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