Page 305 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

294 NOTES TO PAGES 15–16

‘Literature and society’, and the related ‘Sociology and literature’ are both in The
Common Pursuit (Chatto and Windus 1952).
3 Introduction to Frye, The Sociology of Literature and Drama.
4 Perry Anderson, ‘Components of a national culture’, in A.Cockburn and
R.Blackburn (eds.), Student Power (Penguin 1969).
5 Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, but also Modern Tragedy and The
English Novel.
6 Hoggart’s work, which is often (correctly) also identified as originating here,
moves in a different direction: it extends the methods of ‘close reading’ of texts in
the direction of ‘reading a culture’, and especially popular and working-class
culture, where the ‘texts’ are, characteristically, not literary in the traditional sense.
7 All the formulations quoted in this paragraph are from The Long Revolution
(Chatto and Windus 1961).
8 The formulations in this paragraph are all from ‘From Leavis to Goldmann’, New Left
Review, vol. 67 (May/June 1971): reprinted as the Introduction to Goldman’s
Racine (River Press 1972).
9 ‘In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the
material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,
artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological—forms in which men become
conscious of this conflict and fight it out’ (Marx, the Preface to A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy, in K.Marx and F.Engels, Selected Works
(Lawrence and Wishart 1968).
10 The problem with the base/superstructure model has always been how far the base
actually determines the form of the superstructure. Engels (and now Althusser)
insists that to postulate any too direct a determination by the base would be to
oversimplify but that in the end (the last instance) it is the determining element.
However, how one can conceive the last instance (or, in Althusser’s sense, whether
one can ever consider the base in isolation from everything else in a social
formation) remains a problem. Adrian Mellor’s paper on Goldmann in WPCS 4
(1973) contains a discussion of this question. See also Engels’s letter to J.Bloch, in
Marx and Engels, Selected Works (Moscow 1951), p. 443, and Althusser, For Marx
(Allen Lane 1969).
11 See Althusser’s tantalizingly brief essay, ‘The “Piccolo Teatro”’, in For Marx
(Allen Lane 1969); two brief essays in the Appendix to Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays (New Left Books 1971); also Pierre Macherey, Pour une théorie de
la Production Littéraire (Paris: Maspero 1970).
12 Especially the essays in For Marx.
13 Althusser, ‘On the materialist dialectic’, in For Marx.

Chapter 19
Recent developments in English Studies at the Centre

1 Raymond Williams, ‘Base and superstructure’, in New Left Review, no. 82
(November/December 1973).
2 Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press 1977).