Eng 684
Cultural Studies: The British Tradition
Class Information Instructor Information
Fall Semester 2006 Prof. David Schmid
Friday 12.30-3.10pm Office: 302B Clemens
Clemens
538 Office Hours: F 9-12 & by appointment
Phone: 645-2575
Email: schmid@buffalo.edu
Course Description
In an essay entitled, “Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto,” Cary Nelson argues presciently that “of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America since the seventies, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively, and so ahistorically as cultural studies.” Nelson goes on to describe the “casual dismissal” of the history of cultural studies as “an interested effort to depoliticize a concept whose whole prior history has been preeminently political and oppositional.” As an antidote to the ignorance and opportunism that has characterized too many appropriations of cultural studies in the U.S., Nelson recommends that “people who comment on or claim to be ‘doing’ cultural studies ought at least to familiarize themselves with the British cultural studies tradition.” That is the purpose of this class. We will begin with the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and then continue with the multifaceted and seminal contribution of the ‘Birmingham school,’ paying due attention to some of the writers whose work has been especially influential on the British tradition of cultural studies; namely, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. We will conclude by looking briefly at some of the issues raised by United States appropriations of cultural studies, a subject we will take up in more detail at a later date.
Course Texts
Roland
Barthes, Mythologies
Paul
Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union
Jack
Dick
Hebdige, Subculture
These books are for sale at
Talking Leaves Bookstore, 3158 Main Street, 837-8554.
Secondary Reading
All secondary materials are available either through online course reserve (indicated in syllabus), or in the packet of course readings available from Queen City Imaging, 3100 Main Street, 832-8100.
Course Requirements
Students taking the class extensively are required to write short (2-3 page) response papers for each of our meetings, and a 5-7 page mid-term paper. Students taking the class intensively are also required to write a 20-25 page research paper.
Class Format
1. Introduction to the day's readings/issues (10 minutes).
2. Discussion of readings (70 minutes).
4. Break (10 minutes).
5. Discussion of readings (70 minutes).
There will be no student presentations in this class.
Schedule of Readings
Week 1: September 1
Introduction: What is Cultural Studies?
Week 2: September 8
The Marx-Engels Reader (selections).
From “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.”
From “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.”
“Theses on Feuerbach.”
From “The German Ideology.” (Course Reserve)
“The Communist Manifesto.”
Friedrich Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism.”
Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (Selections)
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks. (Course Reserve)
Secondary Reading:
Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci.” (Course Reserve)
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Week 3: September 15
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” (Course Reserve)
Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
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Week 4: September 22
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (selections).
“Who are the ‘Working Classes’?”
“Landscape with Figures--A Setting”
“’Them’ And ‘Us’”
“The Newer Mass Art: Sex in Shiny Packets”
“Unbent Springs: A Note on the Uprooted and the Anxious”
“Conclusion” (Course Reserve)
Raymond Williams, “Culture is ordinary” (Course Reserve)
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Week 5: September 29
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (selections).
“Foreword”
“New Foreword”
“Introduction”
“Marxism and Culture”
“Conclusion” (Course Reserve)
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (selections).
“Introduction”
“The Creative Mind”
“The Analysis of Culture”
“Individuals and Societies”
“Images of Society”
“Britain in the 1960s” (Course Reserve)
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Week 6: October 6
Stuart Hall et al (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972-1979 (selections).
“Preface.”
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems.” (Course Reserve)
Roger Grimshaw, Dorothy Hobson, Paul Willis. “Introduction to ethnography at the Centre.”
Dorothy Hobson, “Housewives and the mass media.”
Stuart Hall, “Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre.”
Marina Camargo Heck. “The ideological dimension of media messages.”
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding.”
Stuart Hall, “Recent developments in theories of language and ideology: a critical note.”
Chris Weedon, Andrew Tolson, Frank Mort, “Introduction to Language Studies at the Centre.”
John Ellis, “Ideology and Subjectivity.”
The Literature and Society Group, 1972-3, “Literature/society: mapping the field.”
The English Studies Group, 1978-9, “Recent developments in English Studies at the Centre.”
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” (Course Reserve)
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Week 7: October 13
Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (selections).
“Introduction”
John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson & Brian Roberts. “Subcultures, Cultures, and Class: a theoretical overview.” (Course Reserve)
Tony Jefferson. “Cultural Responses of the Teds: The defence of space and status.”
John Clarke. “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community.”
Paul Corrigan. “Doing Nothing.”
Dick Hebdige. “Reggae, Rasta and Rudies.”
Chas Critcher. “Structures, Cultures and Biographies.”
John Clarke. “Style.”
Paul Corrigan and Simon Frith. “The Politics of Youth Culture.”
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Week 8: October 20
Dick Hebdige. Subculture
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Week 9: October 27
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (selections).
Paul Gilroy, “Preface”
John Solomos, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones and Paul Gilroy. “The organic crisis of British capitalism and race: the experience of the seventies.” (Course Reserve)
Errol Lawrence. “Just plain common sense: the ‘roots’ of racism.”
Hazel V. Carby. “White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood.”
Pratibha Parmar. “Gender, race and class: Asian women in resistance.”
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Week 10: November 3
Paul Gilroy. There
Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack
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Week 11: November 10
Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs. (selections)
“Introduction: The Hammertown Case Study”
“Elements of a culture” (Course Reserve)
“Class and institutional form of a culture”
“Penetrations’
“The role of ideology”
“Notes toward a theory of cultural forms and social reproduction”
“Monday morning and the millennium”
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Week 12: November 17
Women's Studies Group, Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination (selections).
Editorial Group, “Women’s Studies Group: trying to do feminist intellectual work.” (Course Reserve)
Lucy Bland, Charlotte Brunsdon, Dorothy Hobson, Janice Winship, “Women ‘inside and outside’ the relations of production.”
Janice Winship, “A woman’s world: ‘Woman’--an ideology of femininity.”
Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey (eds), Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (selections).
“Feminism and cultural studies: pasts, presents, futures.” (Course Reserve)
“Feminism, Marxism and Thatcherism.”
Joyce A. Canaan. “Is ‘Doing Nothing’ just boys’ play?: Integrating feminist and cultural studies perspectives on working-class young men’s masculinity.”
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Week 13: November 24
NO CLASS-THANKSGIVING
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Week 14: December 1
Angela McRobbie. Feminism and Youth Culture (selections).
“Girls and Subcultures.”
“Settling Accounts with Subculture: A Feminist Critique.” (Course Reserve)
“The Culture of Working-Class Girls.”
“The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action.”
“Dance Narratives and Fantasies of Achievement.”
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Week 15: December 8
Lawrence Grossberg, "The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham" (Course Reserve)
John Clarke, “Cultural Studies: A British Inheritance.” (Course Reserve)
Michael Denning, “Culture and the Crisis: The Political and Intellectual Origins of Cultural Studies in the United States.” (Course Reserve)
Mike Budd, Robert M. Entman and Clay Steinman. “The Affirmative Character of U.S. Cultural Studies.” (Course Reserve)
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Primary Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1984. 1-60.
“Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).” An Anthology of Western Marxism: From Lukács and Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism. NY & Oxford: OUP, 1989.
Budd, Mike, Robert M. Entman, and Clay Steinman. "The Affirmative Character of U.S. Cultural Studies." Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 7 (1990): 169-184.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Clarke, John. "Cultural Studies: A British Inheritance." New Times, Old Enemies: Essays on Cultural Studies and America. London: HarperCollins, 1991. 1-19.
Denning, Michael. “Culture and the Crisis: The Political and Intellectual Origins of Cultural Studies in the United States." Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies. Ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. 265-286.
Editorial Group. "Women's Studies Group: trying to do feminist intellectual work." Women's Studies Group. 7-17.
Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey. "Feminism and Cultural Studies: Pasts, Presents, Futures." Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey (eds). New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 1-19.
Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey (eds). Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Grossberg, Lawrence. "The Formation(s) of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham" Bringing It All Back Home: Essays in Cultural Studies. Durham and London: Duke, 1997. 195-234.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and the Centre: some problematics and problems." Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. London: Hutchinson, 1980. 15-47, 278-88.
---. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Culture, Ideology and Social Process. Tony Bennett et al. (eds). London: Batsford, 1981. 19-39.
Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson (eds). Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in post- war Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. Boston: Beacon, 1957.
The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. NY: Norton, 1972.
McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen.’ Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991.
Mouffe, Chantal. “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci.” Culture, Ideology and Social Process. Ed. Tony Bennett et al. Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1981: 219-234.
Williams, Raymond. Culture And Society: Coleridge to Orwell. London: The Hogarth Press (1958), 1987.
Williams, Raymond. “Culture is Ordinary.” Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Ann Gray & Jim McGuigan. London: Edward Arnold, 1993: 5-14.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 1961.
Women's Studies Group. Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination. London: Hutchinson, 1978.
Secondary Bibliography
Bennett, Tony, Colin Mercer, and Janet Woollacott (eds). Popular Culture and Social Relations. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986.
Berlant, Lauren. "Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies." Profession 1998. pp. 105-116.
Bérubé, Michael. "Pop Goes the Academy: Cult Studs Fights the Power." Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. London and New York: Verso, 1994, pp. 137-60.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York and London: Routledge, 1990.
Brunsdon, Charlotte. "A thief in the night: stories of feminism in the 1970s at CCCS." Morley and Chen, pp. 276-287.
Brunt, Rosalind, and Caroline Rowan (eds). Feminism, Culture and Politics. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1982.
Clarke, John, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (eds). Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory. London: Hutchinson, 1979.
Denning, Michael. "The Academic Left and the Rise of Cultural Studies." Radical History Review 51 (1992): 21-47.
Dent, Gina (ed). Black Poplar Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.
During, Simon. "Introduction." The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During (ed). New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 1-25.
Dworkin, Dennis. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1997.
Easthope, Antony. "The Subject of Literary Studies and the Subject of Cultural Studies." Literary Into Cultural Studies. London and NY: Routledge, 1991, pp. 162-177.
Ferguson, Marjorie, and Peter Golding. "Cultural Studies and Changing Times: An Introduction." Ferguson and Golding, xiii-xxvii.
---., and ---. - Cultural Studies in Question. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997.
Frow, John, and Meaghan Morris (eds). Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.
Gamman, Lorraine, and Margaret Marshment (eds). The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1989.
Gilroy, Paul. "British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity." Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (eds). Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1996, pp. 223-240.
---. "Cultural studies and Ethnic Absolutism." Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler, pp. 187-199.
Giroux, Henry A. Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Gitlin, Todd. "The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies." Ferguson and Golding, pp. 25-38.
Gray, Herman. "Is Cultural Studies Inflated?: The Cultural Economy of Cultural Studies in the United States." Nelson and Gaonkar, pp. 203-216.
Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (eds). Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
Grossberg, Lawrence. "Cultural studies, modern logics, and theories of globalisation." McRobbie (1996) pp. 7-35.
---. "Toward A Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies: The Discipline of Communication and the Reception of Cultural Studies in the United States." Nelson and Gaonkar, pp. 131-147.
---. "Where is the 'America' in American Cultural Studies?" Bringing It All Back Home: Essays in Cultural Studies. Durham and London: Duke, 1997, pp. 287-303.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies." Morley and Chen, pp. 262-276.
---. "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities." October 53 (Summer 1990): 11-23.
---. "New ethnicities." Morley and Chen, pp. 441-450.
---. "What is this "Black" in Black Popular Culture?" Dent, pp. 21-33.
Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. New York: Comedia, 1988.
Hoggart. Richard. "Literature and Society." American Scholar, 1962, 277-89.
Johnson, Richard. "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16 (Winter 1986/87): 38-80.
Julien, Isaac. '"Black Is, Black Ain't": Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities' Dent, pp. 255-263.
---., and Kobena Mercer. "De Margin and De Centre." Morley and Chen, pp. 450-464.
Lee, Benjamin. "Between Nations and Disciplines." Nelson and Gaonkar, pp. 217-233.
Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990.
Long, Elizabeth. "Feminism and Cultural Studies." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6.4 (1989): 427-435.
McRobbie, Angela (ed). Back to reality?: Social experience and cultural studies. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1996.
---. "The Es and the Anti-Es: New Questions for Feminism and Cultural Studies." Ferguson and Golding, pp. 170-186.
---. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Mellencamp, Patricia (ed). Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
Mercer, Kobena. "Introduction: Black Britain and the Cultural Politics of Diaspora." Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. pp. 1-31, 309-313.
Morley, David and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds). Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Morris, Meaghan. "A question of cultural studies." McRobbie (1996), pp. 36-57.
---. "Banality in Cultural Studies." Discourse X.2 (1988): 3-29.
---. The Pirate's Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. New York: Verso, 1989.
Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson (eds). Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives In Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
Mulhern, Francis. "The Politics of Cultural Studies." Monthly Review 47.3 (July-August 1995): 31-40.
Murdock, Graham. "Cultural studies at the crossroads." McRobbie (1996), pp. 58-73.
---. "Cultural Studies: Missing Links." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6.4 (1989): 436-440.
Nelson, Cary. "Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto." Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff (eds). English Studies/Culture Studies: Institutionalizing Dissent. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994, pp. 191-207.
Nelson, Cary, and
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (eds). Disciplinarity
and Dissent in Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.
Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg (eds). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988.
O'Connor, Alan. "The Problem of American Cultural Studies." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6.4 (1989): 405-413.
Pfister, Joel. "The Americanization of Cultural Studies." The Yale Journal of Criticism 4.2 (1991): 199-229.
Rooney, Ellen. "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2.3 (1990): 14-28.
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
Sherwood, Steven Jay, Philip Smith, and Jeffrey C. Alexander. "The British Are Coming...Again!: The Hidden Agenda of "Cultural Studies"." Contemporary Sociology 22.3 (May 1993): 370-375.
Sinfield, Alan. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.
---. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.
Stratton, John and Ien Ang. "On the impossibility of a global cultural studies: 'British' cultural studies in an 'international' frame." Morley and Chen, pp. 361-392.
Straw, Will. "Shifting Boundaries, Lines of Descent: Cultural studies and institutional realignments." Relocating Cultural Studies: Developments in theory and research. Valda Blundell, John Shepherd and Ian Taylor (eds). London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 86-102.
Surber, Jere Paul. Culture and Critique: An Introduction to the Critical Discourses of Cultural Studies. New York: Westview Press, 1998.
Turner, Graeme. "Introduction." British Cultural Studies: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1990/1996, pp. 1-11.
Webster, Duncan. "Pessimism, Optimism, Pleasure: The Future of Cultural Studies." News From Nowhere 8 (1990): 81-103.
Williams, Raymond. "Culture." Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford UP, 1983, pp. 87-93.
---. "The Future of Cultural Studies." The Politics of Modernism. London and New York: 1989, pp. 151-163.
---. Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. New York: Verso, 1989.