Routledge - A.Easthope - Literary into Cultural Studies - Antony Easthope.pdf - Culture - lady_kitty

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).

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

Routledge - A.Easthope - Literary into Cultural Studies - Antony Easthope.pdf

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