literature in context. lecture 9 period study cultural studies literary history cultural memory

Literature in Context

Lecture 9

Period Study

Cultural Studies

Literary History

Cultural Memory


Period Study, Literary History, Cultural Memory,

Literatures in English, Postcolonial Studies, Literary

Translation are interrelated notions or approaches to

the study of literature.

They are attempts at a scientific approach to literature,

they propose related ways of a systematic study of

literature and its phenomena.


University curricula:

based on literary kindsbased on literary periodsbased on individual authorsbased on literary theoriesbased on social context

Cultural StudiesSee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies

The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when

he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary

Cultural Studies.

Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of

Working Class Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950.

New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Richard Hoggart(1918)

Raymond Williams(1921-1988)

Cultural Studies

Literary periods in a cultural context

Raymond Williams: Culture and Society:art and society are seen together'culture' as a total expression of a way of life

Cultural Studies: contemporary, popular

Period Study: various forms of art within a historicalperiod in a social, political context


Cultural studies is an academic field grounded incritical theory and literary criticism.

It generally concerns the political nature ofcontemporary culture, as well as its historicalfoundations, conflicts, and defining traits.

Researchers concentrate on how a particular mediumor message relates to matters of ideology, social class,nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender.


Cultural studies approaches subjects combiningfeminist theory, social theory, political theory, history,philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/videostudies, communication studies, political economy,translation studies, museum studies and arthistory/criticism to study cultural phenomena invarious societies.

Cultural studies seeks to understand the ways in whichmeaning is generated, disseminated, and producedthrough various practices,beliefs, institutions, andpolitical, economic, or social structures within a givenculture.


Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning andpractices of everyday life. Cultural practices comprisethe ways people do particular things (such as watchingtelevision, or eating out) in a given culture.

As the process associated with globalization hasspread throughout the world, cultural studies hasbegun to analyse local and global forms of resistanceto Western hegemony.

Ziauddin Sardar, Borin Van Loom:Introducing Cultural Studies. Totem Books, 1997

Five main characteristics of cultural studies:

1. Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working class youth in London) would consider the social practices of the youth as they relate to the dominant classes.

2. It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.

Ziauddin Sardar, Borin Van Loom: Introducing Cultural Studies. Totem Books, 1997

3. It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but she/he would connect this study to a larger, progressive political project.

4. It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit cultural knowledge and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.

5. It has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society.


In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text notonly includes written language, but also films,photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of culturalstudies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture.Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of"culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researchernot only includes traditional high culture (the culture ofruling social groups) and popular culture, but alsoeveryday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact,have become the main focus of cultural studies. Afurther and recent approach is comparative culturalstudies, based on the discipline of comparativeliterature and cultural studies.


Cultural studies is not a unified theory but a diverse

field of study encompassing many different

approaches, methods, and academic perspectives; as

in any academic discipline, cultural studies academics

frequently debate among themselves.

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison (1937)

Tony Harrison: V(1985)

Harrison

• V is a poem by Tony Harrison (1937) written in 1985.

• The poem describes the authors visit to his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery and finding that the place was “littered with beer cans and vandalised by obscene graffiti”.

• The cemetery is Holbeck cemetery in the Beeston area of Leeds. It overlooks the Elland Road football ground. Tony Harrison grew up in this neighbourhood.

Harrison

• The poem contains political references. It was written under the premiership of Mrs. Thatcher, during the 1984-1985 miners strike and makes reference to this as well as to National Union of Mineworkers leader, Arthur Scargill.

Harrison

Motto

My father still reads the dictionary every day.

He says your life depends on your power to master words.'

Arthur Scargill

Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

Harrison

• The poem incorporates the graffiti on the grave into its own text. The graffiti include mostly obscene swear words and the name of the local football club in the abbreviated form “United”. The poem explores the ambiguous meaning of it: that of a football club, or a feeling of social unity in a broader sense. Also, there is much punning on the word „v”.

Harrison

If love of art, or love, gives you affrontthat the grave I'm in's graffitied then, maybe, erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNTbut leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v.

Victory? For vast, slow, coal-creating forcesthat hew the body's seams to get the soul.Will earth run out of her 'diurnal courses'before repeating her creation of black coal?

Harrison

• The poem also makes reference to the “versuses” of life, “communism v. fascism”, “Left v. Right”, “white v. black”, “man v. woman”, “rich v. poor”, etc.

HarrisonThese Vs are all the versuses of lifeFrom LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/Whiteand (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

Class v. class as bitter as before,the unending violence of US and THEM,personified in 1984by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,

Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,East/West, male/female, and the groundthese fixtures are fought on's Man, resignedto hope from his future what his past never found.

Harrison

• A filmed version of V. was broadcast by Channel 4 in October 1987. Prior to that conservative MPs protested against it in the parliament and in the press.

• Gerald Howarth said that Harrison was “Probably another bolshie poet wishing to impose his frustrations on the rest of us”.

• Harrison replied that Howarth was “Probably another idiot MP wishing to impose his intellectual limitations on the rest of us”.

Literary PeriodsDominant Qualities

Defining literary periods: based on dominant qualities.Dominant qualities colour most elements of intellectual life in a given culture at a certain

time – also influence art, music, architecture, landscape gardening, philosophy, politics, etc.

• a few broad tendencies in common at a high level ofabstraction

• with individual, temporal, local variations• subordinate currents exist as well as dominant ones• declining and emergent energies

e.g. New Historicism takes this line of study

How to examine a literary period: how it is framed by a set of significant events

The Renaissance in England, for example:

• the first visit of Erasmus (1499), • Caxton's printing press at Westminster (1476), • the discovery of America (1492), • the court of the young Henry VIII

(on the throne: 1491-1547), • the Protestant Reformation, • Copernicus's new astronomy (1543), • the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

How to examine a literary period: priorities in its views

• features certain priorities in its views concerning the world and art

• e.g., in Classicism: balance, form, proportion, propriety (good taste, good manners correctness, otherwise known as decorum), dignity, simplicity, objectivity, rationality, restraint, responsibility (rather than self-expression), unity (rather than diversity)

How to examine a literary period:views of humans, favourite genres

• promotes a certain view of humankind

e.g., in Romanticism: the celebration of the individual

• uses specific genres (rather than others)

e.g., in 19th c. Realism: the novel with its details, its particularisation of the lives of ordinary people

How to examine a literary period:favourite subjects, favourite forms

• favours certain subjects for arte.g., in Modernism: inner individual perception (impressionistic presentation, stream ofconsciousness technique, such as in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway)

• shows characteristic formal elements (including the• example above)

e.g., in Postmodernism: Narcissistic narrative:intruding into one's own fiction to ponder uponits powers

A literary trend may not correspond exactly to a culturalperiod, e.g., Postmodernism and the Post-Modern Period.

Literary period: horizontal or vertical study

• The study of High Modernism• 1928 in literature in England

in the historical context of the UK

in the artistic or social or political context of

continental Europe

in the life of Virginia Woolf• The history of literature

The history of literature

history of literature: a series of literary periods

connections may be established among texts (see W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan”)

allusion, intertextuality: interdependence of texts through genre, conventions vs traditional notions of influence: study of direct sources

How is literature read, or judged?

Yet another way of looking at literature: how it was read, by whom, how it was judged

• readership, horizon(s) of expectations (Hans Robert Jauss)

• How do you judge a piece of literature? Do you have to? Should you? Can you avoid doing so? How do you select a work or period to be studied? Can evaluation change reading? Can evaluation prevent reading?

• How are literary canons formed? • Literary canon – selection, exclusion, promotion

Period Study. Literary History.

"Dates and periods are necessary to the study anddiscussion of history, for historical phenomena areconditioned by time and are produced by the sequenceof events. […] But, unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts.They are retrospective conceptions that we form aboutpast events, useful to focus discussion, but very oftenleading historical thought astray.”

G. M. Trevelyan: English Social History.Harmondsworth: Penguin Books (1942) 1970, 107

Literary Histories

A few examples

Saintsbury, George: A Short History of English Literature. London: Macmillan, (1898) 1953

The Preliminaries of English Literature• The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Poetry• Caedmon, Cynewulf, and Those about Them• Angol-Saxon Prose• The Decadense of Anglo-Saxon

The Making of English Literature• The Transition• First Middle English Period (1200-1250)• Second Middle English Period (1300-1360)• Early Romances – Metrical

5. Early Romances – Alliterative

Saintsbury, cont.

Chaucer and His Contemporaries1. Chaucer’s Life and Poems2. Langland and Gower3. Chaucer’s Prose – Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville

The Fifteenth Century1. The English Chaucerians – Lydgate to Skelton2. The Scottish Poets – Historical, Political, and Minor3. The Four Great Scottish Poets (The King’s Quair, Henryson,

Dunbar, Douglas)4. Later Romances in Prose and Verse5. Minor Poetry and Ballads6. Miscellaneous Prose

Saintsbury, cont.

Elizabethan Literature to the Death of Spenser1. Preliminaries – Drama2. Preliminaries – Prose3. Prelminaries – Verse4. Spenser and His Contemporaries5. The University Wits (Peele, Green, Marlowe, Kyd, Lodge, Nash)6. Lyly and Hooker – The Translators, Pamphleteers and Critics

Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature1. Shakespeare2. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in Drama3. The Schools of Jacobean Poetry4. Jacobean Prose – Secular5. The Golden Age of English Pulpit - I

Saintsbury, cont.

Caroline Literature

1. Blank Verse and the New Couplet

2. The Metaphysicals – The Lyric Poets – The Miscellansts, etc.

3. The Drama till the Closing of the THeatres

4. The Golden Age of the English Pulpit – II

5. Miscellanous Prose

6. Scots Poetry and Prose

The Augustan Ages

1. The Age of Dryden – Poetry

2. The Age of Dryden – Drama

3. The Age of Dryden - Prose

Saintsbury, cont.

4. Queen Anne Prose (Swift, Steele, Addison, etc.)5. Pope and His Elder Contemporaries in Verse

Middle and Later Eighteenth-Century Literature1. The Poets from Thomson to Crabbe2. The Eighteenth-Century Novel3. Johnson, Goldsmith, and the Later Essayists4. The Graver Prose5. Eighteenth-Century Drama6. Miscellaneous Writers

The Triumph of Romance1. The Poets from Coleridge to Keats

Saintsbury, cont.

2. The Novel – Scott and Miss Austen

3. The New Essay (Lamb, Hunt, Hazlitt, De Quincey, etc.)

4. The Last Georgian Prose

5. The Minor Poets of 1800-1830

Victorian Literature

1. Tennyson and Browning

2. The Victorian Novel (Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, etc.)

3. History and Criticism (Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, etc.)

4. Poetry since the Middle of the Century

5. Miscellaneous (J. S. Mill, Darwin, etc.)

Baugh, Albert C.: A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948

Book I. The Middle Ages

1. The old English Period (to 1100)

2. The Middle English Period (1100-1500)

Book II. The Renaissance

1. The Early Tudors (1485-1558)

2. The Reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603)

3. The Early Stuarts and The Commonwealth (1603-1660)

Book III. The Restauration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1789)

1. The Rise of Classicism

2. Classicism and Journalism

3. The Disintegration of Classicism

Book IV. The Nineteenth Century and After

Dodsworth, Martin, ed.: The Penguin History of Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1970) 1994

1. The Middle Ages

2. English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674

3. English Drama to 1710

4. Dryden to Johnson

5. The Romantic Period

6. The Victorians

7. The Twentieth Century

[8. American Literature to 1900

9. American Literature since 1900]

Ford, Boris, ed.: The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, (1983) 1990

1. Medieval LiteraturePart One: Chaucer and the Alliterative TraditionPart Two: The European Inheritance

2. The Age of Shakespeare3. From Donne to Marvell4. From Dryden to Johnson5. From Blake to Byron6. From Dickens to Hardy7. From James to Eliot8. The Present[9. American Literature]

Penguin Pelican

Daiches, David: A Critical History of English Literature. 4 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, (1960) 1969

1. From the Beginnings to the Sixteenth Century2. Shakespeare to Milton

[ShakespeareDrama from Jonson to the Closing of the TheatresMiltonProse in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth CenturiesScottish Literature to 1700]

3. The Restoration to 18004. The Romantics to the Present Day

+ The Present Age in British Literature(Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press, (1958) 1969

David Daiches

Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976

1. Poetry around the Turn of the Century

2. Poetry in Rapport with a Public

3. Popular Modernism

[The New Poetry of America

Imagism

Poetry for Democracy

Conservative and Regional Poets of America

Black Poets of America: The First Phase

British Poetry after the War, 1918-1928]

4. The Beginnings of the High Modernist Mode

Perkins, David: A History of Modern Poetry. Modernism and After. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987

1. The Age of High Modernism

[The Ascendancy of T. S. Eliot, 1925-1950

Eliot’s Later Career

Modes of Modern Style in the United States

Hart Crane

The Poetry of Critical Intelligence

The Period Style of the 1930s in England

W. H. Auden

The English Romantic Revival]

1. The Resurgence of Pound, Williams, and Stevens

2. Postmodernism

Period Studies

Innes, Christopher: Modern British Drama 1890-1990.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992

Proceeds by a mixture of chronological, generic, cultural and theoretical features

Bradbury, Malcolm: The Modern British Novel 1878

2001. London: Penguin Books, 2001

Proceeds by chronology, each decade a characteristic quality is attributed to

Period Studies

Childs, Peter: The TwentiethCentury in Poetry. A CriticalSurvey. London and New York:Routledge, 1999

Proceeds by a mixture ofchronological, generic, culturaland theoretical features.

Period Studies

Bradbury, Malcolm; McFarlane, James, eds.:Modernism. A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930.London: Penguin Books (1976) 1991

1. The Name and nature of Modernism2. The Cultural and Intellectual Climate of Modernism3. A Geography of Modernism4. Literary Movements5. The Lyric Poetry of Modernism6. The Modernist Novel7. Modernist Drama

Histories of Genres

Allen, Walter: The English Novel. Harmondsworth:

Penguin Books (1954) 1958

Grierson, Herbert J. C.; Smith, J. C.: A Critical History

of English Poetry. New Jersey: Humanities Press,

London: Athlone Press (1944) 1983

Cultural Memory

How we create an image of the past, How we make sense of our past from our present,How we understand ourselves and our past,What stories we tell to ourselves about ourselves,What we choose to remember or forget,How we explain the reasons why we remember or

forget something,How we make sure that we hand over the memories

that matter to us

Cultural Memory as a Concept

• Introduced to the archaeological disciplines by Jan Assmann

Assman’s definition: the "outer dimension of humanmemory"

• "memory culture“ (Erinnerungskultur)• "reference to the past“ (Vergangenheitsbezug)

https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/citd/holtorf/2.0.html

Communicative Memory vs Cultural Memory

The communicative memory contains memories that an individual shares with his contemporaries.

The cultural memory is based on fixed points in the past. Even in the cultural memory, the past is not preserved as such but is cast in symbols as they are represented in oral myths or in writings, performed in feasts, and as they are continually illuminating a changing present. In the context of cultural memory, the distinction between myth and history vanishes.

Communicative and Cultural Memory

JAN ASSMANNAstrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Hg.), Cultural

Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin, New York 2008.

Jan Assmann, “Communicative and Cultural Memory” 109-118

Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive”

97-108

Cultural MemorySee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory

As a term, cultural memory was first introduced by theGerman Egyptologists Jan Assmann in his book Daskulturelle Gedächtnis (1992). Assmann and fellowscholars have identified a general interest in memoryand mnemonics since the early 1980s, illustrated byphenomena as diverse as memorials and retro-culture.

Some might see cultural memory as becoming moredemocratic, due to liberalization and the rise of newmedia. Others see cultural memory as remainingconcentrated in the hands of corporations and states.

Cultural MemorySee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory

Because memory is not just an individual, privateexperience but is also part of the collective domain,cultural memory has become a topic in bothhistoriography and cultural studies.

These emphasize cultural memory’s process(historiography) and its implications and objects(cultural studies), respectively.

Memory is a phenomenon that is directly related to thepresent; our perception of the past is alwaysinfluenced by the present, which means that it isalways changing.

Cultural MemoryHistoriographical approach

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_memory

Crucial in understanding cultural memory as aphenomenon is the distinction between memory andhistory. This distinction was put forward by PierreNora, who pinpointed a niche in-between history andmemory. Simply put, memories are the events thatactually happened, while histories are subjectiverepresentations of what historians believe is crucial toremember. This dichotomy, it should be noted,emerged at a particular moment in history: it impliesthat there used to be a time when memories could existas such — without being representational.



Scholars disagree as to when to locate the momentrepresentation 'took over'. Nora points to the formationof European nation states. For Richard Terdiman, theFrench revolution is the breaking point: the change ofa political system, together with the emergence ofindustrialization and urbanization, made life morecomplex than ever before. This not only resulted in anincreasing difficulty for people to understand the newsociety in which they were living, but also, as thisbreak was so radical, people had trouble relating to thepast before the revolution. In this situation, people nolonger had an implicit understanding of their past.



In order to understand the past, it had to berepresented through history. As people realized thathistory was only one version of the past, they becamemore and more concerned with their own culturalheritage (in French called patrimoine) which helpedthem shape a collective and national identity.



In search for an identity to bind a country or peopletogether, governments have constructed collectivememories in the form of commemorations whichshould bring and keep together minority groups andindividuals with conflicting agendas.

The obsession with memory coincides with the fear offorgetting and the aim for authenticity.



However, more recently questions have arisen whether

there ever was a time in which 'pure', non-

representational memory existed. Representation is a

crucial precondition for human perception in general:

pure, organic and objective memories can never be

witnessed as such.

Cultural Memory

In an oral tradition, all cultural representations are

easily remembered ones; hard-to-remember

representations are forgotten, or transformed into

more easily remembered ones, before reaching a

cultural level of distribution.

Sperber, Dan: Explaining Culture. A Naturalistic

Approach. Malden, MSA: Blackwell, 1996, 74

Cultural MemoryCultural Studies approach


Recently, interest has developed in the area of'embodied memory'. The body can be seen as acontainer, or carrier of memory.

Memory can be contained in objects. Souvenirs andphotographs inhabit an important place in the cultural memory discourse.

Cultural MemoryCultural Studies approach


Another practice that has a specific relationship withmemory is photography. The act of taking a picture canunderline the importance of remembering, bothindividually and collectively.

Pictures cannot only stimulate or help memory, but can

rather eclipse the actual memory – when we rememberin terms of the photograph – or they can serve as areminder of our propensity to forget.

Cultural MemoryBetween Culture and Memory: Experience


The rise of gender and postcolonial studiesunderscored the importance of the individual andparticular memories of those unheard in mostcollective accounts: women, minorities, homosexuals,etc.

Experience, whether it be lived or imagined, relatesmutually to culture and memory. It is influenced byboth factors, but determines these at the same time.

Cultural MemoryBetween Culture and Memory: Experience


Culture influences experience by offering mediatedperceptions that affect it. In turn, experience affectsculture, since individual experience becomescommunicable and therefore collective.

A memorial, for example, can represent a shared senseof loss.

Experience is substantial to the interpretation ofculture as well as memory, and vice versa.

DublinGeneral Post Office

The Death of Cuchulain(1911) by Oliver Sheppard

Cultural Memory

Assmann, Jan: Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1992

Nora, Pierre: 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire'. Representations, 26, 1989, 7–25.

“Memory Culture”

The way a society ensures cultural continuity

by preserving, with the help of cultural mnemonics, its

collective knowledge from one generation to the next,

rendering it possible for later generations to

reconstruct their cultural identity.


“Reference to the Past”

• Reassure the members of a society of their collective identity and supply them with an awareness of their unity and singularity in time and space—i.e., an historical consciousness—by creating a shared past

• It can involve rituals and ceremonies at special occasions such as commemoration days, and at special places such as ancient monuments, which function as timemarks and sites of memory


Forms of Cultural Memory

Formal – institutional – private – personal • History• Schools, subjects, syllabi, exams• Religion• Holidays (public, national, religious, private rituals)• Anecdotes• Memories• Controversial, minority views, counter-narratives

Cultural Memory and Literature

Literary works – popular, canonicalHistory of literature

- of a language- of a nation

Representation of a literature or culture in anotherliterature or culture:

stereotypespopular imageshistory of their literature

Cultural memory at DES, SEAS

British Literature in the Hungarian Cultural Memoryproject at the Department of English Studies, dir. Prof. Ágnes Péter

Cultural Memory and LiteratureAn international conference (24–25 Sept, 2010)

http://kulturalisemlekezet.blogspot.com/

Cultural memory resources

Cultural Memory, Collective Memory sites

Brief introduction to names and concepts:

http://www.collectivememory.net/2009/12/cultural-memory-and-communicative.html

Up to date academic info on projects and conferences:

http://www.collectivememory.net/

Definition with interpretation and sources before 2000:


Cultural Memory Texts

Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”

Collective Memory and Cultural Identity - JStor

www.jstor.org/stable/488538

Recent publications:Cultural Memory Studies: An International and

Interdisciplinary Handbook. Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nunning eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008

Series: Cultural Memory in the Present ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Stanford UP

http://www.sup.org/browse.cgi?x=series&y=Cultural%20Memory%20in%20the%20Present

Studying Cultural Memory

Center for the Study of Cultural Memory at the University of London

http://www.igrs.sas.ac.uk/centre-study-cultural-memory

University of Brighton http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/study/postgrad/cultural-history-memory-identity-ma

The Centre for Bible and Cultural Memory, Faculty of Theology, Copenhagen:

http://www.teol.ku.dk/english/dept/bicum/

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