Page 252 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 241

Our own current work, which has involved us in the recovery and revaluation
of women’s writing, is directed towards analyses of the concrete historical,
understood as gender-differentiated at every level. Gendered reading here
becomes as central as gendered writing or as the representations of gender within
writing.

Work in the Centre
Our own recent work, from which the next two sections are drawn, has
developed in response to issues raised within these three areas as well as to
theoretical work reviewed earlier. So far it has been uneven, and there are some
lines of research which we (and we hope others) will wish to develop over the
next few years. These include the priorities set by feminist concerns at the centre
of our project; a knowledge of alternative and oppositional practices of writing
and reading in this century; and work on popular cultural forms, not only as a
way of challenging the Hegemony of Literature but also because they form the
ground from which the new forms of a future culture must develop.
University-based research can easily be disabled by the constraints of a
division of labour which separates the ‘criticism’ of the university from the
‘literacy’ of the school or the ‘practice’ of cultural workers. We have been
involved in a preliminary attempt to break with received practices of research
(individual author, individual ‘supervisor’, one bound library copy of a thesis). At
present we experience the strength given by a way of working that is
collaborative, involving joint writing and mutual support and criticism. But the
move towards collective work is still, inevitably, highly contradictory and full of
problems, for we remain hedged in by powerful material and institutional
determinations. Access to, and appropriation of, knowledge is still caught within
unequal social relations of gender, status and age. The potential loneliness of the
individual research moment, with its detailed grasp of a particular area, is an
uneasy partner to the stimulus of work in groups. New definitions of ‘adequate
work’ are being struggled for, but the shifts in register of a collective text such as
this may be more open, or simply more incoherent, than the worked-up argument
of an individual author. Finally, to say that both women and men may consider
questions of gender is not to say that the questions which feminism poses may
readily be jointly worked on. But we are committed to joint work which combats
received academic practices and their social relations.
‘Work in progress 1’ (pages 249–56 below) draws on work in 1977–8, part of
which issued in a paper at the Essex ‘1936’ conference. The work began with an
attempt to deconstruct a received ideology of the 1930s (constructed in the
heyday of the Cold War), which emphasized an unsuccessful involvement of
writers with Left politics. ‘Writers’ proved to be a particular male coterie, and
the work broadened to look at the literary formation of the period as a whole,
with its ‘popular’ genres, a distinctive ‘middlebrow’ set of texts and much other
women’s and working-class writing which was marginalized. We tried to show