Page 58 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

at the University of Birmingham. Excluded from ‘English’ by
Leavisism, ‘the popular’ had become the subject matter of the
new proto-discipline of cultural studies largely at the instigation
of Williams and Hoggart themselves. In 1962, Hoggart was
appointed Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham.
Two years later he became director of the new Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. For Hoggart, Williams’ ‘inter-
esting work’ was to be one source of intellectual inspiration for
the Centre (Hoggart, 1970, p. 255). Williams reciprocated,
judging this ‘an excellent pioneering example’ of institutional
innovation (Williams, 1976a, p. 149). Moreover, Williams’ own
work sketched out much of the subject matter of the new dis-
cipline. In two books on the media, Communications and Television:
Technology and Cultural Form (Williams, 1962; Williams, 1974a),
he was able to develop a critique of existing mass media inst-
itutions and texts that avoided the disabling cultural elitism
of Leavisite criticism. Both books sought to identify the insti-
tutional forms that could sustain a properly democratic
communications system. Thus the new televisual technologies
were, in Williams’ opinion, ‘the contemporary tools of the long
revolution towards an educated and participatory democracy’
(Williams, 1974a, p. 151).

Stuart Hall
When Hoggart left Birmingham in 1968, he was succeeded by
Stuart Hall, then still very much under the influence of the left
culturalist argument. Hall himself had previously co-authored The
Popular Arts with Paddy Whannel, a study that dealt directly with
problems of ‘value and evaluation’ in the study of popular
culture. Like Williams and Hoggart, Hall and Whannel were
concerned to rescue what was valuable and creative in ‘popular
art’ from its denigration as ‘mass’ culture. Their intention to
develop a method for discriminating between ‘good’ and ‘bad’
popular culture, and so to educate popular taste, was in some
respects clearly residually Leavisite. As Storey sees it: ‘[Hall and
Whannel] seem to suggest that because most school students do
not have access . . . to the best that has been thought and said, they

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