within the academy. As currently practiced, much of cul­
tural studies is Marxism of an unfortunately vulgar kind. 
Insofar as cultural studies represents a reaction against 
the mandarin machismo of theory in the 1980s, trying to 
replace the disembodiedness of many theoretical discus­
sions with an emphasis on the social functions of litera­
ture and with attention to a much broader range of 
material, it has genuine claims to inaugurate a more pop­
ulist and progressive critical practice. But it has also ex­
tended and confirmed the de facto eclipse of literature 
already evident fifteen years ago, as theory took prece­
dence over primary works.

Although all cultural forms are now supposed to be of 
equal interest, there is an implicit bias in favor of the pro­
ductions of international mass media and against a liter­
ary tradition seen as hopelessly elitist and retrograde. 
(Film studies suffers from a similar blindness; despite its 
roots in the cinephile culture of the 1960s, it is increas­
ingly uninterested in either art film or experimental film.) 
Yet literature is obviously a central cultural form, which 
it would be disastrous to forget or to dismiss. To take 
culture seriously is to take it whole and to be interested 
in the connections among all its parts. Demystifying a 
cultural phenomenon or discovering that it was invented 
does not mean that it disappears or becomes insignifi­
cant. In Saussurean structuralism, the arbitrary does not 
become senseless simply because we understand it to be 
arbitrary; within the system, it is powerful despite or 
even in its arbitrariness. For Levi-Strauss, too, individual 
cultural forms assume a kind of inevitability, because 
they lock into the whole matrix of culture, but his project 
is in the end thoroughly relativist. Barthes takes apart 
mythologies, yet he also acknowledges the centrality of 
mythmaking—and the literary—for all cultures.

Ironically, as the possibilities for interdisciplinary in­
vestigation and the number of interesting texts available 
for study have expanded, the range of discussion has nar­
rowed drastically. This need not be. Recent work in the 
emerging field of publishing history provides fresh ways 
of thinking about literary institutions, from academies 
and cliques to newspapers and magazines; the ground has 
now been laid for a rethinking of the sociology of literary 
form. And there should be better ways now to capitalize 
on the wonderful republishing programs of small inde­
pendent and university presses (the efforts of Virago and 
Pandora; the reprinting of American radical novels by 
the University of Illinois Press; the translation of key 
forgotten works of central and eastern European litera­
ture by Northwestern University Press, Quartet, Sun and 
Moon, and Overlook; and so on). Cultural critics like 
C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and 
Siegried Kracauer are now being rediscovered, but this is

just the tip of the iceberg, given the number of half- 
forgotten thinkers, programmatic and otherwise, whose 
work defines a larger cultural field. Leroi Jones’s Blues 
People and Hans Richter’s Struggle for the Film, the work 
of Aby Warburg and of the Annales school, the Lynds’ 
Middletown and Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art, 
British Mass Observation studies and Yury Lotman’s 
semiotic analyses of Russian cultural history all deserve 
new readers.

There is no need to mourn literary education as it used 
to be. The most devastating condemnation of the old dis­
pensation is that, far from creating lifetime readers of 
difficult works, it seems to have engendered hatred, am­
bivalence, or indifference toward literature in so many of 
those who now teach it. But there is also no need for the 
historical amnesia that now, despite the new emphasis on 
disciplinary history, dominates the profession.

KATIE TRUMPENER 
University of Chicago

RICHARD MAXWELL 
Valparaiso University

From my perspective outside the United States, I under­
stand cultural studies to encompass two possibilities. On 
the one hand, it might involve the study of artistic forms 
besides those whose medium is language and of exploi­
tations of language beyond the imaginative or narrowly 
textual. On the other hand, cultural studies might provide 
the opportunity for a serious investigation of the work­
ings of specific contemporary cultures. Cultural studies 
may be responsible for a subtle shift of interest from 
canonical subjects, but its overall emphasis remains con­
servative and domestic. The radical reorganization of lit­
erary curricula ascribed to cultural activists seems vastly 
exaggerated.

While I recognize that the wide-ranging conclusions 
of some branches of cultural studies become a pretext 
and an alibi for ignoring individual cases, I disagree with 
the critics of cultural studies who aim to contract the 
compass of the literary field. Studies of texts and of the 
conditions of their emergence belong first in the literary 
department rather than the cultural. All foreign litera­
tures should be studied as literature, not as ethnic fixtures 
in the vast wilderness of cultural studies. To relegate post­
colonial literatures, for example, to cultural studies can 
only comfort defenders of the canon. Literary studies 
ought to keep pace with every kind of literary production.

The confusion between the literary and the cultural 
is not only an American disorder. Some books cited in 
contemporary literary journals are housed in the sociology



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