Page 254 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AT THE CENTRE 243

selection from a diverse matrix of fictional writing. The role of Scrutiny here is
an unusually vivid example. Although fixity is a feature of the literary tradition,
complete stasis is considered undesirable, particularly in relation to the school
curriculum. That literary traditions are sites of struggle is highlighted by the
contemporary cases of black and women writers. The advantages of students
being brought into contact with such work have to be seen clearly within the
limitations which the form of contact can impose. For example, would the
reasons why Woolf is so much better known than Holtby be in themselves
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challenged by replacing To the Lighthouse with South Riding as an A-Level
book?
The construction of literature does not just involve the inclusion of certain
‘great’ works in a canon of writing. In the same process, all other fiction is
categorized and defined. Other books are not merely ‘not literature’—they may
be named ‘popular fiction’, ‘general fiction’, ‘women’s writing’, ‘middlebrow’,
‘lowbrow’ or, as is the case with working-class writing, may be marginalized to
the extent of appearing to be non-existent.
In the extract which follows we discuss the conditions which formed the limits
of the possible for women as writers in the thirties and look very briefly at one
novel and its place in the field of literary production.
The critique of received literary histories and the deconstruction of their
assumptions about the literature and history of the 1930s—and, indeed, the
whole making and remaking of ‘the thirties’ in itself—made it imperative to
rethink the scope of the term ‘the literary field’. In terms of writing, we defined
the terrain at first by using terms derived from the period (highbrow, middlebrow,
lowbrow) but did not use the terms evaluatively. We added a category
‘marginalized’ to cover those works which, either because of their political
content or because of the class position of their authors, were outside the
mainstream of literary production and distribution and had very clearly defined
readerships (for example, among the labour movement). We then attempted to
determine how the ‘brows’ were constructed in the ideologies and practices of
particular institutions—through the education system, with the definitions of
‘literariness’ in higher education and of levels of literacy in the schools, and
through production, marketing and distribution of books as ‘literature’, ‘general
fiction’ or ‘romance’ in publishing, libraries and book clubs.
However, it is important not to reduce texts to their social location, and we
also attempted to think of literary production in terms of the hailing or
interpellation of readers by texts. In terms of the ideological function of the text,
we associated ‘lowbrow’ with the dominant positioning of the reader through
identification with one or two characters; ‘middlebrow’/the publishing category
‘fiction’ with the interpellation of the reader in the position of the literary
ideology itself (as defined, chiefly through higher education)—judgement,
discrimination. We also used interpellation as a method of analysing the
positioning of subjects within ideologies which exist outside and are represented
within literary texts. It is this concern with both the institutions which structure