Introduction to Literature and Culture Handouts 2010
“Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to mee returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine”
(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Three, lines 40-44)
Why read literature?
Humanist (and Romantic) view (ideology)
Why study literature?
literature as a school subject
Answers given by Renaissance Man
Bill Rago told to teach ‘Double D’s (dumb as dogshit) basic comprehension
literary language
“Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off”
simile, metaphor, oxymoron): language skills (understanding complex texts)
(2) understanding human situations
(therapy context)
Melvyn reading his letter, Benitez reciting Henry V, Hobbs reading Othello in prison
Why Shakespeare?
Prof. Quiller-Couch (1917): letting Shakespeare “have his own way with the young plant - just letting him drop like the gentle rain from heaven, and soak in”
Laurence Olivier’s 1945 film of Henry V
The story OF “English” or “Eng. Lit.” as a school subject
(why called “magyar” and “English”?)
First chair of Eng. Lit.: 1828 (London); in Oxford: 1904; after WW1: “EngLit.” with its present function
Before “English”: what did it replace?
a, The ‘nice’ aspect of EngLit: the humanist and humanising subject
Eng. Lit.: its function is not the passing on of knowledge but “the cultivation of the mind, the training of the imagination, the quickening of the whole spiritual nature” (Prof. Moorman, Leeds, 1914)
“England is sick and … English literature must save it. The Churches having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function; still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the state” (Prof. George Gordon, Oxford)
lit. makes you different - e.g. Dead Poets’ Society (“Lit.” even as a subject is “outside the system”)
“convincing every child that he or she is a valuable person” (Alan Sinfield);
trying to go against our usual social experience (being insignificant, disposable units)
universal human values (what is ‘universal’?)
BUT also other values (e.g. national): things that “everyone should know”
b, The darker aspect
Element of authority, power in the educational context
Interpretation: power situation
„All pupils need the civilizing experience of contact with great lit., and can respond to its universality. They will depend heavily on the skill of the teacher as an interpreter” (Newson Report, 1963)
„Vajon érted-é, amit olvasol?
Mi módon érthetném, hacsak valaki meg nem magyarázza nékem?” (Ap. Csel. 8.31)
(„Understandest thou what thou readest?
How can I, except some man should guide me?”)
Lit: a powerful way of transmitting certain (universal, national etc.) values
national identity (e.g. identifying enemies)
gender identity, class identity, religious identity, ethnic identity etc.
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
H: Methinks it is like a weasel.
P: It is backed like a weasel.
H: Or like a whale?
P: Very like a whale.
The Taming of the Shrew:
Petruchio: Good lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Katharina: The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.
P: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
K: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
P: Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
K: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.
The darker side of “Eng.Lit”
Colonies; the mission of civilizing the natives (“savages”)
1835: English Education Act (India)
In Britain: educating the working classes: giving them “culture”
‘humanising’ = standardising?
Curriculum – the classics – the canon
Canon: religious context: texts with authenticity, authority, and value. These features are retained in a secular context.
CANON related to “cannon” and “cane”
A shared knowledge of what to read and a shared knowledge of how to read them properly
literature as an institution, part of “culture”
CULTURE
Hermann Göring (or Hans Johst): “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”
Cyril Connolly (English writer): “When I hear the word ‘gun’ I reach for my culture”
George Steiner: “Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalised sadism. Literary values and the utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility”
Binary oppositions (binarities, dichotomies)
1. Etymology and original meaning
Cultura, cultivatio
colere: to inhabit - colony, cultivate - couture, protect, worship - cult)
cultura animi
By the 18th century: growth of man
Culture: sg. “added” to nature
2. Traditional meaning (culture as a value-laden term) from 18th cent.
“culture” vs. “barbarity”
A, culture (positive) / barbarity/ natureB, culture (positive) / civilization / barbarity/n.
C, cult. (pos) / mass cult. / Civilization / barbarity/n.
Three stages:
a, culture vs. primitives, savages, barbarians barbarity (“culture” means sg. like “civilisation”)
b, culture vs. civilisation
19th cent. Germany (Herder)
“culture” vs. “civilisation”
material (“new barbarity”) vs. spiritual
(German origin; negative connotations of “Kultur” in WW1)
Matthew Arnold (19th-century English poet, teacher, essayist): Culture is “the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world” (1865)
culture is “a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit. . . .The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light”. … (Culture and Anarchy, 1869).
F. R. Leavis (English critic): “The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, etc. but of recognising that their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race at a given time. . . .Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age. . .” (1933)
Culture and elite (classics and classes)
c, culture as “high culture” vs. “mass culture” (new barbarity)
3. The anthropological meaning
- broadening of meaning;
- culture as a neutral (value-free) term;
- a plurality of cultures (English culture, youth culture, hip-hop culture etc.);
- reintroduction of the culture – nature dichotomy
Anthropology and ethnography (from mid- C19)
Two conclusions of anthropology:
1. “primitive culture” is not really “primitive” (complex social structures, e.g. myth, kinship)
E. B. Tylor (Victorian anthropologist): we should appreciate “the real culture which better acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man”
2. similarities bw. cultures (technologies, myths, etc.) - Cultures are all different but the fact of having a culture is a universal human feature
Ethnocentrism
Inuit/Eskimo; Baka/Pigmy; Magyar/Ungar; Dine/Apache; Roma/Tsigan
R. B. Tylor: culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1871)
T.S. Eliot: culture in the widest sense “includes all the characteristic activities and interersts of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar” (1944)
Raymond Williams (English Marxist critic): “Culture is ordinary. …Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of society is the finding of common meanings and directions” (1958)
Arnold Gehlen, Norbert Elias (German athropologists): Human being: unable to survive in nature → puts culture between himself and nature
culture = second nature
The boy contracting his eyelids: nervous twitch (biological) or wink (cultural)?
“thick description” (Clifford Geertz, (American anthropologist)
In culture, everything is meaningful
Geertz: culture is “webs of meaning and signification woven by us” (1973)
Threshold: taboo on cannibalism and incest
cultural texts – cultural practices
culturalism: coherence of a culture, organic unity, details expressing the whole
Slavoj Žižek (Slovenian philosopher) on European lavatories: German, French, English: three strategies/styles of dealing with human excrement (that is: how does a given culture treat disgusting material?)
Cultural facts: use + symbolic meanings
e.g. wearing jeans
Identity, seld-definition: largely defined in cultural terms
CULTURE, POLITICS, IDEOLOGY
Culture, economy, politics and power relations
culture is part of economy (but economy is studied by anthropology): production, marketing and consumption of ideas, identities
IDEOLOGY
narrow sense: ideas shared by a group (e.g. a party)
wider sense: a system of ideas that has become so habitual that it is accepted unquestioningly as “natural”
(Lukács György: „hamis tudat”)
Ideology works through texts, images, practices, institutions: each offers us a view of the world and of ourselves: addressing us in a certain way: we are addressed (produced)
Product of ideology: the subject who recognizes himself in a certain way, inserted by institutions (the Church, education, family) into symbolic identities
Louis Althusser (French Marxist thinker, 1960s): Ideology is “the imaginary relationship of individuals with their real conditions”
Culture is effective as an ideological weapon precisely because it seems apolitical
Walt Disney; the politics of Mickey Mouse
„Mickey Egér a valaha felmutatott leghitványabb eszménykép; … minden önállóan gondolkodó fiatalembernek és tiszteletre méltó ifjúnak azt kell hogy súgják egészséges érzései, hogy ez az ocsmány és koszos élősdi, az állatvilág ezen legnagyobb bacilushordozója nem lehet az eszményi állat. Ne hagyjuk, hogy a zsidók tovább aljasítsák az emberiséget! Le Mickey Egérrel! Viseljen mindenki horogkeresztet!” (Nazi German article, 1930s)
“Mickey Mouse is the most atrocious ideal that has ever been offered to mankind … The healthy sentiments of every independent-minded young man worthy of respect must suggest that this ugly and dirty parasite, this greatest bacillus host of the animal kingdom cannot be the ideal animal. We must not allow Jews to degrade humanity! Down with Mickey Mouse! Let everybody wear the swastika!”
1970s: Comic Book Art Specifications
Ducktales: Ducksburg, Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck;
The Lion King (1994)
cultural divisions social/political divisions (élite; origin of “classic”: highest taxation category in Rome)
Hungarian film Hippolyt
CULTURE AND POLITICS
Culture (leisure activities): a battlefield of conflicts between forces of regulation (discipline, control) and resistance
Renaissance Man: the uses of “Shakespeare”
POPULAR CULTURE
“MASS CULTURE” vs. “POPULAR CULTURE”
mass (crowd) vs. “the people” (populus)
A, Negative view: the mass culture hypothesis
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, 1947
1. mass culture: an industry
2. sameness (Adorno: “all mass culture is identical”); clichés
3. not coming from the people, not authentic
“Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying” (Dwight Macdonald)
4. passing, ephemeral interest
5. escapist - “packaged dreams”
“If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and more varied dreams that we could otherwise never have known” (Richard Maltby)
addiction (drug)
6. conformity: passive, identical consumers, cretinization
“At worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense while paving the way to totalitarianism” (Bernard Rosenberg)
e.g. ancient Rome: panem et circenses
Positive views
1. carnival view of popular culture (Mikhail Bakhtin)
8 features of the carnival
2. Positive view of pop culture focusing on its consumers
bricolage, DIY: a “creative” act of producing meaning
the logic of fandom
rap and hiphop culture
Fields of contemporary culture
Instead of a dichotomy of high and low: a spectrum of fields and subcultures
Subcultures: excluded groups: Afro-American, working-class, etc
youth cultures: radical, oppositional values (origin of jazz, blues)
underground cultures
counterculture (“ellenkultúra”; i.e. against the dominant/official culture): combination of subcultural energies and avantgarde art forms, political overtones
Where is mainstream/dominant culture today?
ART AND LITERATURE
What is literature?
“How do I recognise a poem when I see one?” (Stanley Fish, US critic)
a, Literature as context (cultural practice)
Örkény’s tram ticket („Mi mindent kell tudnunk”); John Cage’s music (“4’33”); ready-mades (Marcel Duchamp: “Fountain”); pop art (Andy Warhol’s prints); happening, “actionism” (Rudolf Schwarzkogler)
“I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family.”
“I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.” (Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children)
Terry Eagleton (English critic): “Anything can be literature”; “One can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing”
b, Literature as one of the arts
Art: “skill” (Greek technē, Latin ars)
Poetry was sg. different, a divine madness (mania), inspired by the Muses
Artes liberales (grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astrology, music)
artes vulgares (e.g. sculpture)
AESTHETICS
(1750, Alexander Baumgarten)
branch of philosophy (like logic, metaphysics, ethics)
aisthesis (sensory experience)
true/good/beautiful
thinking/willing and acting/feeling
The principal concerns of aesthetics:
a, What is beauty? (aesthetic value)
Natural beauty, beautiful acts (morality), mathematics, sports
b, What is the nature of man-made beauty (art)?
Why is a sculpture beautiful (e.g. a nude)?
1. because its model is beautiful
2. Mimetic view, ART AS MIMESIS: because the imitation is perfect (technē)