ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M 240-540 Dr. David Lavery

1. ENGL 6310/7310 Popular Culture Studies Fall 2011 PH 300 M 240-540 Dr. David Lavery Week Two, 9/12/11

2. Popular Culture Studies Will Brooker Week Two

3. Popular Culture Studies Week Two

4. Popular Culture Studies Week Two

5. Popular Culture Studies What are now called departments of English will be renamed departments of “Cultural Studies” where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon Week Two

6. Popular Culture Studies John Fiske [pictured] (1996) maintains that “culture” in cultural studies “is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political” (115). What he means by this is that the object of study in cultural studies is not culture defined in a narrow sense, as the objects of supposed aesthetic excellence (“high art”); nor, in an equally narrow sense, as a process of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual development, but culture understood, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, as “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group”. This is a definition of culture that can embrace the first two definitions but also, and crucially, it can range beyond the social exclusivity and narrowness of these, to Week Two

7. Popular Culture Studies include popular culture—the cultures of everyday life. Therefore, although cultural studies cannot (and should not) be reduced to the study of popular culture, it is certainly the case that the study of popular culture is central to the project of cultural studies. As Cary Nelson (1996) explains, “people with ingrained contempt for popular culture will never fully understand the cultural studies project” (279) --John Storey (xvi) As Tony Bennett [pictured] (1996) explains, cultural studies is committed “to examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations of power” (307). --John Storey (xvii) Week Two

8. Popular Culture Studies include popular culture—the cultures of everyday life. Therefore, although cultural studies cannot (and should not) be reduced to the study of popular culture, it is certainly the case that the study of popular culture is central to the project of cultural studies. As Cary Nelson (1996) explains, “people with ingrained contempt for popular culture will never fully understand the cultural studies project” (279). --John Storey (xvi) As Tony Bennett [pictured] (1996) explains, cultural studies is committed “to examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations of power” (307). --John Storey (xvii) Week Two

9. Popular Culture Studies To deny that the consumers of popular culture are cultural dupes is not to deny that the culture industries seek to manipulate, but it is to deny that popular culture is little more than a degraded landscape of commercial and ideological manipulation, imposed from above in order to make a profit and secure ideological control. --John Storey (xix) Week Two

10. Popular Culture Studies Matthew Arnold (1822-88). English poet, educator, and man of letters. Week Two

11. Popular Culture Studies Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy • Sweetness and Light • Culture and Anarchy • Culture is “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” “[Attained by] the disinterested and active use of reading, reflection, and observation, in the endeavor to know the best that be known” (Arnold) • Anarchy = popular culture; “doing as one likes” • Hebraism and Hellenism • “firm obedience” and “strictness of conscience” vs. “clear intelligence” and “spontaneity of consciousness” • the coming of Christianity vs. the Renaissance • Liberalism vs. Puritanism • Barbarians (Upper-Class) • Philistines (Middle Class) • Populace (Lower Class), • Aliens (individuals from any of the previous three who do not fit in with its dominant spirit) Week Two

12. Popular Culture Studies Matthew Arnold (1822-88) Dover Beach The sea is calm to-night.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Week Two

13. Popular Culture Studies Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” Sophocles long agoHeard it on the A gaean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Week Two

14. Popular Culture Studies Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. Week Two

15. Popular Culture Studies F. R. Leavis (1895-1978).English critic and literary scholar. “Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture” Week Two

16. Popular Culture Studies F. R. Leavis “Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture” • The selection in Storey (a pamphlet) was largely “borrowed” from Q. (Queenie) D. (Dorothy) Leavis’s graduate thesis (Fiction and the Reading Public). • An elitist • A snob • Anti-American • Nostalgia for a 19th century rural utopia • Links to I. A. Richards [bottom right] and New Criticism and Logical Positivism Week Two

17. Popular Culture Studies F. R. Leavis Week Two

18. Popular Culture Studies Richard Hoggart (1918- ) “The Full Rich Life & The Newer Mass Art: Sex in Shiny Packets” • Set up the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham • “celebrates a grubbily home-made, urban culture . . . Leavis would have disdained—and Arnold feared” (Brooker) Week Two

19. Popular Culture Studies SloughCome friendly bombs and fall on Slough!It isn't fit for humans now,There isn't grass to graze a cow.Swarm over, Death!Come, bombs and blow to smithereensThose air-conditioned, bright canteens,Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,Tinned minds, tinned breath. Week Two

20. Popular Culture Studies SloughMess up the mess they call a town-A house for ninety-seven downAnd once a week a half a crownFor twenty years.And get that man with double chinWho'll always cheat and always win,Who washes his repulsive skinIn women's tears: Week Two

21. Popular Culture Studies SloughAnd smash his desk of polished oakAnd smash his hands so used to strokeAnd stop his boring dirty jokeAnd make him yell.But spare the bald young clerks who addThe profits of the stinking cad;It's not their fault that they are mad,They've tasted Hell. Week Two

22. Popular Culture Studies SloughIt's not their fault they do not knowThe birdsong from the radio,It's not their fault they often goTo MaidenheadAnd talk of sport and makes of carsIn various bogus-Tudor barsAnd daren't look up and see the starsBut belch instead. Week Two

23. Popular Culture Studies SloughIn labour-saving homes, with careTheir wives frizz out peroxide hairAnd dry it in synthetic airAnd paint their nails.Come, friendly bombs and fall on SloughTo get it ready for the plough.The cabbages are coming now;The earth exhales. (1937) Week Two

24. Popular Culture Studies Raymond Williams (1921-1988). Welsh media scholar “The Analysis of Culture” Week Two

25. Popular Culture Studies Raymond Williams “The Analysis of Culture” • In one sense this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the project that the arts of a period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in an argument, are of major importance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed; often not consciously, but by the fact that here, in the only examples we have of recorded communication that outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community that makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon. • —Raymond Williams (Storey 56-57) • lived culture • recorded culture • culture of the selective tradition • First full paragraph on 56—how selection works Week Two

26. Popular Culture Studies E. P. Thompson (1924-93). British historian. Preface from The Making of the English Working Class Week Two

27. Popular Culture Studies Stuart Hall (left) (1932- ). Jamaican-born UK cultural theorist and sociologist. and Paddy Whanel (right) (1922-1980). Scottish media and cultural theorist. “The Young Audience” Week Two