Page 64 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 55

Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

fantasy and pleasure functions in the visual imagery of the
popular media and how that imagery produces and perpetuates
stereotypes of identity and otherness: the construction of national
cultural identity through photography; the ideology of exhibition
in ethnographic museums; stereotypes and fantasies of the
‘racialised Other’, especially blacks, in film, advertising and other
popular media; the construction of male identity in consumer
advertising; and the gendering of social roles in television soaps.
Important though this work undoubtedly is, its weaknesses are
also apparent. Even the Leavises had known that historical reality
could never simply be deduced from a close reading of texts. But
as Sparks observes, contemporary cultural studies has increas-
ingly regressed ‘beyond Hoggart and Williams, beyond the
Leavises and the British marxists, to an essentially textualist
account of culture’. If this has been Hall’s achievement, then it is
surely, as Sparks concludes, quite ‘fundamentally regressive’
(Sparks, 1996, p. 98).
What we have termed ‘culturalism’ emerged from out of a
heady combination of Romantic humanism and historicism. Its
most generally defining features were a stress on human agency
and creativity and a commitment to the positive value of a
‘common culture’, often understood as both national in charac-
ter and reaching its highest form in ‘art’. During the 1950s and
1960s, the ‘left culturalist’ challenge to literary studies sought to
radically decentre high art in favour of a much more properly
common understanding of culture, from out of which there devel-
oped what eventually became ‘cultural studies’. But from the
1970s on, this left culturalism was itself increasingly challenged
and apparently out-radicalised by theoretical perspectives
associated with western Marxism and structuralist or post-
structuralist semiology. It is to these other intellectual traditions,
whose impress we have already registered in the new historicism
and in the work of Stuart Hall, that we turn in the chapters that
immediately follow. This is not to suggest, however, that the theo-
retical and practical questions typically posed by culturalism were
somehow either resolved or transcended. Quite the contrary—
the matters at issue in these older debates over community and
culture, class and nation, have repeatedly returned to haunt both

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