Page 9 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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topics are, however, scheduled as the main themes of Centre volumes now in
preparation or shortly due to appear: for example, the collection of historical
essays on Working Class Culture already published, and the volumes on
Unpopular Education, History and Theory and Citizenship and the Welfare State,
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already planned or completed and due to be published in the Hutchinson series.
These absences have three consequences which readers might bear in mind.
First, this collection does not accurately reflect the present spread of Centre
work. Second, it prioritizes a set of concerns which characterized the Centre’s
most recent work—mainly from 1972, when the journal was founded, up to about
1978. Third, it gives to Cultural Studies an emphasis on the analysis of texts and
cultural forms, rather than on practices and institutions, which obscures more
recent developments and which may therefore appear to tie the Centre too
closely to its originating topics of interest. While in no way representing a
rejection of these earlier concerns, it is important that this selection should not be
taken as fixing Cultural Studies in an anachronistic mould. The shifts which have
produced new kinds of work must be understood as just as essential to the
definition of Cultural Studies as those represented here. The different phases of
Centre work are more extensively marked and discussed in the Introduction and
section introductions below.
The present volume is divided into four main sections. They deal with
ethnographic work, the media, language and English studies. Each has an
introductory overview piece, charting the changing interests and directions in these
areas. This is followed by a selection of extracts mainly drawn from journal
articles, theses or published papers, reflecting projects and seminar work over the
period 1972–8. There has been no attempt to update these pieces retrospectively
or to bring them into line with present thinking. In this respect, the ‘Working
Papers’ of our title is an accurate guide to actual Centre practice and to how the
results of that practice are represented in the volume. The exception is English
Studies, which, leaving aside the ‘mapping the field’ extract (from an early
journal, WPCS 4), has been largely rewritten especially for this volume and draws
mainly on present work. For a time, literary studies as such were not widely
pursued in the Centre. It is only more recently that we have again been able to
find a serious basis for this work—one which, while drawing on the analysis of
texts, breaks with the literary-critical tradition of a too text-bound practice, as well
as with the text-context framework of the so-called ‘sociology of literature’, and
relocates both in the analysis of literary formations and in literature as an
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institutional practice. There was therefore, in this case, no continuing body of
Centre work to draw on. As has already been said, the ‘historical’ dimension of
Centre work is certainly not accurately reflected in these selections. But the
move to a more concrete, historical mode of work—one of the most important
aspects of recent Centre thinking—is briefly indexed by Richard Johnson’s
review article, looking back at the Anderson/ Thompson debate about the
‘peculiarity’ of Britain’s historical development, which helped to inaugurate this