supposed 
to be studying, the “fascination with being a celebrity” 
(Tom Frank, “Textual Reckoning,” In These Times 27 
May 1996: 24). The audience that witnessed the caval­
cade of cultural studies stars at the formative University 
of Illinois conference in 1990 was obsessed with prefer­
ment and aggrieved by neglect. One of the organizers of 
the conference, Lawrence Grossberg, who went on to 
coedit the proceedings and the journal Cultural Studies, 
effectively installing himself as the CEO of cultural stud­
ies in the United States, has argued that cultural studies 
needs to be crossed with the work of Gilles Deleuze and 
Michel Foucault (We Gotta Get Out of This Place [Rout­
ledge, 1992]). The result of this amalgamation with post­
modern theory, Epstein observes, is that cultural studies 
has adopted the widespread poststructuralist silliness of 
insisting “that nothing is real, everything is a matter of 
appearances,” and of minimizing human agency (Frank 
24). The occasion for her comments was the physicist 
Alan Sokal’s hoax on Social Text, an article baited with 
the thesis that physical reality is only “a social and lin­
guistic construct” (“Transgressing the Boundaries— 
Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum 
Gravity,” Social Text 14 [1996]: 217). Daniel Harris sim­

ilarly complains that postmodern theorists primarily pro­
mote their “most cherished tenet—that . . . there is no 
stable and empirically verifiable ‘reality’ behind the va­
garies and impermanence of language” (793). This anti­
materialism completely contradicts the original basis of 
cultural studies, the materialism exemplified by Raymond 
Williams and by the efforts of Birmingham mentors such 
as Richard Johnson to set out a “postpoststructuralist” 
view of agency that would acknowledge the power of ide­
ology and other social constraints but also the human ca­
pacity to negotiate with them.

Considering the complete recasting of cultural studies 
in the United States, it is hardly surprising that Michael 
Berube would write that no one “really needs or wants to 
hear the Birmingham-Hoggart-Williams narrative” about 
the British origins of cultural studies (“Bite Size The­
ory,” Social Text 36 [1993]: 89). Donna Haraway, one of 
the best-known postmodern theorists associated with 
cultural studies in the United States, has said with perfect 
equanimity that cultural studies is about “everything and 
nothing” (Scott Heller, “Cultural Studies,” Chronicle of 
Higher Education 31 Jan. 1990: A4). That pretty well 
sums up why, a decade after the literary discovered cul­
tural studies, PMLA is still wondering exactly what cul­
tural studies is supposed to do.

NEIL NEHRING 
University of Texas, Austin

At Indiana University, graduate students in most humani­
ties and social science disciplines can now “minor” in the 
fledgling Cultural Studies Program. The faculty members 
in the program represent twelve disciplines, from anthro­
pology to telecommunications. The largest number are 
from English. Despite much faculty and student interest 
in cultural studies programs, creating one is an uphill 
struggle against existing disciplinary regimes. There 
aren’t many such programs—let alone departments—in 
North America today, even though many academics want 
to turn their disciplines, or at least their own teaching 
and research, toward cultural studies, because of what 
they see as the arbitrary narrowness of present disciplin­
ary rules, procedures, and objects of study.

For “literary” disciplines (so the story goes), the source 
of our discontent has been “theory” (especially poststruc­
turalism, Marxism, and feminism). But other forces are 
reshaping English departments in particular. One is the 
exponential increase of entire new literatures in English, 
produced in former British colonies (Australia, India, Ni­
geria, etc.) and in North America by ethnic “minorities” 
(African, Asian, and Native American, among others). 
The long struggle to include American literature in the