ENGL 6310/7310
Popular Culture
Studies
Fall 2011
PH 300
M 240-540
Dr. David Lavery
Week Two, 9/12/11
Popular Culture Studies
Will Brooker
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Popular Culture Studies
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Popular Culture Studies
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Popular Culture Studies
What are now called
departments of English will be
renamed departments of
“Cultural Studies” where
Batman comics, Mormon
theme parks, television,
movies and rock will replace
Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Wordsworth and
Wallace Stevens.
Harold Bloom, The Western
Canon
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Popular Culture Studies
John Fiske [pictured] (1996) maintains that
“culture” in cultural studies “is neither aesthetic nor
humanist in emphasis, but political” (115). What he
means by this is that the object of study in cultural
studies is not culture defined in a narrow sense, as
the objects of supposed aesthetic excellence (“high
art”); nor, in an equally narrow sense, as a process
of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual development,
but culture understood, in Raymond Williams’s
phrase, as “a particular way of life, whether of a
people, a period or a group”. This is a definition of
culture that can embrace the first two definitions
but also, and crucially, it can range beyond the
social exclusivity and narrowness of these, to
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Popular Culture Studies
include popular culture—the cultures of everyday
life. Therefore, although cultural studies cannot
(and should not) be reduced to the study of popular
culture, it is certainly the case that the study of
popular culture is central to the project of cultural
studies. As Cary Nelson (1996) explains, “people
with ingrained contempt for popular culture will
never fully understand the cultural studies project”
(279)
--John Storey (xvi)
As Tony Bennett [pictured] (1996) explains, cultural
studies is committed “to examining cultural
practices from the point of view of their intrication
with, and within, relations of power” (307).
--John Storey (xvii)
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Popular Culture Studies
include popular culture—the cultures of everyday
life. Therefore, although cultural studies cannot
(and should not) be reduced to the study of popular
culture, it is certainly the case that the study of
popular culture is central to the project of cultural
studies. As Cary Nelson (1996) explains, “people
with ingrained contempt for popular culture will
never fully understand the cultural studies project”
(279).
--John Storey (xvi)
As Tony Bennett [pictured] (1996) explains, cultural
studies is committed “to examining cultural
practices from the point of view of their intrication
with, and within, relations of power” (307).
--John Storey (xvii)
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Popular Culture Studies
To deny that the consumers of popular culture are
cultural dupes is not to deny that the culture
industries seek to manipulate, but it is to deny that
popular culture is little more than a degraded
landscape of commercial and ideological
manipulation, imposed from above in order to make
a profit and secure ideological control.
--John Storey (xix)
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Matthew Arnold (1822-88).
English poet, educator, and man of
letters.
Popular Culture Studies
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Matthew Arnold
Culture and Anarchy
 Sweetness and Light
 Culture and Anarchy
• Culture is “the best that has been thought and
said in the world.” “[Attained by] the disinterested
and active use of reading, reflection, and
observation, in the endeavor to know the best that
be known” (Arnold)
• Anarchy = popular culture; “doing as one likes”
 Hebraism and Hellenism
• “firm obedience” and “strictness of conscience” vs.
“clear intelligence” and “spontaneity of
consciousness”
• the coming of Christianity vs. the Renaissance
 Liberalism vs. Puritanism
 Barbarians (Upper-Class)
 Philistines (Middle Class)
 Populace (Lower Class),
 Aliens (individuals from any of the previous three who
do not fit in with its dominant spirit)
Popular Culture Studies
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Popular Culture Studies
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)
Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
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Popular Culture Studies
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
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Popular Culture Studies
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
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F. R. Leavis (1895-1978). English critic and
literary scholar.
“Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture”
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Popular Culture Studies
F. R. Leavis
“Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture”
 The selection in Storey (a pamphlet) was largely
“borrowed” from Q. (Queenie) D. (Dorothy)
Leavis’s graduate thesis (Fiction and the Reading
Public).
 An elitist
 A snob
 Anti-American
 Nostalgia for a 19th century rural utopia
 Links to I. A. Richards [bottom right] and New
Criticism and Logical Positivism
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Popular Culture Studies
F. R. Leavis
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Popular Culture Studies
Richard Hoggart (1918- )
Popular Culture Studies
“The Full Rich Life & The Newer Mass Art: Sex
in Shiny Packets”
 Set up the Center for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham
 “celebrates a grubbily home-made,
urban culture . . . Leavis would have
disdained—and Arnold feared” (Brooker)
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Popular Culture Studies
Slough
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk,
tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
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Popular Culture Studies
Slough
Mess up the mess they call a townA house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.
And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:
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Popular Culture Studies
Slough
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.
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Popular Culture Studies
Slough
It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.
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Popular Culture Studies
Slough
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales. (1937)
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Raymond Williams (1921-1988).
Welsh media scholar
“The Analysis of Culture”
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Popular Culture Studies
Raymond Williams
“The Analysis of Culture”
In one sense this structure of feeling is the culture of a
period: it is the project that the arts of a period, taking
these to include characteristic approaches and tones in
an argument, are of major importance. For here, if
anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed;
often not consciously, but by the fact that here, in the only
examples we have of recorded communication that
outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep
community that makes the communication possible, is
naturally drawn upon.
—Raymond Williams (Storey 56-57)
 lived culture
 recorded culture
 culture of the selective tradition
 First full paragraph on 56—how selection works
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Popular Culture Studies
Popular Culture Studies
E. P. Thompson (1924-93). British historian.
Preface from The Making of the English Working Class
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Stuart Hall (left) (1932- ). Jamaican-born UK
cultural theorist and sociologist. and Paddy
Whanel (right) (1922-1980). Scottish media
and cultural theorist.
“The Young Audience”
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Popular Culture Studies