Page 230 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

18
Literature/society: mapping the field*
The Literature and Society Group, 1972–3

The revival of interest in the literature/society theme
As a glance at the bibliography in this issue will confirm, there has been, in
recent years, a remarkable growth of interest in the literature/society problem. To
place this changing visibility properly, in all its complex significance, would
require a critical review of the whole map of intellectual culture. Any attempt to
explicate the current shift in attention must take account of the following:
1 The continuing force of the Leavis/Scrutiny tradition, both in English studies
and in education generally. The central elements in this position are summarized
below.
2 The growth of an interest in ‘culture’, often from a base within English
studies. The work of Hoggart and Williams is paradigmatic here.
3 A disenchantment with the pragmatic, empirical, anti-theoretical nature of
Anglo-Saxon literary criticism; a growing interest in literary theory.
4 The availability, in English, of some of the key texts of European theorists
and writers (Lukács, Goldmann, Marcuse, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno), especially
the Marxists, whose work had hitherto been known, if at all, only at second
hand.
5 The expansion in the use of linguistics in literary and cultural studies. There
are, of course, many kinds of linguistics. What is important here is the apparent
promise that a more rigorous and ‘scientific’ approach can be discovered through
a linguistics-based study of literary work rather than through the intuitive and
interpretative procedures of literary criticism.
6 The intellectual impact of French structuralism and semiology. (Though the
coverage in English is still extremely limited, there are, inter alia, translations of
Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser.)
7 The application of semiology, structuralism and ideological criticism to the
new media and a general revival of interest in aesthetic and formal questions.
Here the English development lags well behind the French, German and Italian
debates. (But some discussion has emerged in magazines like Screen and
Monogram and in Wollen’s widely read Signs and Meaning in the Cinema.) 1