Chapter 9: Cultural Studies

1. Chapter 9: Cultural Studies A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature

2. I. Defining Cultural Studies • “Culture” is hard to define and so is “cultural studies” • It is not so much a discrete approach as a set of practices influenced by many fields • It concentrates on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation • Four goals: (1) transcending confines of a particular discipline, (2) remaining politically engaged, (3) denying the separation of high and low culture, and (4) analyzing the means of production as well as product • Joins subjectivity to engagement

3. II. U.S. Ethnic Studies A. African American Writers • Gates: uses “race” in quotation marks as “a dangerous trope” • The Other • Du Bois: double-consciousness

4. II. U.S. Ethnic Studies A. African American Writers (cont’d) • Sollors, Appiah, Morrison • African American women writers versus male protest writers • Irony, autobiography, naturalism, tragedy • Myth of persecuted people (cf Hebrews) • Periods of Colonial, Antebellum, Reconstruction, pre-World War II, Harlem Renaissance, Naturalism and Modernism, Contemporary

5. II. U.S. Ethnic Studies B. Latina/o Writers • Problem of naming Latina/os • Gender differences • History of the United States and Mexico • Anzaldúa; code-switching; mestizaje • La Virgen, La Malinche, La Llorona

6. II. U.S. Ethnic Studies C. Native American Literatures • Oral versus written traditions, traditional versus mainstream • ritual, performance, community; art not disconnected from everyday life • Occom, Apess, Hopkins, Mournin Dove, Zitkala-a, Erdrich, Harjo

7. II. U.S. Ethnic Studies D. Asian American Writers • Autobiography • Immigrant literature (paper sons and picture brides) • Women overshadow men • Far, Kingston, Tan, new Pacific voices

8. III. Postmodernism and Popular Culture A. Postmodernism • Modernist literature recognized fragmentation and alienation of life but mourned them; postmodernism celebrates them • Disillusionment with institutions; irony, ambiguity, self-conscious play of meanings, parody, pastiche; suspicion and subversion of “master narratives” • Eagleton: postmodernism offers a “depthless, decentered, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, unstable, indeterminate, eclectic, pluralistic” meaning • Eco: awareness of “the already said” • Baudrillard: “simulacra” of “real” objects

9. III. Postmodernism and Popular Culture B. Popular Culture • Production • Textual • Audience • Historical analyses • “Subject-positions”