What is cultural studies(British cultural materialism& new historicism)

Department of English

 Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai

Semester: 2

Class: M.A. Part: 1

Roll No: 29

Email Id: vanitabaldaniya0806gmail.com

Paper: 8 c (The Cultural Studies)

Topic: What is Cultural Studies

(1)              British Cultural Materialism

(2)              New Historicism

Work Form: Assignment

Guidance by:  Dilipsir Barad.

       Cultural Studies

What is a Cultural studies? 

        Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways inn which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power.

                   Cultural studies explore culture, power, and identity. In cultural studies, we analyze a wide variety of forms of cultural expression, such as TV, film, advertising, literature, art and video games. As well, we study social and cultural practices, like shopping, cell phone use, and social justice movements. We are concerned with thinking about identity and social roles, including gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. Cultural studies research and teaching seeks to be self-critical, self reflexive, and engaged. It challenges dominant or “normal” assumptions   about who we are, in relation to others, and how.

                   The program has a number of core and cultural studies- specific courses and relief on cultural studies focused courses in other disciplines, including: Anthropology, art History, English, French, Geography, German, History, indigenous studies, Japanese studies, Performance, Philosophy, Sociology, Spanish studies, Visual arts, and gender and Women’s studies.

                   “Culture has two aspects: the known meaning and direction, which its members are trained to: the new observation and meaning, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative: that it is both the most ordinary common meaning and the finest individual meaning. We use the word culture in these two sense: to mean a whole way of life- the common meanings: to mean the arts and learning- the special processes of discovery and creative effort”

                                                          -Raymond Williams

 Matthew Arnold says that is ;

Culture:-

                    

        Culture is opposite to nature. Power is important.cultural study another part is creative faculty and this is ideas(ideology) culture is define and describe the language is important.

          Nation is political contract, and country is Geography contract. Nature involve culture. Nation is idea and outside culture. Culture also deals with identity culture materialism. A micro-theory in anthropology which holds that most aspects of human culture can be explained in material terms.

                             British Cultural Materialism

                   Cultural studies is referred to as “cultural materialism”in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens”of British Culture. Edward Burnett Tylor’s pioneering anthropological study primitive culture argued that:-

                “culture or civilization, taken in

                   Its widest ethnographic sense, is

                   A complex whole which includes

                   Knowledge, belief, art, morals,

                   Low, custom and any other

                   Capabilities and habits acquired

                   By man as a member of society.” 

                   Claude Levi-Strauss’s influence moved British thinkers to assign “culture”to primitive peoples and then, which the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams, to a tribute culture to the working class as well as the elite. A William memorably states:- 

                   “There are no Masses; - there

                   Are only ways of seeing people

                   as Masses”.

              To appreciate the important of this revision of “culture”we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set, an ideology left over from the previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture”developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past.

                   The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annul the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norm. this cultural materialism furnished a leftist orintation “critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism”. Such, was the description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to literary Theory and Criticism.

                   Cultural materialism began in Ernest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the “great tradition”of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.

                   Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture. Raymond Williams applauded the richness of canonical texts such as Leavis promoted, but also found they could seem to erase contain communal forms of life.

                   Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Georgy Lukucs, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhil Bakhtin, and Antonio Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and in the many systems of domination related to literature. From Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, for example, they got the concept of cultural “hegemony”referring to relations of domination not always visible as such.

                Williams noted that hegemony was “a sense of reality for most people… beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move.”  But the people are not always victims of hegemony; they sometimes possess the power to change it. Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people,that:

                “The main function of ideology is to

                   Reproduce the society’s existing relations

                   Of production, and that function is even

                   Carried out in literary texts”.

                   New Historicism

                   If the 1970s could be called the Age of Deconstruction.”write Joseph Litvak,

                   “some hypothetical survey of late

                   Twentieth century criticism might

                   Well characterize the 1980s as

                   Marking the Return to History,

                   Or perhaps the Recovery of the

                   Reference”.

                   As a return to historical scholarship, new historicism concerns itself with extra literary matters- latters, diaries, films, paintings, medical theatises- looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text New Historicists seek “Surprising Coincidences”that may cross generic, historical, and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony, or popular culture. New historians see such cress cultural phenomena as texts in themselves.

                   New historicism versus old histiricism the latter, says porter saw history as:-

                   “world views magisterially unfolding

                   As a series of tableaux in a film called

                   Progress”.

                   As though all Elizabethans for example, held views in common. The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favor of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.

                   Steplen Greenblatt, a Renaissance scholars and founding editor of the journal Representations, may be credited with the coining of the term “new historicism”, new historicism exists, veeser explains, between these two poles in an attempt to work with the;

                  “apparently contradictory historical

                   Effects of capitalism”.

                   Without insisting upon an inflexible historical and economic theory, for Foucault history was not the working out of “universal”ideas: because we cannot know the governing ideas of the past or the present, we should not imagine that “we” even have a “center”for mapping the “real”.

                   Furthermore, history itself is a form of social oppression, told in a series of ruptures with previous ages; it is more accurately described as discontinues, riven by “fault lines”that must be integrated into succeeding cultures by the epistemes of power and knowledge.

                   A new episteme will render absolets our ways or organizing knowledge and telling history. New historicism frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: exchange, negotiation and circulation of ideas are described.

                   What about Laputa? Hoe can new historicism help us answer the question raised a few pages ago? In “The Flying Island and Female Anatomy; Gynecology and power a reading of Book 3 that makes some new historicist sense out of Swift’s use of Laputa.

                   Culture notes the men ineffectual in several ways abstracted as they are in their foolish “science”, they are so absent minded they must have an attendant called a “flapper”who constantly must slap them out of their reveries. The women, on the other hand have an –

                   “Abundance of vivacity; they condemn

                   Their Husbands, and are exceedingly fond

                   Of strangers… mistress and lover may

                   Proceed to the greatest familiarities before

                   Face, if he be but provided with paper

                   And implements and without his flapper,

                   By his side.”

                   Bruce connects the men “doomed attempt of various type of science to control the woman’s body” to the debate about language in Book-3. While the men invent the 'Engine for Improving Speculative Knowledge’ that produces only brokehsomences, the women and other commoners clamor, after the manner of their forefathers.

                   Thus, in A voyage to Laputa”, control of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality reflecting the contemporary debates of Swift’s day. So, above given deeply introduction about what is cultural studies and British cultural materialism and New Historicism.

                  

                     

         

T.S.Eliot(Tradition and Individual Talent)

Department of English

Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai

Semester: 2

Class: M.A. Part: 1

Roll No: 29

Email Id: vanitabaldaniya0806gmail.com

Paper: 7 (Literary Theory and Criticism)

Work Form: Assignment

Guidance by: Dilipsir Barad.

Topic:

   T.S.Eliot’s Tradition and Individual Talent

                            (1920)

    About the poet:

                   Often hailed as the successor to poet-critics such as John Dryden, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, T. S.Eliot’s literary criticism informs his poetry just as his experience as a poet shape his critical work. Though famous for insisting on objectivity” in art, Eliot’s essays actually map a highly personal set of preoccupation responses and ideas about specific authors and works of art, as well as formulate more general theories on the connections between poetry, culture and society.

         Perhaps his best- known essay, “Tradition and Individual Talent” was first published in 1919 and soon after included in The Sacred wood: essays on poetry and criticism (1920). Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he essentially impersonal”, that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Until the middle of the last century, Eliot’s idea of tradition was extraordinary influential.

       As he did write in ‘Tradition and The Individual Talent’ some one said:

                   “The dead writers are remote

                     From us because we know so

                     Much more than they did,”

                        Precisely, and “they are that which we know: Eliot is part of that which we know. However unconsciously. ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is still potentially a remarkably fertile essay- contradiction, and at some level it knows it. It is self- conscious as a critical performance, and anticipates any deconstructive reading. These qualities inhere in its elliptical style, where corners are cut, logic is slippery, and the progression from one sentence to the next can be mercurial.

                   The Historical Sense

          Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual involving something he describes as “the Historical Sense” which is a perception of “the Pastness of the past” but also of its “presence”. For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”, however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself.

          This vies, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”. Requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary history- non just immediate past but the distant past and not just the literature of his or her own country but the whole “mind of Europe”.

        Eliot’s second point is one of his most famous and contentions. A poet, Eliot maintains must; self sacrifice”, to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieves, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a more medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a “mature” poet’s mind works by being a passive “receptacle” of image, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new” art emotion”.

          For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of the a greater ability which to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge. Though Eliot’s belief that;

                   “Poetry is not a turning loose

                 Of emotion, but an escape

                   From emotion; it is not the

                   Expression of personality, but

                   An escape from personality”.

          Sprang from what he viewed as the excesses of Romanticism, many scholars have noted how continuous Eliot’s thought and the Romantics” his impersonal poet”. Even has links with John Keats, who proposed a similar figure in “the chameleon poet”. But Eliot’s belief that critical study should be “diverted” from the poet to the poetry shaped the study of poetry for half a century, and while “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has had many detractors, especially those who question Eliot’s insistence on is difficult to overemphasize the essay’s influence.

                   In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence, we cannot refer to ‘the tradition” or "to a tradition” at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of so and so is “traditional” or even “too Traditional”.

                   Eliot’s biographer Peter Ackroyd describes well the appeal to Eliot of Bradley’s book Appearance and Reality : to recognize the limitations of ordinary knowledge and experience but yet to see that when they are organized into a coherent whole they might vouchsafe glimpses of absolute truth there is balm here for one trapped in the world and yet seeking some other, invaded by sensations and yet wishing to understand and to order them. Immediate experience gained through what Bradley calls “Finite Centres” is incomplete, and even ‘mad’, but it is all that is valid for the individual:

“All significant truth are Private truth” But the thesis would somehow break out of solipsism.

                   To view present anarchy in the light of an ordered past might make it appear less anarchy. But that past is ordered only from our present perspective, and so the order was never actual but always only ideal. The statement in “Tradition and Individual Talent” ’that, this essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism’ sounds like a covert admission that ‘the historical sense’ cannot provide a basis in actuality for order. By declining to go beyond, even as it calls attention to, that frontier, the essay presents an intriguingly unresolved tension between reality and ideality.

          Impersonality- the closet Romantic

          The second part of “Tradition and Individual Talent” shifts from tradition and the historical sense to the individual practicing poet. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one  not precisely in any valuation of “personality”’ not being necessarily more interesting, or having” more to say”, but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

          The theory of impersonality does not any subjectivism but ‘set out to put the author in his place, and to liberate the poem from his narcissism. Thus the second part of ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ frequently strays into psychological terminology in spite of itself. It invites inspection of all that it would- ward off, a prurience encouraged by the evasive statement that only those who have personality and emotions knows what it means to want to escape from these things. And the ‘scientific, seemingly objective chemical analogy for the creative process, whose purpose is to denigrate the work of art as an expressive medium, reads today like a smoke screen.

                    As Edward Lobb argues in his book, T.S.Eliot and the Romantic critical Tradition, the idea of a dissociation of sensibility is,

             “The story of Eden applied to the                              

              Secular history, of literature and

                 As such is a ‘literary myth was first

                 Put forward by the Romantics; Eliot’s

                 View of literary history is… basically

                Romantic in its nostalgia for a lost “

                Golden age.”

        Literary and Social-Political Hierarchies

       Political criticism, originating in England and as its name implies, essentially pragmatic, was given theoretical backbone by the new criticism, which, formulated by a group of American southern agrarian poet- critics, elaborated a system describing the text not as an expressive medium but as a formal unity and autonomous’ object, to be examined without regard to any contextual considerations, historical, authorial. For instance. It informs his imperialist apologetic, which have literary as well as political implications, and which draw on a long tradition of pan-European thinking.

          I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light- or darkness- of these observations:

  “And now methinks I could even chide myself

   For doating on her beauty, though her death

   Shall be revenged after no common action.

  Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors

  For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

 Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships

 For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

  Why does you fellow falsify highways,

  And put his life between the judge’s lips,

 To refine such a thing-keeps horse and men

  To beat their valours for her…?”

                   In this passage there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction towards beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it.

               For Eliot, the implications for a European literary tradition are clear: as he writes in his essay’ what is a classic?

        “Each literature has its greatness

          Not in isolation, but because of

          Its place in a larger pattern,

         A pattern set in Rome”.

           Thus the several European literatures are parts of a larger pattern, and they cannot survive without maintaining their position as part of that pattern, that greater whole, Latin is the universal language, the ideal to which the European vernaculars should aspire, but which they can never attain.

                   Legacies: Theory

           It is not necessary to share this outmoded in a European ideal order’- a belief that underlies Eliot’s espousal, and linking of Royalist in politics, classicism in literature, and Anglo-Catholicism in religion- to learn, even today, from his idea of tradition.

            There have been, and continue to be, important implication here for the theory and practice of literary criticism. Tradition, not as an inheritance but as the invention of anyone who is prepared to expend the necessary labor and sweat, means that everyone it free to create their private pantheon of precursors according to their own literary tastes and obsessions: Eliot’s simultaneous order’ depends on ‘a principle of aesthetic not merely historical criticism’.

          The argument in ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’ gives legitimacy to the idea of the text as an object of perpetual reinterpretation. Reader- response and reception theories have elaborated on this approach.

        Sharratt sees Eliot’s ideas as the precursor to some central postmodernist tendencies: Eliot’s ‘construction of history’ being based essentially on literary taste, anticipates

          “The deeper superficialities of

            Post-modernism’, resulting in

            ‘a textual reshuffling of an

             Endlessly expanding but

             Unreliable archive with no 

             Verifiable validity”.

             Legacies: Poetry

            One of the motives impelling ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ no doubt also impelled The Waste Land a few tears later. The poem thus intimates Eliot’s idea of tradition, projecting the subjective presence of a past out of which to create some sort of order, which in this case would be the poem itself, an order perhaps inchoate, potential, and barely discernible: but the elements are there.

            This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusion as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression of significant emotion; emotion has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.

           So, In last conclude, about the critic, T. S. Eliot and his famous work ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ about introduction above as under and describe the all deeply introduction.