Tag: Theory Article Summaries

Cultural Studies as a Multi-Moment Inquiry

Johnson proposes that cultural studies engages with “a circuit of culture”, encompassing production, textual forms, and lived experience, rather than isolating any single element.
“Each aspect has a life of its own… but after that, it may be more transformative to rethink each moment in the light of the others” (p. 74).

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📚 Text-Based Analysis and Its Limitations

He explores how humanities disciplines (especially literary studies) have contributed rigorous textual analysis, yet have often lacked broader social application.
“There is a tendency for the tools to remain obstinately technical or formal… buried in a heightened technical mystique” (p. 60).
Johnson warns against “the abstraction of texts from the other moments” of cultural circulation (p. 63).

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🧠 The Importance of Formalism (But Not Too Much)

Johnson values structuralist and semiotic methods for identifying forms of subjectivity but critiques their overdetachment from social life.
“A little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it” – quoting Roland Barthes (p. 61).
He insists on “describing them carefully, clearly, noting the variations and combinations” of narrative and symbolic forms (p. 60).

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📺 Critique of Structuralist Foreshortening

He critiques approaches like those in Screen theory for focusing narrowly on “the productivity of signifying systems” and neglecting real contexts of production and readership (p. 65).
“There is no real theory of subjectivity here… no account of the carry-over or continuity of self-identities from one discursive moment to the next” (p. 69).

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👥 The Reader as a Social Subject

Johnson emphasizes the gap between “the reader in the text” and “the reader in society”, stressing that actual readers bring complex histories and identities to texts.
“Textual materials are complex, multiple, overlapping, coexistent… all readings are also ‘inter-discursive’” (p. 67).
He argues that we must “trace what stories are already in place” before understanding how texts are received (p. 69).

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🧵 Connecting Lived Culture to Public Forms

In his third approach, Johnson highlights the importance of studying how marginalized groups appropriate and rework dominant cultural forms in everyday life.
“Typically, studies have concerned the appropriation of elements of mass culture and their transformation according to the needs and cultural logics of social groups” (p. 72).

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🚩 Critique of Expressivism and Cultural Empiricism

Johnson is cautious about uncritical celebration of “authentic” experience, arguing that such approaches can romanticize and oversimplify complex social realities.
“Research of this kind has often mediated a private working-class world and the definitions of the public sphere with its middle-class weighting” (p. 71).

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🔧 Toward a Post-Post-Structuralist Theory of Subjectivity

Johnson calls for a theory of subjectivity that integrates structure with lived agency and historical transformation.
“Human beings and social movements also strive to produce some coherence and continuity… and through this, exercise some control over feelings, conditions and destinies” (p. 69).

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📈 Future Directions: Integrated, Conjunctural Cultural Studies

He concludes by advocating for conjunctural analysis that traces cultural forms across different moments—production, representation, and lived practice—recognizing their “inner connections” (p. 74).
“We need to trace what Marx would have called ‘the inner connections’ and ‘real identities’ between them” (p. 74).

• 📚 Expansion of Textual Theory
  Johnson critiques traditional textual analysis for its formalist limitations, emphasizing that texts must be read in relation to their production, reception, and social context. He challenges the isolation of texts in literary studies, arguing:

“The ultimate object of cultural studies is not… the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation” (p. 62).
This redefines the function of the text within culture and aligns cultural studies with a dynamic model of interpretation.

• 👥 Contribution to Reader-Response Theory
  Johnson shifts the emphasis from the text to the reader, criticizing structuralist and psychoanalytic models that “ascribe this capacity [to read critically] to types of text” rather than to actual, socially situated readers (p. 68).
  He promotes studying how “subjective forms are inhabited” across class, gender, and historical contexts (p. 67), enriching theories of reading with contextualized agency.
• 🛠️ Refinement of Marxist Literary Theory
  Drawing on Gramscian concepts of hegemony, Johnson situates cultural practices within larger structures of class and power. He moves beyond economic determinism, advocating for cultural struggle as a site of political agency:

“Popular cultural forms… may permit a questioning of existing relations or a running beyond them in terms of desire” (p. 73).
This situates literature within ideological and class-based formations, advancing a non-reductive materialist theory.

• 🧬 Critique of Structuralism
  While acknowledging the insights of semiology, narratology, and Saussurean linguistics, Johnson argues that structuralism tends to abstract texts from lived experiences and production contexts:

“Formalism… is the abstraction of texts from the other moments” (p. 63).
This helps bridge literary theory with social and cultural analysis, fostering a more integrated approach.

• 🌪️ Advancement of Post-Structuralist Insights
  Johnson affirms post-structuralism’s critique of the unified subject, but insists it lacks a theory of self-production and continuity. He argues for a “post-post-structuralist” theory of the subject that can account for identity transformation and political consciousness (p. 69).
  This challenges post-structuralist theory to evolve and address historical and collective subjectivities.
• 📜 Revision of Canon and Literary Value
  He questions how “criteria of ‘literariness’ themselves come to be formulated and installed in academic, educational and other regulative practices” (p. 62).
  This contribution encourages literary theory to interrogate the construction of the literary canon through ideology and institutional power.

🔍 Over-Theorization Without Practical Application
Johnson’s essay, while rich in theoretical insight, is sometimes criticized for being too abstract. The complex layering of ideas on subjectivity, textuality, and production risks alienating readers or practitioners looking for concrete methodologies or real-world applications.

🌀 Ambiguity Around Subjectivity
Although Johnson advocates for a post-structuralist understanding of the subject, some critics argue that he does not offer a clear or usable theory of subjectivity. His critique of existing theories (e.g., psychoanalysis, semiotics) is sharp, but his own suggestions remain conceptually vague (p. 67–69).

⚖️ Balancing Acts That Result in Dilution
Johnson attempts to synthesize production, text, and lived culture into a single cultural circuit. However, this inclusivity may result in a lack of analytical sharpness—trying to address all areas at once can lead to intellectual diffusion rather than focus (p. 73–74).

📚 Dismissiveness Toward Literary Criticism
Literary scholars have critiqued Johnson for his apparent dismissal of “literary value” and canonical study. While he critiques “literariness” as a regulatory construct (p. 63), some argue this position undervalues aesthetic complexity in favor of ideology critique.

🎭 Neglect of Aesthetic Experience and Emotional Response
By focusing so heavily on ideological and discursive formations, Johnson’s framework is seen by some as neglecting the emotional, affective, or aesthetic engagement readers have with texts—an aspect central to understanding cultural resonance.

🌐 Eurocentric/Anglocentric Bias
Johnson’s examples (e.g., the Royal Wedding, CND campaign, British film theory) reflect a Western-centric focus, raising questions about the global applicability of his model. Cultural studies from postcolonial or non-Western contexts often feel marginalized in his framework.

🧪 Insufficient Methodological Guidance
Though Johnson critiques formalism and empiricism, he offers no concrete methodology for conducting cultural studies research. Scholars have noted the absence of replicable research strategies, making it difficult for new researchers to follow.

🔸 Naming as a Colonial Practice of Power and Erasure
Walsh begins by emphasizing that the very act of naming in Latin America is a legacy of colonial power. She asserts that naming has historically functioned to impose external epistemologies and erase local identities:

“The politics of naming have always had great significance in Latin America… subordinated differences to map out an image according to their own heuristic code of naming” (Walsh, 2012, p. 109).
The term “Latin America,” she notes, is itself a colonial imposition, with Indigenous communities preferring Abya Yala, meaning “lands in full maturity.”

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🔸 Decolonizing Cultural Studies: From Object to Intervention
Walsh critiques how Cultural Studies, when uncritically transplanted into Latin American contexts, often replicate Western academic structures. Instead, she advocates for a model that emerges from lived struggles and knowledge systems:

“The project of Cultural Studies… seeks to cross, transcend and go beyond the limits that traditionally have seen culture as an object of study” (Walsh, 2012, p. 116).
She calls for (inter)Cultural Studies that actively intervene in society, not just analyze it.

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🔸 Four Legacies Shaping (Inter)Cultural Studies in Latin America
Walsh outlines four key legacies that shape her approach:

1. Scientific Disciplinarity – a Eurocentric system that privileges so-called objective knowledge and marginalizes alternative rationalities.

“The humanities were set up not as areas of knowledge per se… but instead as something more ephemeral” (Walsh, 2012, p. 110).

2. Birmingham School & Stuart Hall – inspiring a political vocation of theory grounded in lived struggles.

“I come back to the critical distinction between intellectual work and academic work… They are not the same thing” (Hall, 1992, cited in Walsh, 2012, p. 112).

3. Latin American Cultural Thought – including thinkers like Martí, Mariátegui, and Barbero, but critiqued for often being confined to elite mestizo academia.
4. Social and Epistemic Movements – rooted in Indigenous and Afro-descendant activism, these movements generate theory and challenge coloniality.

“Movements provoke theoretical moments and historical conjunctures insist on theories” (Hall, 1992, cited in Walsh, 2012, p. 112).

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🔸 The Inter-cultural, Inter-epistemic, and De-colonial Dimensions
Central to Walsh’s project are three interrelated pillars:

• Inter-culturality is not just diversity but a transformative political project:

“It does not simply add diversity… but rather to rethink, rebuild and inter-culturalize the nation” (Walsh, 2012, p. 117).

• Inter-epistemicity involves valuing knowledge produced outside Western academic frameworks:

“To think with knowledges produced in Latin America… by intellectuals who come not only from academia, but also from other communities” (Walsh, 2012, p. 118).

• De-coloniality challenges the colonial matrix of power, including epistemological dominance:

“At the centre… is capitalism as the only possible model of civilization” (Walsh, 2012, p. 119).

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🔸 Academic Tensions and Resistance to the Project
Walsh details the resistance her program at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar has encountered from traditional academic institutions:

“Our concern here is not so much with the institutionalizing of Cultural Studies… but with epistemic inter-culturalization” (Walsh, 2012, p. 121).
She links this to broader neoliberal reforms that have depoliticized and re-disciplined Latin American academia.

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🔸 Reclaiming Intervention as Ethical and Political Practice
In closing, Walsh returns to Stuart Hall’s concept of “intervention” as a guiding principle for Cultural Studies:

“To consider Cultural Studies today a project of political vocation and intervention is to position—and at the same time build—our work on the borders… of university and society” (Walsh, 2012, p. 122).
The goal is to foster knowledge that is rooted in life, struggle, and transformation, not detached academicism.

🔄 Postcolonial Theory
Walsh expands postcolonial theory by emphasizing the limits of postcolonial discourse when applied to Latin America. She critiques its tendency to remain textual and elite, shifting the focus toward lived struggles, knowledge systems, and political intervention rooted in Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements. Her call for “naming” as a site of colonial power resonates with postcolonial concerns, but her decolonial stance goes further by centering epistemic sovereignty.

“The politics of naming have always had great significance in Latin America… subordinated differences to map out an image according to their own heuristic code of naming” (Walsh, 2012, p. 109).
“Inter-culturality has marked a social, political, ethical project… to rethink, rebuild and inter-culturalize the nation” (p. 117).

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🌐 Decolonial Theory (Modernity/Coloniality Group)
Firmly situated in the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality school, Walsh’s work is a practical manifestation of its core ideas. She emphasizes inter-epistemic dialogue, the deconstruction of the colonial matrix of power, and the repositioning of the university as a space for pluriversal thinking. Her model of (inter)Cultural Studies acts as a decolonial educational and theoretical project.

“Our concern here is not… institutionalizing Cultural Studies. Better yet… with epistemic inter-culturalization, with the de-colonialization and pluriversalization of the ‘university’” (p. 121).
“By colonial matrix, we refer to the hierarchical system of racial-civilizational classification…” (p. 118).

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📚 Cultural Studies (Hall/Birmingham School)
Walsh reclaims and recontextualizes the political legacy of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School by aligning it with Latin American struggles. She upholds Hall’s idea that “movements provoke theoretical moments” and expands it to include epistemic movements, led by historically marginalized communities. Her version of Cultural Studies is not disciplinary but political, embodied, and decolonial.

“Movements provoke theoretical moments and historical conjunctures insist on theories” (Hall 1992, cited in Walsh, 2012, p. 112).
“A practice which understands the need for intellectual modesty… not substituting intellectual work for politics” (p. 112).

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📖 Critical Theory
By challenging the hegemonic Eurocentric academic canon, Walsh intervenes in critical theory by critiquing the Western monopoly on reason and knowledge production. She promotes a critical interculturality that integrates decolonial and ethical commitments into theory-making itself.

“To question the supposed universality of scientific knowledge… that does not capture the diversity… or the counter-hegemonic alternatives” (p. 111).
“We are concerned… with a thinking from the South(s)… to open, not close, paths” (p. 121).

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🔬 Theory of Representation
Building on Hall’s theory, Walsh deepens its application to Latin America by showing how colonial regimes of representation have structured epistemic and social exclusions. Her focus is not only on discursive stereotyping but also on material and institutional naming practices that shape power and identity.

“Practices of representation construct and contribute to the stereotyping… within a supposedly naturalized structure and regime of truth” (p. 113).

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📏 Institutional Critique / Knowledge Production
Walsh critiques the disciplinary boundaries and neoliberal restructuring of academia in Latin America. She pushes for a radical rethinking of what counts as knowledge, who produces it, and where—a critique of both content and academic form.

“Discipline… works to negate and detract from practices… that do not fit inside hegemonic rationality” (p. 111).
“The project seeks to cross, transcend and go beyond the limits that traditionally have seen culture as an object of study” (p. 116).

🔍 Over-politicization of Academic Discourse
Some may argue that Walsh’s insistence on political engagement in academic work risks collapsing the line between scholarship and activism.

❗ Critics might ask: Can Cultural Studies maintain critical distance if it becomes a project of intervention rather than reflection?

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📏 Anti-Disciplinarity as Methodological Risk
Her call for “indisciplinarity” challenges academic norms, but critics may argue that rejecting disciplinary boundaries can result in conceptual vagueness or lack of methodological rigor.

❗ Without clear academic frameworks, how do we ensure accountability, coherence, and evaluative criteria in research?

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🌍 Limited Scalability Beyond Andean/Latin American Contexts
Walsh grounds her theory deeply in Latin American epistemologies and struggles. While powerful regionally, some may question its applicability across global contexts, particularly in societies without a similar history of Indigenous-Afro-descendant political movements.

❗ Is her model of (inter)Cultural Studies transferable beyond Abya Yala?

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🧠 Complex Language and Dense Theoretical Style
The article uses highly theoretical, sometimes abstract language that might alienate non-specialist readers or those outside the decolonial academic community.

❗ Could the accessibility of her transformative ideas be hindered by their presentation?

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📚 Insufficient Engagement with Alternative Views within Latin America
While Walsh critiques Eurocentrism and disciplinary knowledge, she may be seen as underrepresenting dissenting Latin American scholars who support modernization or universalist frameworks from within the region.

❗ Does her framework fully acknowledge intra-regional diversity and contestation?

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⚖️ Tension Between Inclusion and Exclusion
Despite her commitment to pluralism and dialogue, some might find Walsh’s tone to marginalize scholars who remain within traditional academic paradigms, potentially reproducing the very exclusions she critiques.

❗ Can decolonial thinking risk becoming a new orthodoxy, dismissing other valid intellectual paths?

🌍 Reimagining the Canon Beyond “Writing Back”

Riemenschneider challenges the dominant pedagogical focus on postcolonial “writing back” narratives and urges a shift toward texts that imagine alternative futures and explore constructive possibilities.

“Should not our common procedure of prioritizing texts that are ‘writing back’ be modified by more frequently including examples that probe into or even construct possible ‘different worlds’?” (Riemenschneider, 2004, p. 106)

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💸 Globalization as Cultural and Economic Erosion

The article highlights how globalization leads to both material dislocation and the erasure of local specificities, especially in postcolonial societies.

“Destroys local sites of production and jobs… impoverishing an ever increasing number of an unemployed workforce… lost to the circulation of goods” (p. 106)

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📚 Teaching Gap in Literary Academia

Despite an active scholarly community, there is a disconnect between literary research and teaching practices, particularly in the realm of New Literatures in English.

“Academics pursue research… but rarely give much time to the challenge of teaching what they are studying” (p. 106)

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📖 Canon vs. Context: The Globalization Dilemma

Riemenschneider questions whether popular Indian writers like Narayan, Rao, and Seth, whose works don’t address globalization directly, are still fitting in a course addressing global issues.

“Can we responsibly promote the study of such texts… whose basic concerns are certainly not the economic and social havoc brought about by globalization?” (p. 107)

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🤝 Hybridity and Harmony in Historical Encounters

In discussing Dalrymple’s White Mughals, Riemenschneider points to historical periods where East and West coexisted, offering models of intercultural hybridity and mutual transformation.

“A time… of surprisingly widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity” (p. 107)
“That East and West are not irreconcilable… They have met and mingled in the past” (p. 108)

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🏰 From Cultural Exchange to Imperial Domination

Imperial strategies under British governance, such as those of Lord Wellesley, shifted relationships from fusion to conquest, marking a decisive break with earlier hybrid models.

India became “a place to conquer and transform” instead of “a place to embrace and to be transformed by” (p. 108)

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🚪 Barriers to Cultural Crossing in Fiction

Through Thalassa Ali’s A Singular Hostage, the article examines how fictional colonial encounters often reinforce cultural boundaries rather than bridge them.

“Mutual prejudices… never at any time would permit either party to cross the boundary line between their respective worlds” (p. 108)

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🌐 Diaspora as a Space for Alternative Imaginations

Riemenschneider sees diasporic writing as a more productive terrain for imagining “different worlds,” offering possibilities of hybridity and coexistence not bound by nationalist constraints.

“Is it then correct to say that an imagined different world is possible, more or less, only in the diaspora?” (p. 109)

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🧭 Inclusive Teaching in a Globalized World

He ends with a strong call to educators to rethink curricula that either overly conform to Western literary dominance or promote rigid cultural essentialism.

“We must resist both, the globalizing homogenization and levelling as well as a fundamentalist-inspired defence of differences” (p. 109)

📚 Postcolonial Theory

Riemenschneider contributes to postcolonial literary theory by questioning the over-reliance on “writing back” narratives and proposing that literature can also imagine alternate futures rather than only respond to the colonial past.

“Should not our common procedure of prioritizing texts that are ‘writing back’ be modified by more frequently including examples that probe into or even construct possible ‘different worlds’?” (p. 106)

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🌍 Globalization Theory in Literature

The article bridges globalization studies with literary pedagogy by emphasizing how economic and cultural globalization impacts the production and teaching of English literature in formerly colonized societies.

“Globalization… is in the process of erasing not just local cultural specificities but threatening to annihilate their very economic and social underpinnings” (p. 106)

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🧩 Hybridity and Cultural Theory

Through references to Dalrymple’s White Mughals, the article engages with the concept of intercultural hybridity, a key idea in the works of Homi Bhabha, by exploring instances of cultural mingling in colonial India.

“A time… of surprisingly widespread cultural assimilation and hybridity” (p. 107)

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🛤️ Diaspora and Transnational Theory

The text highlights diaspora literature as a space where authors explore identity through cultural dislocation and hybridity, aligning with theories of transnationalism and global citizenship.

“Diaspora writing… focus[es] on the challenges and possibilities of cultural assimilation…” (p. 109)

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🏛️ Canon Critique and World Literature

Riemenschneider critically assesses the canonization of certain Indian English writers, questioning whether literary syllabi should prioritize established names or more politically engaged, local voices.

“Many of which have by now attained canonical status… whose basic concerns are certainly not the economic and social havoc brought about by globalization” (p. 107)

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🧑‍🏫 Pedagogical Theory / Literary Education

He foregrounds pedagogical responsibility in literary theory, pushing scholars to align their teaching with current socio-political realities rather than remain locked in outdated canons.

“What decisions do we take in aiding our students?… Can we responsibly promote the study…” (p. 107)

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🌐 Cosmopolitanism and Ethical Criticism

The article resonates with ethical and cosmopolitan literary criticism by promoting the idea that literature should foster global understanding and resist both homogenization and essentialist nationalism.

“We must resist both, the globalizing homogenization… and a fundamentalist-inspired defence of differences” (p. 109)

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🔍 Historiographic Metafiction / Narrative Theory

By incorporating historically-grounded texts like White Mughals and A Singular Hostage, Riemenschneider explores how fiction and non-fiction can re-narrate colonial encounters, a core idea in historiographic metafiction.

“Dalrymple’s brilliant historical study… not the familiar story of European conquest… but the Indian conquest of the European imagination” (p. 107)

🧭 Eurocentric Framing of Cross-Cultural Discourse

While the article advocates for global inclusivity, it paradoxically relies heavily on Western-authored texts (e.g., White Mughals, A Singular Hostage) to explore non-Western contexts, which may recenter Western perspectives in postcolonial studies.

The core examples are from William Dalrymple (British) and Thalassa Ali (American), potentially sidelining authentic indigenous voices.

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📦 Limited Representation of Non-Indian Literatures

The article focuses almost exclusively on Indian or India-related texts, despite referencing “New Literatures in English” broadly. This regional limitation may weaken its claim to addressing the “global” comprehensively.

No significant mention of African, Caribbean, Aboriginal, or Pacific authors, which narrows the theoretical application.

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🔍 Lack of Textual Analysis or Close Reading

Riemenschneider offers thoughtful thematic overviews but avoids in-depth literary analysis or textual critique of the works he discusses. This might appear more like a pedagogical essay than a rigorous literary-theoretical article.

The references to literary texts serve illustrative rather than analytical purposes.

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🛑 Overgeneralization of Diaspora Writing

While highlighting diaspora literature as a site of cultural possibility, the article risks romanticizing hybridity and oversimplifying the diverse challenges faced by diasporic writers and communities.

“Is it then correct to say that an imagined different world is possible, more or less, only in the diaspora?” (p. 109) – This question itself may reduce diaspora writing to a monolithic category.

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🎓 Abstract Pedagogical Proposals Without Implementation

Although Riemenschneider raises important questions about literary syllabi, the article lacks specific strategies or case studies on how to apply his pedagogical ideas in actual classroom settings.

The text ends with open-ended questions, but does not propose models for curriculum revision.

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🧩 Neglect of Student-Centric Perspectives

While he emphasizes the teacher’s responsibility in choosing texts, the article omits any reflection on student reception, engagement, or learning outcomes—key elements in contemporary pedagogical theory.

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📊 Minimal Engagement with Contemporary Theory

The article implicitly invokes theorists like Homi Bhabha (on hybridity), but it does not explicitly engage with or cite major voices in postcolonial or globalization theory, which limits its intertextual depth.

📚 Cultural studies was born out of a deliberate rejection of traditional disciplines such as literary studies, film studies, and art history. Yet, as Frow clarifies, this rejection was not of the aesthetic object itself, but of the normative frameworks that governed its placement and value:

“It is important to be clear that this was a refusal not of the object itself… but of the normative discourses within which the object and its ‘placing’ were defined” (p. 44).

🎭 However, this strategic distance eventually became a limitation, as it occluded crucial discussions of value within cultural texts — including literature — which cultural studies set out to theorize.

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📖 Three Modes of Literary Emergence

1. 📘 Reflexive Fiction and Truth in Literature
   Frow identifies epistemological reflexivity in works like The Radetzky March and Don Quixote, where literature reflects on itself through layers of truth and fiction.

“The narrative of a resistance to Literature has itself become a work of literature” (p. 45).

2. 📰 The Corruption and Commodification of Literature
   In Lost Illusions, literature appears within a sociological reflexivity, entangled in journalism, commodification, and industrial production.

“The literary… is torn between the two and whose defining character is its status, and its dissatisfaction with its status, as a thing to be bought and sold” (p. 47).

3. 🎤 Lyric Memory and Epiphany in Poetry
   Frank O’Hara’s The Day Lady Died presents lyrical emergence, where literature arises in a temporal rupture, transcending the mundane through memory and voice.

“The ‘emergence’ of the literary… is the effect of this shift of planes from the mundane to the epiphanic moment of memory” (p. 48).

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⏳ Dual Temporality and Historical Value of the Literary

⚖️ Literature exists simultaneously as a historical institution and as a momentary event in reading. This creates a tension between canon formation and fleeting readerly experience.

“The concept of literary emergence… specifies a dual temporality: on the one hand… an act of reading; on the other… a structure of historical value” (p. 49).

📘 Frow challenges universal definitions of literature, noting that all such claims are normative and reflect institutionalized regimes of value rather than inherent qualities.

“Any attempt now to define the literary as a universal… fails to account for the particular institutional conditions of existence” (p. 49).

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🏛️ The Literary Regime: Texts, Readers, and Institutions

🔧 Frow proposes the idea of a “literary regime”—a set of social and interpretive structures that assign value to texts and determine how they are read.

“The concept of regime shifts attention from an isolated and autonomous ‘reader’ and ‘text’ to the institutional frameworks which govern what counts as the literary” (p. 50).

📺 This regime is not superior to other cultural forms like film or television. Instead, it is simply one among many regimes of cultural value, shaped by relations, not essences.

“No special privilege attaches to a literary regime except insofar as such a privilege can be enforced by political means” (p. 51).

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🔄 Reading as a Recursive and Relational Practice

🔍 Frow suggests we move away from fixed textual meanings and instead view reading as a dynamic practice, involving multiple layers of interpretive framing: from content to form, to technique, to institutional regimes.

“Textuality and its conditions of possibility are mutually constitutive and can be reconstructed only from each other” (p. 52).

🧠 Interpretation becomes a historical mediation, where meaning arises between the moment of writing and the moment of reception — not rooted in either alone.

“Any text which continues to be read… will in some sense not be the ‘same’ text” (p. 53).

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🔄 Rethinking the Discipline of Literary Studies

🎓 Frow critiques the current state of literary studies as fragmented — divided between ethical, deconstructive, political, and bellettristic approaches — and lacking a unified theoretical core:

“In one sense, the discipline of literary studies is flourishing… in another, it has become lost in irrelevance” (p. 54).

🛠️ He advocates for a renewed literary pedagogy based not on canon or theory, but on a generalizable, reflective practice of reading that bridges literary and non-literary forms.

“It must be at once continuous with and richer than untutored practice… and be extrapolated from ‘literary’ texts to other discursive kinds” (p. 54).

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⚡ The Ambivalence of Literary Emergence

🌀 Frow closes by noting that every instance of literary emergence simultaneously enacts and undermines the concept of literature itself. Literature, in this view, is inherently unstable, defined by the contradictions that animate it:

“These texts… can be taken as a figure for the institution of a reading that would at once display and displace the literary regime” (p. 55).

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✅ In Summary:
John Frow’s essay is a critical reconfiguration of the boundaries and assumptions of literary studies. By analyzing how literature emerges across texts, regimes, and historical contexts, Frow opens the door to a relational, politically aware, and reflexive understanding of literature’s role within cultural studies.

📚 1. Poststructuralism & Reflexivity

🔍 Contribution: Frow extends poststructuralist ideas by exploring literature’s self-reflexive nature—its capacity to question and remake itself.

“The narrative of a resistance to Literature has itself become a work of literature” (p. 45).
🌐 Theoretical Tie: Builds on Paul de Man and poststructuralist thought, where language is unstable and meaning is deferred.
“The literary constitutes… a language aware of its own rhetorical status and its inherent liability to error” (p. 49).

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🏛️ 2. Institutional Theory (Sociology of Literature)

📦 Contribution: Introduces the idea of the “literary regime”—institutions and social forces that define, categorize, and give value to literature.

“Texts and readings count as literary or nonliterary by virtue of protocols which govern this distinction” (p. 50).
🏛️ Theoretical Tie: Deepens Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and Tony Bennett’s work on cultural institutions, showing how literary meaning is socially regulated.

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🌀 3. Reader-Response Theory (Relational Reading)

👁️ Contribution: Frow reorients attention from the text itself to the relation between the reader, the text, and its framing conditions.

“Reading… moves from a focus on a ‘text’… to the relation between a text and the set of framing conditions” (p. 52).
📖 Theoretical Tie: Expands on Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser by emphasizing the historical and institutional embeddedness of interpretation.

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⏳ 4. Historicism / New Historicism

📜 Contribution: Proposes that literature’s meaning is always subject to changing regimes of reception, contesting any fixed or timeless interpretation.

“Any text which continues to be read… will in some sense not be the ‘same’ text” (p. 53).
🧭 Theoretical Tie: Resonates with Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism in viewing literature as deeply entwined with historical conditions of both production and reception.

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🧩 5. Cultural Studies / Anti-Canonism

🚫 Contribution: Argues against fetishizing the literary canon, calling instead for a theoretically aware and socially situated analysis of literature.

“The exclusion of the literary… was a strategic delimitation… but there is no reason… why this exclusion should continue” (p. 53).
📚 Theoretical Tie: Extends Stuart Hall’s cultural studies framework, encouraging integration of literary studies into the broader matrix of cultural regimes.

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🧠 6. Critique of Universalism

🧱 Contribution: Refutes attempts to offer a unified, essentialist definition of literature by demonstrating its institutional and historical variability.

“Any attempt now to define the literary as a universal or unitary phenomenon… falls into the fetishism of a culture of social distinction” (p. 49).
📘 Theoretical Tie: Counters structuralist views (like Frye’s archetypes) by arguing for the pluralism and contingency of literary value.

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🔧 7. Pedagogical Theory / Literary Education

🎓 Contribution: Reframes literary education as training in critical reading practices, not the transmission of timeless cultural value.

“What might count as useful knowledge… is less the imparting of systematic information than the teaching of a practice” (p. 54).
🛠️ Theoretical Tie: Contributes to critical pedagogy (e.g., Freire, Giroux), emphasizing interpretation as an empowering, reflective act.

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⚖️ 8. Value Theory in Literature

📈 Contribution: Reopens the question of value in literature—not as eternal or intrinsic, but as socially and semiotically produced.

“The very force of its initial refusal of the normative has become a problem… it occludes those questions of value” (p. 44).
💬 Theoretical Tie: Challenges both formalism and radical relativism, offering a balanced, relational approach to literary valuation.

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🧬 Summary

John Frow’s “On Literature in Cultural Studies” doesn’t simply intervene in literary theory—it restructures its foundation by:

• Breaking down the boundaries between disciplines
• Introducing the flexible but rigorous concept of regimes
• Centering historical, institutional, and relational dynamics in literary meaning

It is a call for theory after theory, where critical reflection and cultural embeddedness take priority over rigid categories and static canons.

⚖️ 1. Relativism vs. Rigorous Criteria

📌 Criticism: Frow’s call for “relative relativism” may lead to a theoretical impasse where no stable criteria remain to distinguish meaningful from arbitrary interpretation.

His dismissal of universal literary value might be read as undermining normative critical judgment.

🔎 Why it matters: Without shared evaluative frameworks, literary criticism risks becoming purely contextual and losing its capacity to critique broader systems.

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🌀 2. Vagueness in the “Literary Regime”

📌 Criticism: The term “literary regime”—while conceptually rich—is ontologically overloaded, blending institutional, textual, semiotic, and social dimensions without clear boundaries.

This may confuse rather than clarify how regimes function practically in shaping reading.

🔎 Why it matters: Readers may struggle to distinguish what counts as a regime versus broader cultural influence or personal interpretation.

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🎯 3. Undervaluing the Aesthetic Dimension

📌 Criticism: By focusing on cultural and institutional framing, Frow potentially downplays the aesthetic and affective power of literature itself.

His emphasis on external regimes may neglect the formal innovations, beauty, or style of literary texts.

🔎 Why it matters: Many argue that literature’s unique value lies in its affective and stylistic power, not just its social embeddedness.

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🧱 4. Risk of Disciplinary Dilution

📌 Criticism: Frow’s encouragement of interdisciplinary openness might inadvertently dissolve the specificity of literary studies into broader cultural studies.

“Literature” becomes just another “regime,” losing its traditional disciplinary coherence.

🔎 Why it matters: Some literary theorists fear this undermines the distinctive tools and methods of close reading, genre study, and formal analysis.

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🗃️ 5. Abstract Overload and Accessibility

📌 Criticism: Frow’s language is dense and steeped in theoretical jargon, making the essay less accessible to non-specialists or students new to literary theory.

Terms like “hermeneutic bootstrapping” or “axiological regimes” can alienate readers unfamiliar with poststructuralist discourse.

🔎 Why it matters: For a piece partly about pedagogy and reading practices, the lack of clarity may hinder its impact in the classroom.

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🧭 6. Limited Engagement with Non-Western Literatures

📌 Criticism: Frow’s analysis is heavily Euro-American, drawing examples only from Western canonical texts (Roth, Cervantes, Balzac, O’Hara).

This limits the scope of his claim that “literary value is institutionally constructed” across global cultural contexts.

🔎 Why it matters: A more inclusive global literary critique would enhance his argument about the variability of regimes across cultures.

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🔍 7. Minimal Discussion of Reader Agency

📌 Criticism: While Frow critiques autonomous conceptions of the “reader,” he doesn’t give enough space to the lived experience and agency of actual readers.

His concept of the reader as a “function” within a regime may overlook how individuals interpret texts creatively or resist dominant regimes.

🔎 Why it matters: Ignoring reader subjectivity risks reducing reading to mere effects of institutional power.

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🧠 Summary:

Frow’s essay is a seminal intervention in redefining the relationship between literary studies and cultural theory—but it also opens itself to critiques related to:

• theoretical overreach 🌀
• undervaluing form and aesthetics 🎨
• abstract language barriers 🧱
• Western-centrism 🌍

📘 Reciprocity in Interdisciplinary Study
Gallagher highlights the shift in the relationship between literary and social studies, noting that prior to the 1980s, the approach was largely one-sided: literature was examined through sociological lenses, but not vice versa.

“No matter how intertwined literature and society were imagined to be, however, the relationship… was essentially non-reciprocal” (p. 79).

🔁 Emergence of Cultural Studies
This evolving reciprocity between disciplines formed the basis of what Gallagher defines as Cultural Studies—a field marked by methodological fluidity and resistance to fixed definitions.

“‘Cultural Studies’ specifies neither a well-defined object nor a method of analysis” (p. 80).

🔍 Critique of the Term “Culture”
Gallagher critiques the inflation and ambiguity of the word “culture” in contemporary discourse, likening it to its Arnoldian predecessor.

“We may have rejected the restriction of ‘Culture’… nevertheless, our use of ‘culture’ and Arnold’s have more in common than is generally recognized” (p. 81).

🎭 Williams’s Productive Ambiguity
Williams deliberately maintained ambiguity in defining “culture” to avoid reductive binaries such as art/society or base/superstructure.

He resisted “reification” by playing “the meanings off against each other” to prevent one-way determinism (p. 82).

🌀 Particularity over Abstraction
Williams emphasized cultural specificity over analytical abstraction, encouraging critics to regard culture as a “complex of lived relationships” rather than a static societal whole.

“Culture” connotes a “vital whole” that is “more deeply constitutive of subjectivity” than “society” (p. 83).

🔄 Culture as Signifying System
In his later work Culture/The Sociology of Culture, Williams defined culture as “the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored” (p. 83).

💰 The Money Paradox
Gallagher critiques Williams’s attempt to exclude money from cultural analysis, exposing a contradiction:

Money is not cultural “because the needs and actions of trade and payment are dominant” (p. 84).
Yet, when money’s materiality becomes excessive or symbolic (as in rare coins), Williams acknowledges it as cultural—a paradox she finds illuminating.

⚖️ Materiality vs. Signification
Gallagher explores the tension between material presence and signifying function, noting that for Williams, “phenomena disappear from ‘culture’ for two opposite reasons: they are either too material… or not material enough” (p. 85).

🧩 Limits of Signification in Cultural Studies
Gallagher warns that cultural studies often mystifies its objects by treating their excess of meaning as inherently profound, echoing Arnoldian ideals.

“We may be succumbing to a new mystique of culture” (p. 81).

💡 Final Reflection on Cultural Theory’s Tensions
Gallagher argues that instead of reconciling immanence and signification, cultural theory should embrace their historical tensions and resistances.

“We cannot understand the historical function of the object until we understand its peculiar ways of emptying itself of immediate comprehensibility” (p. 88).

📚 ➤ Contribution to Cultural Materialism
Gallagher deepens our understanding of cultural materialism by illustrating how Williams substituted “culture” for “society” to emphasize a “complex of lived relationships” rather than abstract structures.

“Culture was vital and enduring, yet evolving… more deeply constitutive of subjectivity than the word ‘society’ could suggest” (p. 83).
🔗 Relates to: Raymond Williams’s Cultural Materialism / New Historicism

🔄 ➤ Interdisciplinary Reciprocity
She underscores the shift from one-way interdisciplinary use (sociology reading literature) to a mutual methodological exchange, thereby legitimizing literary analysis within social theory.

“One is not surprised to find… Hayden White defining the tropes of historical analysis, John S. Nelson detailing the complex ‘plots’ of political science…” (p. 79).
🔗 Relates to: Interdisciplinary Theory / Sociology of Literature

🎭 ➤ Critique of Autonomy in Formalism
Gallagher challenges formalist ideas of aesthetic autonomy, aligning with Williams’s view that cultural texts are never isolated but embedded in social processes.

“Williams… succeeded in replacing the idea of artistic autonomy with that of specificity” (p. 83).
🔗 Relates to: Anti-Formalism / Reader-Response and Materialist Criticism

💬 ➤ Expansion of the Semiotic in Culture
By analyzing how signification operates even in non-literary domains (e.g., food, money), Gallagher helps expand the semiotic scope of literary theory to encompass broader cultural practices.

“The signifying system… includes not only the traditional arts… but also all the ‘signifying practices’—from language… to fashion and advertising” (p. 83).
🔗 Relates to: Structuralism / Semiotics

📖 ➤ Deconstruction of Cultural Unity
She critiques Williams’s essentialist tendencies and shows how his analysis inadvertently reinforces the mystique of culture as irreducibly meaningful—mirroring the “presence” fetishized in Derridean deconstruction.

“We may be succumbing to a new mystique of culture” (p. 81).
🔗 Relates to: Poststructuralism / Deconstruction

🧱 ➤ Material Signification and Marxist Limits
Gallagher exposes limits in Williams’s Marxist materialism, such as his exclusion of money from cultural analysis, revealing contradictions in the application of base/superstructure distinctions.

“Money’s ineligibility for culture might stem partly from its dissolution into the economic” (p. 87).
🔗 Relates to: Marxist Literary Theory / Political Economy of Culture

🌐 ➤ Contribution to Cultural Theory’s Object of Study
She interrogates what counts as a cultural object, criticizing both Arnoldian high culture and the overexpansion of “culture” into everything.

“The puzzling thing about these writings is their almost programmatic refusal to tell us what isn’t culture” (p. 80).
🔗 Relates to: Cultural Theory / Critique of Essentialism

🧠 ➤ Epistemological Self-Reflexivity
Gallagher’s essay itself is a meta-theoretical reflection on the conditions and limits of theorizing culture, making it a model for critical theory that interrogates its own foundations.

“We cannot understand the historical function of the object until we understand its peculiar ways of emptying itself of immediate comprehensibility” (p. 88).
🔗 Relates to: Critical Theory / Meta-theory

🔍 Overemphasis on Ambiguity
Gallagher frequently critiques Williams’s refusal to define “culture” with precision but does not provide a clear alternative herself. Her argument may seem to circle around the problem of definition without offering a constructive framework.

She acknowledges that “culture” resists coherence but doesn’t resolve how cultural critics should proceed (p. 88).

📏 Unclear Analytical Boundaries
In critiquing Williams’s treatment of money and food, Gallagher suggests a paradox, but her analysis can itself seem caught in the same ambiguity—blurring the line between cultural and economic domains without clear criteria.

Her own treatment of signifying systems may “replay the tension” she accuses Williams of mishandling (pp. 85–87).

⚖️ Heavy Reliance on Williams
Although Gallagher sets out to critique Williams, much of her essay relies heavily on his formulations and terms. At times, it reads more as an elaboration of his ideas than a decisive intervention or revision.

She notes Williams’s contradictions but continues to work within his framework rather than proposing a new paradigm (p. 82–83).

💭 Underdeveloped Engagement with Alternative Theorists
Gallagher name-drops major thinkers (e.g., Laclau, Mouffe, Hayden White), but does not deeply engage their theories. This limits the depth of her comparative critique and the potential for triangulating Williams’s ideas in a broader intellectual field (p. 79).

🧱 Structural Complexity and Density
The prose of the article is dense, with extended metaphors and abstract formulations. This stylistic complexity may obscure her core arguments, making the essay less accessible even to theoretically informed readers.

🔄 Inconsistent Use of Materialism
Gallagher critiques Williams’s cultural materialism for privileging the material, but she herself occasionally reverts to a form of symbolic idealism—treating excess or opacity as inherently valuable without fully explaining why.

🔍 Psychoanalysis as a decisive but incomplete interruption in Cultural Studies
Hall argues that psychoanalysis did not merge seamlessly into Cultural Studies, but rather interrupted it, transforming its theoretical foundations. This intervention, however, remains “incomplete,” leaving unresolved tensions.

“The displacements, theoretically and in terms of the forms of study… have been irrevocably transformed by the opening up of the spaces and questions which psychoanalysis poses to it” (Hall, 2018, p. 889).
The essay traces how this disruption reshaped Cultural Studies, especially through the challenges of subjectivity, representation, and the unconscious.

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📚 Only post-Lacanian psychoanalysis had a transformative impact
Hall distinguishes between earlier forms of psychoanalysis and the radical shift brought by Lacan’s rereading of Freud. It was this version that made psychoanalysis relevant to cultural theory.

“The decisive impact in cultural theory has been made by that form of psychoanalysis which arises after the Lacanian rereading of Freud” (p. 890).
Lacan’s emphasis on language, the symbolic order, and the divided subject significantly reframed core concepts in Cultural Studies.

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🌸 Feminism and psychoanalysis as a dual break
The conjunction of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism brought radical reconfigurations to how Cultural Studies understands identity and social life.

“It is the couplet post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism which disrupts Cultural Studies, reposing questions about subjectivity, sexuality, the unconscious, representation, language…” (p. 891).
This double intervention forces Cultural Studies to confront dimensions it previously ignored—especially gender and the psychic.

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🧠 The unconscious challenges sociological models of the self
Cultural Studies had long relied on models of the subject shaped by Marxist or anthropological thought. But the Freudian unconscious—especially as reformulated by Lacan—displaces those assumptions.

“There is always… something irretrievably lost, a fundamental displacement” in the process of identity formation (p. 891).
This irreducibility of the unconscious renders simplistic “inside/outside” models of self and culture untenable.

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⚧️ Sexuality enters Cultural Studies via psychoanalysis
Hall critiques Cultural Studies for historically ignoring sexuality and sexual difference, treating cultural subjects as asexual.

“It walked and talked and looked at and attempted to analyse a culture… as if the subjects of culture were unsexed” (p. 891).
Psychoanalysis, especially in feminist contexts, brings sexuality and its unconscious dimensions to the center of cultural analysis.

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👥 Subjectivity is not unified but fragmented and processual
Traditional Cultural Studies conceived of subjects as unified individuals or collective identities. Psychoanalysis breaks this illusion.

“Subjectivity as a constitution… which cannot be formed without fragmentation and displacement” (p. 893).
Rather than being a coherent entity, the subject is a site of division and contradiction—never whole or finished.

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💬 Ideology as representation, not illusion
Marxist theories often described ideology as “false consciousness,” but psychoanalysis reframes ideology as a system of representations.

“The shift from the notion of an illusion to a system of representations… upon which the effectivity of ideology depends” (p. 893).
This emphasizes how subjects internalize ideology not just cognitively but affectively—through unconscious structures of recognition and misrecognition.

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🧩 Language is central to subject formation and cultural life
Building on Lacan, Hall emphasizes that language is not just a medium of communication but the structure through which subjects and meanings are constituted.

“The unconscious is structured like a language… the subject is constituted in and through language” (p. 894).
Language thus becomes foundational to the analysis of culture, identity, and power in post-psychoanalytic Cultural Studies.

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🚧 Critique of Lacanian dogmatism and metaphor becoming doctrine
Although Hall values Lacanian insights, he critiques the dogmatic tendencies within Lacanian theory—especially its transformation of metaphor into rigid principle.

“What began as a set of very important perceptions were transformed into a kind of dogmatic doxology” (p. 894).
This rigid formalism can limit the openness and usefulness of Lacanian thinking.

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⚖️ Need to balance the psychic and the social
Hall warns that the rise of psychoanalysis led some scholars to neglect the social altogether, replacing social critique with subjectivity.

“They still require a theory of subjectivity, but they cannot be replaced by a theory of subjectivity” (p. 895).
Cultural theory must engage both domains—psychic and social—without collapsing one into the other.

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🔥 The internalization of violence complicates political struggle
Psychoanalysis reveals that violence is not merely external or structural—it is internal, part of psychic life.

“Psychic life itself is aggressive and violent… the violence is already in our inside” (p. 896).
This insight complicates political action, challenging simplistic binaries of good/evil or oppressor/oppressed.

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🧭 Towards a politics that recognizes radical subjectivity
Although psychoanalysis helps us understand our inner complicity in domination, it remains unclear how these insights can generate political change.

“What forms of politics and cultural struggle might come out of these new kinds of conceptions… remains an intractable puzzle” (p. 896).
Hall leaves us with a challenge: to rethink both theory and practice in light of the complex interrelations between psyche, power, and culture.

🔍 Redefining the Subject as Fragmented, Not Unified
Hall challenges the humanist conception of a stable, coherent subject prevalent in earlier literary theory. He introduces the psychoanalytic idea of the subject as split, dislocated, and constructed through processes of language and fantasy.

“Subjectivity as a constitution… cannot be formed without fragmentation and displacement” (Hall, 2018, p. 893).
This rethinking aligns with poststructuralist literary theory and changes how characters, narrators, and authors are interpreted.

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🧠 Emphasizing the Unconscious in Cultural and Literary Analysis
Hall insists that the unconscious is a vital domain for understanding culture, ideology, and identity—moving beyond surface meanings.

“The presence of the unconscious means that it is not possible… to accept a sociological… account of how the inside gets outside and the outside gets inside” (p. 891).
This enriches psychoanalytic literary criticism by reaffirming the power of hidden desires and repression in textual production and interpretation.

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🖼️ Transforming Ideology from Illusion to Representation
One of Hall’s most important contributions is shifting the understanding of ideology in literary theory. Rather than a “false consciousness,” ideology is seen as a system of representation that actively shapes subjectivity and meaning.

“The shift from the notion of an illusion to a system of representations… on which the effectivity of ideology depends” (p. 893).
This deepens Marxist literary theory and intersects with post-Althusserian analysis.

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🗣️ Foregrounding Language as Structuring, Not Reflective
Drawing from Lacan, Hall shows that language produces meaning and identity rather than merely expressing them.

“The unconscious is structured like a language… the subject is constituted in and through language” (p. 894).
This insight reinforces structuralist and poststructuralist approaches in literary theory, where language is not transparent but generative.

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⚧️ Introducing Sexual Difference as Central to Cultural and Literary Theory
Hall critiques Cultural Studies—and by extension, literary criticism—for historically ignoring sexuality. He argues that psychoanalysis and feminism force literary theory to engage with sexual difference as a site of meaning and conflict.

“Cultural Studies had absolutely nothing to say about it… as if the subjects of culture were unsexed” (p. 891).
This aligns with feminist psychoanalytic readings, like those by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose.

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💭 Bringing Fantasy into the Analysis of Institutions and Texts
Hall incorporates fantasy—especially sexual and power fantasies—into the core of institutional and cultural analysis. This adds a new dimension to literary theory’s treatment of genre, narrative, and discourse.

“At the centre of institutions are… fantasies of power… without which no proper account… can be given” (p. 892).
In literary terms, this supports deeper readings of symbolic structures in fiction and drama.

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📚 Expanding Cultural Studies to Include the Psychical
Hall expands the scope of Cultural Studies, traditionally focused on the social and historical, to include the psychical and libidinal.

“It is only when psychoanalysis… focuses radically on its own object… that it throws an important, piercing but uneven light” (p. 890).
This shift reorients literary theory toward questions of interiority, trauma, repression, and symbolic meaning.

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🔄 Questioning Smooth Theoretical Synthesis
Hall resists the totalizing integration of psychoanalysis with literary and cultural theory. Instead, he advocates for holding the tension between the psychic and the social.

“They still require a theory of subjectivity, but they cannot be replaced by a theory of subjectivity” (p. 895).
This stance challenges literary theories that seek unified explanatory models, favoring hybridity and contradiction.

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🔥 Challenging the Idea of Pure Political Resistance
By showing that violence and repression are internal as well as external, Hall complicates the idea of ethical purity in political or literary resistance.

“Psychic life itself is aggressive and violent… the violence is already in our inside” (p. 896).
This affects literary theory’s engagement with the political, suggesting that texts and subjects are never outside complicity.

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🧩 Inspiring New Interdisciplinary Methods in Literary Criticism
Hall’s essay bridges psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and semiotics—encouraging interdisciplinary approaches in literary studies.

“Some grasp of the social whole… does require an ability to speak both these languages together in some way” (p. 895).
This opens literary theory to richer, more pluralistic readings.

🌀 Over-Complexity and Theoretical Density
Hall’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis and its abstract language can alienate readers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic discourse.

“What began as a set of very important perceptions were transformed into a kind of dogmatic doxology” (Hall, 2018, p. 894).
📚 Critics argue this dense jargon may obstruct accessibility and interdisciplinary dialogue.

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⚖️ Imbalance Between the Psychic and the Social
Although Hall insists on holding both domains in tension, some critics say the essay leans too far into subjectivity, potentially marginalizing material social structures.

“They still require a theory of subjectivity, but they cannot be replaced by a theory of subjectivity” (p. 895).
🌍 This concern reflects ongoing debates about how much psychoanalysis can explain systemic oppression, class struggle, or political change.

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📉 Difficulty in Generating Political Praxis
Hall himself questions whether psychoanalysis can support political struggle, as it often emphasizes internal contradiction and complicity over clear agency.

“Whether it generates a politics or not, I don’t know… remains an intractable puzzle” (p. 896).
🚫 Critics may see this as undermining radical activism, favoring introspection over action.

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🗣️ Ambiguity in Language and Terminological Slippage
Hall critiques Lacan for turning metaphors into literal claims (e.g., “the unconscious is a language”), yet he relies on similarly slippery formulations in parts of his own argument.

“The enormously suggestive metaphor… becomes… a really concrete established fact” (p. 894).
🔄 This opens his own essay to charges of imprecision.

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🧠 Theoretical Elitism
The reliance on high theory—Lacan, Althusser, Freud—without extensive grounding examples or literary applications may seem elitist or detached from everyday cultural practices.
🎓 Critics from more practice-based traditions might see Hall’s psychoanalytic turn as moving away from grounded empirical Cultural Studies.

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📌 Resistance from Within Cultural Studies
Traditional Cultural Studies emphasized materialism, empiricism, and class; integrating psychoanalysis disrupted this lineage, leading some to view it as a theoretical detour.

Hall acknowledges: “Cultural Studies had absolutely nothing to say about [sexuality]”—but some may argue that its original strengths were diluted in the psychoanalytic turn.

🎯 1. Challenging Scarry’s Generalizations on Beauty

Kacandes opens her article by critiquing Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just for making unsupported generalizations about the “banishment of beauty” from academic discourse.

“It’s not only her repetitive passives that obscure the ‘guilty’ party, it’s also the lack of footnotes” (Kacandes, 2003, p. 157).

She argues that although Scarry raises a valid issue—the marginalization of beauty in scholarship—her framing oversimplifies the debate and lacks critical specificity.

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🧠 2. Cultural Studies Has Never Truly Banished Aesthetics

Contrary to claims that cultural studies marginalizes beauty, Kacandes asserts that foundational thinkers like Gramsci and Williams deeply engaged with aesthetics.

“All of cultural studies has ultimately been a debate with aesthetics” (Davies, 1995, p. 67).

She cites Gramsci’s acknowledgment that art must be judged both ideologically and aesthetically, and Williams’s rejection of binaries between political and aesthetic responses.

“Williams takes pains to stress corporeal markers of the ‘aesthetic’” (Kacandes, 2003, p. 158).

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🌍 3. Embedding Aesthetics in Socio-Historical Context

Kacandes argues that aesthetic experience should be understood through cultural context, not isolated as a purely formal or sensory experience.

“We have to learn to understand the specific elements… which socially and historically determine and signify aesthetic and other situations” (Williams, 1977, p. 157).

She sees this approach as vital to the revitalization of literature teaching.

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🎶 4. Aesthetic Judgment as Social Practice: The Mendelssohn Case

Using Celia Applegate’s study on Mendelssohn’s revival of St. Matthew Passion, Kacandes illustrates how aesthetic value is culturally constructed.

“What factors allowed the same piece of music to be transformed… from something ‘strange’ to ‘a true enthusiasm’?” (Kacandes, 2003, p. 160).

This example highlights that aesthetic appreciation is not timeless or universal, but negotiated within historical contexts.

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📱 5. Secondary Orality and the Crisis of Literary Value

Kacandes incorporates Walter Ong’s idea of secondary orality to explore why students struggle with reading in a media-saturated world.

“We are not ‘oral’ once again, we are ‘secondary oral’ for the first time” (Kacandes, 2003, p. 162).

She argues that cultural shifts in communication have led to declining literacy and, consequently, diminished literary engagement, a problem that must be addressed pedagogically.

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📘 6. Reclaiming the Role of Literature through Cultural Studies

Kacandes defends the teaching of literature in a cultural studies framework that includes aesthetic dimensions.

“What is literature good for and why should students want to learn about it? Insofar as these are genuine questions, I find the answer that ‘literature is beautiful’ to be woefully insufficient” (Kacandes, 2003, p. 163).

She argues that literature’s cultural and emotional functions must be addressed through interdisciplinary, historically grounded analysis.

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📖 7. Aesthetic Response and Trauma: The Case of A Jewish Mother

In analyzing Gertrud Kolmar’s A Jewish Mother, Kacandes introduces a dual method: examining both trauma in and as literature.

“The text… fails to tell the story by eliding, repeating, and fragmenting components of it” (Kacandes, 2003, p. 169).

She highlights how ellipses and stylistic inconsistency evoke trauma: “The ellipses mark the space to which… ‘willed access is denied’” (Caruth, 1995, p. 152).

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💡 8. Beyond Beauty: Cultural Studies as Witnessing

Kacandes argues for a complex form of cultural analysis that recognizes aesthetic features as entry points into societal critique and memory work.

“We, as readers, are witnesses who have a moral obligation to try to understand how… individuals have tried to ‘respond to the state of the world and attempt to act on it’” (Paulson, 2001, p. 119).

Her conclusion insists that aesthetic categories like “beauty” are not ends in themselves but tools to interrogate power, trauma, and identity.

🎨 1. Aesthetic Theory

• Kacandes reclaims aesthetics within literary theory by challenging the binary of “aesthetic vs. political” in academic debates.
• She argues that beauty has not been “banished” by cultural studies, contrary to Elaine Scarry’s claim (Scarry 1999: 57), but is alive through nuanced discussions of form and feeling.
• ✍️ “It is an intellectual disservice to set up scapegoats… I will offer my own version of evidence that ‘beauty’ and aesthetics have not been banished by cultural studies” (p. 157).

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🧩 2. Ideology and Marxist Literary Criticism

• She aligns with Gramsci and Raymond Williams in asserting that literature is always situated within ideological and historical contexts.
• Cultural studies, she insists, is not anti-aesthetic, but deeply rooted in Marxist critique where “aesthetic judgment and ideological awareness coexist” (p. 158).
• 🧠 “Gramsci insisted that it was possible to appreciate the aesthetic merits… even while repudiating the ideology that informs it” (p. 157).

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🧠 3. Cultural Studies

• Kacandes extends cultural studies’ role in literary theory by emphasizing that formal and aesthetic elements are not excluded but central to meaningful cultural critique.
• She uses Applegate’s analysis of Mendelssohn’s revival to show how aesthetic judgment is shaped by social and historical forces (p. 159–160).
• 📍 “To understand [beauty], one must investigate what ‘beauty,’ ‘truth,’ ‘goodness’ meant in a specific culture and time” (p. 160).

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🔊 4. Orality and Literacy (Ong’s Media Theory)

• Introduces Walter Ong’s theory of secondary orality to literary pedagogy, linking media changes to changing relationships with reading and literature.
• She contextualizes the decline in reading as a structural shift in how we communicate—“we are not oral again; we are ‘secondary oral’ for the first time” (p. 162).
• 💬 This challenges literary theory to consider media environment and cognitive shifts caused by technology in analyzing texts.

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💥 5. Trauma Theory

• Kacandes contributes by showing how literature can not only depict trauma but also perform trauma, especially through narrative ellipses, fragmentation, and gaps.
• Analyzing Kolmar’s A Jewish Mother, she claims the text itself enacts trauma, compelling readers to “witness” rather than resolve the trauma (p. 169).
• 🕳️ “The ellipses mark the space to which, as trauma theory puts it, ‘willed access is denied’” (p. 169).

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🗣️ 6. Narratology (Narrated Monologue & Perspective)

• Through free indirect discourse in Kolmar’s novel, Kacandes explores how perspective complicates emotional and aesthetic responses.
• This aligns with narratological approaches that examine how literary voice mediates subjectivity and ambiguity.
• 🔄 “Kolmar’s extensive use of narrated monologue makes it hard to determine what position the text itself is taking” (p. 165).

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💔 7. Kitsch and Sentimentality in Literature

• Kacandes provocatively rehabilitates kitsch, suggesting it can be read not as aesthetic failure, but as a deliberate signal to provoke cultural reflection.
• She urges readers to go beyond judging art as good/bad and instead ask what work it does within a cultural system (p. 166).
• 🎭 “This kind of language ultimately led me to decide that there were numerous aesthetic clues – teasers – that could draw one in” (p. 165).

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🛠️ 8. Literary Value and Ethics

• Finally, Kacandes proposes a moral obligation in literary studies: to serve as witnesses to literature’s role in recording and resisting social trauma and exclusion.
• She frames literary reading as a cultural and ethical practice, not just aesthetic or academic.
• 🌍 “We, as readers, are witnesses who have a moral obligation to try to understand how individuals have tried to ‘respond to the state of the world’” (p. 170).

🔍 Psychoanalysis as a decisive but incomplete interruption in Cultural Studies
Hall argues that psychoanalysis did not merge seamlessly into Cultural Studies, but rather interrupted it, transforming its theoretical foundations. This intervention, however, remains “incomplete,” leaving unresolved tensions.

“The displacements, theoretically and in terms of the forms of study… have been irrevocably transformed by the opening up of the spaces and questions which psychoanalysis poses to it” (Hall, 2018, p. 889).
The essay traces how this disruption reshaped Cultural Studies, especially through the challenges of subjectivity, representation, and the unconscious.

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📚 Only post-Lacanian psychoanalysis had a transformative impact
Hall distinguishes between earlier forms of psychoanalysis and the radical shift brought by Lacan’s rereading of Freud. It was this version that made psychoanalysis relevant to cultural theory.

“The decisive impact in cultural theory has been made by that form of psychoanalysis which arises after the Lacanian rereading of Freud” (p. 890).
Lacan’s emphasis on language, the symbolic order, and the divided subject significantly reframed core concepts in Cultural Studies.

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🌸 Feminism and psychoanalysis as a dual break
The conjunction of post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism brought radical reconfigurations to how Cultural Studies understands identity and social life.

“It is the couplet post-Lacanian psychoanalysis and feminism which disrupts Cultural Studies, reposing questions about subjectivity, sexuality, the unconscious, representation, language…” (p. 891).
This double intervention forces Cultural Studies to confront dimensions it previously ignored—especially gender and the psychic.

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🧠 The unconscious challenges sociological models of the self
Cultural Studies had long relied on models of the subject shaped by Marxist or anthropological thought. But the Freudian unconscious—especially as reformulated by Lacan—displaces those assumptions.

“There is always… something irretrievably lost, a fundamental displacement” in the process of identity formation (p. 891).
This irreducibility of the unconscious renders simplistic “inside/outside” models of self and culture untenable.

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⚧️ Sexuality enters Cultural Studies via psychoanalysis
Hall critiques Cultural Studies for historically ignoring sexuality and sexual difference, treating cultural subjects as asexual.

“It walked and talked and looked at and attempted to analyse a culture… as if the subjects of culture were unsexed” (p. 891).
Psychoanalysis, especially in feminist contexts, brings sexuality and its unconscious dimensions to the center of cultural analysis.

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👥 Subjectivity is not unified but fragmented and processual
Traditional Cultural Studies conceived of subjects as unified individuals or collective identities. Psychoanalysis breaks this illusion.

“Subjectivity as a constitution… which cannot be formed without fragmentation and displacement” (p. 893).
Rather than being a coherent entity, the subject is a site of division and contradiction—never whole or finished.

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💬 Ideology as representation, not illusion
Marxist theories often described ideology as “false consciousness,” but psychoanalysis reframes ideology as a system of representations.

“The shift from the notion of an illusion to a system of representations… upon which the effectivity of ideology depends” (p. 893).
This emphasizes how subjects internalize ideology not just cognitively but affectively—through unconscious structures of recognition and misrecognition.

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🧩 Language is central to subject formation and cultural life
Building on Lacan, Hall emphasizes that language is not just a medium of communication but the structure through which subjects and meanings are constituted.

“The unconscious is structured like a language… the subject is constituted in and through language” (p. 894).
Language thus becomes foundational to the analysis of culture, identity, and power in post-psychoanalytic Cultural Studies.

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🚧 Critique of Lacanian dogmatism and metaphor becoming doctrine
Although Hall values Lacanian insights, he critiques the dogmatic tendencies within Lacanian theory—especially its transformation of metaphor into rigid principle.

“What began as a set of very important perceptions were transformed into a kind of dogmatic doxology” (p. 894).
This rigid formalism can limit the openness and usefulness of Lacanian thinking.

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⚖️ Need to balance the psychic and the social
Hall warns that the rise of psychoanalysis led some scholars to neglect the social altogether, replacing social critique with subjectivity.

“They still require a theory of subjectivity, but they cannot be replaced by a theory of subjectivity” (p. 895).
Cultural theory must engage both domains—psychic and social—without collapsing one into the other.

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🔥 The internalization of violence complicates political struggle
Psychoanalysis reveals that violence is not merely external or structural—it is internal, part of psychic life.

“Psychic life itself is aggressive and violent… the violence is already in our inside” (p. 896).
This insight complicates political action, challenging simplistic binaries of good/evil or oppressor/oppressed.

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🧭 Towards a politics that recognizes radical subjectivity
Although psychoanalysis helps us understand our inner complicity in domination, it remains unclear how these insights can generate political change.

“What forms of politics and cultural struggle might come out of these new kinds of conceptions… remains an intractable puzzle” (p. 896).
Hall leaves us with a challenge: to rethink both theory and practice in light of the complex interrelations between psyche, power, and culture.

🔍 Redefining the Subject as Fragmented, Not Unified
Hall challenges the humanist conception of a stable, coherent subject prevalent in earlier literary theory. He introduces the psychoanalytic idea of the subject as split, dislocated, and constructed through processes of language and fantasy.

“Subjectivity as a constitution… cannot be formed without fragmentation and displacement” (Hall, 2018, p. 893).
This rethinking aligns with poststructuralist literary theory and changes how characters, narrators, and authors are interpreted.

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🧠 Emphasizing the Unconscious in Cultural and Literary Analysis
Hall insists that the unconscious is a vital domain for understanding culture, ideology, and identity—moving beyond surface meanings.

“The presence of the unconscious means that it is not possible… to accept a sociological… account of how the inside gets outside and the outside gets inside” (p. 891).
This enriches psychoanalytic literary criticism by reaffirming the power of hidden desires and repression in textual production and interpretation.

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🖼️ Transforming Ideology from Illusion to Representation
One of Hall’s most important contributions is shifting the understanding of ideology in literary theory. Rather than a “false consciousness,” ideology is seen as a system of representation that actively shapes subjectivity and meaning.

“The shift from the notion of an illusion to a system of representations… on which the effectivity of ideology depends” (p. 893).
This deepens Marxist literary theory and intersects with post-Althusserian analysis.

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🗣️ Foregrounding Language as Structuring, Not Reflective
Drawing from Lacan, Hall shows that language produces meaning and identity rather than merely expressing them.

“The unconscious is structured like a language… the subject is constituted in and through language” (p. 894).
This insight reinforces structuralist and poststructuralist approaches in literary theory, where language is not transparent but generative.

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⚧️ Introducing Sexual Difference as Central to Cultural and Literary Theory
Hall critiques Cultural Studies—and by extension, literary criticism—for historically ignoring sexuality. He argues that psychoanalysis and feminism force literary theory to engage with sexual difference as a site of meaning and conflict.

“Cultural Studies had absolutely nothing to say about it… as if the subjects of culture were unsexed” (p. 891).
This aligns with feminist psychoanalytic readings, like those by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose.

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💭 Bringing Fantasy into the Analysis of Institutions and Texts
Hall incorporates fantasy—especially sexual and power fantasies—into the core of institutional and cultural analysis. This adds a new dimension to literary theory’s treatment of genre, narrative, and discourse.

“At the centre of institutions are… fantasies of power… without which no proper account… can be given” (p. 892).
In literary terms, this supports deeper readings of symbolic structures in fiction and drama.

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📚 Expanding Cultural Studies to Include the Psychical
Hall expands the scope of Cultural Studies, traditionally focused on the social and historical, to include the psychical and libidinal.

“It is only when psychoanalysis… focuses radically on its own object… that it throws an important, piercing but uneven light” (p. 890).
This shift reorients literary theory toward questions of interiority, trauma, repression, and symbolic meaning.

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🔄 Questioning Smooth Theoretical Synthesis
Hall resists the totalizing integration of psychoanalysis with literary and cultural theory. Instead, he advocates for holding the tension between the psychic and the social.

“They still require a theory of subjectivity, but they cannot be replaced by a theory of subjectivity” (p. 895).
This stance challenges literary theories that seek unified explanatory models, favoring hybridity and contradiction.

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🔥 Challenging the Idea of Pure Political Resistance
By showing that violence and repression are internal as well as external, Hall complicates the idea of ethical purity in political or literary resistance.

“Psychic life itself is aggressive and violent… the violence is already in our inside” (p. 896).
This affects literary theory’s engagement with the political, suggesting that texts and subjects are never outside complicity.

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🧩 Inspiring New Interdisciplinary Methods in Literary Criticism
Hall’s essay bridges psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and semiotics—encouraging interdisciplinary approaches in literary studies.

“Some grasp of the social whole… does require an ability to speak both these languages together in some way” (p. 895).
This opens literary theory to richer, more pluralistic readings.

🌀 Over-Complexity and Theoretical Density
Hall’s engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis and its abstract language can alienate readers unfamiliar with psychoanalytic discourse.

“What began as a set of very important perceptions were transformed into a kind of dogmatic doxology” (Hall, 2018, p. 894).
📚 Critics argue this dense jargon may obstruct accessibility and interdisciplinary dialogue.

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⚖️ Imbalance Between the Psychic and the Social
Although Hall insists on holding both domains in tension, some critics say the essay leans too far into subjectivity, potentially marginalizing material social structures.

“They still require a theory of subjectivity, but they cannot be replaced by a theory of subjectivity” (p. 895).
🌍 This concern reflects ongoing debates about how much psychoanalysis can explain systemic oppression, class struggle, or political change.

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📉 Difficulty in Generating Political Praxis
Hall himself questions whether psychoanalysis can support political struggle, as it often emphasizes internal contradiction and complicity over clear agency.

“Whether it generates a politics or not, I don’t know… remains an intractable puzzle” (p. 896).
🚫 Critics may see this as undermining radical activism, favoring introspection over action.

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🗣️ Ambiguity in Language and Terminological Slippage
Hall critiques Lacan for turning metaphors into literal claims (e.g., “the unconscious is a language”), yet he relies on similarly slippery formulations in parts of his own argument.

“The enormously suggestive metaphor… becomes… a really concrete established fact” (p. 894).
🔄 This opens his own essay to charges of imprecision.

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🧠 Theoretical Elitism
The reliance on high theory—Lacan, Althusser, Freud—without extensive grounding examples or literary applications may seem elitist or detached from everyday cultural practices.
🎓 Critics from more practice-based traditions might see Hall’s psychoanalytic turn as moving away from grounded empirical Cultural Studies.

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📌 Resistance from Within Cultural Studies
Traditional Cultural Studies emphasized materialism, empiricism, and class; integrating psychoanalysis disrupted this lineage, leading some to view it as a theoretical detour.

Hall acknowledges: “Cultural Studies had absolutely nothing to say about [sexuality]”—but some may argue that its original strengths were diluted in the psychoanalytic turn.

🧭 1. Two Camps in Cultural Studies: American Pragmatism vs. Continental Theory

Carey draws a foundational line between two philosophical sources within cultural studies: one rooted in American pragmatism (Dewey, James, Rorty) and the other in European poststructuralism (Derrida, Foucault, Althusser).

“Cultural studies… can be simplistically divided… into two broad camps: one that draws primarily upon continental sources… and one that draws primarily upon American sources” (Carey, 1992, p. 56).

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🎯 2. Reclaiming Cultural Studies as a Democratic, Reformist Endeavor

Carey situates himself in the American tradition, advocating for cultural studies that supports liberal democracy, civic engagement, and communal responsibility.

“I have not as yet given up faith in liberal democracy… for an open, nonascriptive basis of community life” (p. 56).

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⚔️ 3. Cultural Studies under Conservative Attack

Cultural studies has become a scapegoat in conservative critiques of academia, particularly in the discourse of “political correctness.”

“Roger Kimball… has identified cultural studies as part of the problem… rather than… part of the solution” (p. 56).
“The conservative critique… has identified cultural studies as part of the ‘problem of higher education’” (p. 58).

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🧩 4. Internal Weaknesses of the Cultural Left

Carey criticizes the Left for lacking a cohesive ideology, becoming overly focused on critique rather than presenting constructive alternatives.

“The Left has a dozen different critiques of ideology; it just does not have an ideology” (p. 67).
“The cultural Left… cannot speak to the general public… because it is jargon besotted… and contemptuous of ordinary people” (p. 67).

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🛠️ 5. The Crisis of Higher Education: Not Political Correctness, But Educational Failure

The real crisis in universities is not ideology but a decline in educational quality and purpose.

“The decadence besetting the academy is not political correctness but a genuine disinterest in education” (p. 58).
“Students approach us… as consumers… ingesting whatever is fashionable and forgettable this semester” (p. 58).

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🧱 6. The Illusion of a Common Culture

Carey challenges both conservative nostalgia for a unified “Western tradition” and radical deconstruction of culture into fragments of race/gender, calling for a richer conception of American cultural experience.

“Cultural studies was not an argument against a common culture but against the simple-minded notion that… American culture was a direct… tributary of… the Greeks and the Bible” (p. 59).

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⚖️ 7. The Over-Reduction of Culture to Race and Gender

Carey critiques the theoretical collapse in cultural studies where economic and structural analysis has been abandoned in favor of identity politics.

“Culture is now reduced to ideology and ideology in turn reduced to race and gender” (p. 60).
“The Left… forgot to develop a political program… that can speak to… citizens” (p. 67).

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📉 8. Professionalization and Instrumentalization of Education

He argues that both liberal arts and professional programs have become overly utilitarian, losing sight of education as a civic and moral good.

“The liberal arts have… become professionalized… [and] the curriculum increasingly reflects… the professional interests… of faculty” (p. 69).
“Unless we can agree that education has purposes that are intrinsic to it… the university will be exploited… by extrinsic purposes” (p. 71).

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🧠 9. The Debate as Theatrical, Not Transformational

The political correctness debate, Carey insists, is more performative than substantive, failing to address the actual problems of the university.

“This is a debate that confuses garnering publicity and producing celebrity with making political gains” (p. 63).
“The university described in the literature of political correctness is a fantasy” (p. 63).

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🚨 10. Who Loses? The Students

Ultimately, the victims of these ideological failures are students—especially disadvantaged ones—who are promised transformative education but receive diluted curricula.

“The big losers in this great debate are the students and through them the country at large” (p. 72).
“It is the newcomers to higher education who are the big losers” (p. 72).

🧠 1. Cultural Studies & Literary Theory

Carey affirms and critiques the foundational assumptions of cultural studies as a form of literary and critical theory, helping expand its scope beyond textual analysis to institutional critique.

“Cultural studies arose as a revolt against formalism and was anti-positivist and anti-foundational: a form of both interpretive and critical theory” (p. 58).
✅ Contribution: Carey reasserts cultural studies as a method for interrogating power, ideology, and meaning in both texts and institutions.

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🧭 2. Pragmatism vs. Poststructuralism

He introduces a distinctly American pragmatist approach to cultural and literary theory, contrasting it with the European poststructuralist tradition.

“I take myself to be part of the Dewey group… because… I have not as yet given up faith in liberal democracy” (p. 56).
✅ Contribution: Carey repositions literary theory within a pragmatic, reformist framework rooted in experience and democratic ideals.

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🧱 3. Hegemony & Ideology Critique (Gramscian Theory)

Carey evaluates how cultural studies has handled Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, stressing the need for it to address broad civic and moral concerns beyond identity categories.

“Hegemonic analysis must move beyond ideology to culture and recognize that human interests cannot be exhausted by any social category” (p. 61).
✅ Contribution: Expands literary theory’s engagement with hegemony toward inclusive civic imagination, not just ideological critique.

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🧩 4. Identity Politics and Literary Criticism

He critiques the reduction of cultural analysis to identity categories, warning that literary theory risks losing its broader cultural relevance.

“Race and gender have assumed a position as the new ‘base’… Ideology has swallowed culture” (p. 60).
✅ Contribution: Warns literary theory against becoming narrowly essentialist, encouraging a return to contextually rich, socially responsive analysis.

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🔍 5. Anti-Canon & Curriculum Reform

Engaging the political correctness debate, Carey implicitly critiques the binary of canon vs. anti-canon in literary studies, calling for deeper reflection on curricular politics.

“Curriculum reform… has virtually nothing to do with what is going on in most college classrooms” (p. 63).
✅ Contribution: Reorients literary curricular debates toward substantive educational and institutional realities rather than symbolic gestures.

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🏛️ 6. Reimagining the “Common Culture”

Carey challenges both conservative and radical accounts of cultural heritage, advocating a historically grounded but evolving notion of shared culture.

“Cultural studies… was not an argument against a common culture but against… a simple-minded notion” (p. 59).
✅ Contribution: Offers literary theory a model for balancing tradition and pluralism without retreating to essentialism or relativism.

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📉 7. Institutional Critique of the Academy

He bridges literary theory with critical university studies, exposing the commodification of education and its impact on cultural and literary discourse.

“The university has pretty much disappeared as an independent and unitary institution” (p. 68).
✅ Contribution: Elevates the role of institutional critique within literary theory, encouraging scholars to reflect on their positionality.

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🗣️ 8. Language, Tropes, and Political Rhetoric

Carey critiques the way ideological discourse (including literary theory) becomes disconnected from real-world communication, saturated with jargon.

“We seem to be surprised that [ideology] speaks in tropes and hyperbole rather than flattened academic discourse” (p. 58).
✅ Contribution: Calls for clearer, more engaged forms of literary criticism that resonate beyond academic circles.

⚖️ 1. Oversimplification of Identity Politics

Critics argue that Carey downplays the importance of race, gender, and sexuality by portraying them as narrow or reductive concerns within cultural studies.

🧩 He critiques identity as a “new base” replacing economic analysis, but this risks erasing the lived realities of systemic oppression.

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🧵 2. Nostalgia for Civic Unity

His call for a shared “common culture” is seen by some as nostalgic or idealistic, failing to reckon with the structural inequalities that fragment cultural unity in the first place.

🏛️ The idea of “neighbors lending lawnmowers” may sound inclusive, but it presumes a level of privilege and stability not afforded to all communities.

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📉 3. Lack of Engagement with Contemporary Theory

Carey’s critique of poststructuralism and theory-heavy approaches may dismiss valuable insights from deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism.

📚 His framing of theorists like Derrida or Foucault as distant from public life overlooks how these theories have informed real-world activism and critique.

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🔒 4. Overemphasis on Institutional Decline

Some scholars argue Carey blames universities too heavily for cultural decline without acknowledging broader neoliberal economic forces.

🏫 His claim that the university has “become a balance sheet” (p. 68) is valid but not unique to the academy—it reflects wider capitalist transformations.

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🧠 5. Dismissal of Theoretical Rigor

Carey’s pragmatist disdain for jargon can be read as anti-intellectual or populist, limiting the capacity of scholarship to push conceptual boundaries.

💬 Calling theory “flattened academic discourse” may resonate rhetorically, but it risks alienating rigorous critical traditions.

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📚 6. False Dichotomy Between Theory and Practice

He sometimes draws a sharp line between academic theory and real-world problems, but many scholars see this as a false divide.

🔄 The best of cultural studies—Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Judith Butler—has always linked theory to lived experience and activism.

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🧩 7. Underestimation of Right-Wing Culture Wars

While Carey critiques both Left and Right, some argue he underplays the strategic, well-funded nature of conservative attacks on the humanities.

🎯 His suggestion that the Left “deserves to lose” risks validating coordinated disinformation campaigns against academic freedom.

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🧭 8. Idealization of American Pragmatism

His celebration of Dewey and Rorty may seem too rooted in American exceptionalism, potentially ignoring global intellectual developments.

🌍 Cultural studies is international and transdisciplinary—Carey’s American framing may limit its scope and relevance globally.

🔑 Main Ideas with Supporting Quotations

• English Studies Are in a State of Flux, Not Crisis
  • Frith notes the paradox of English studies: it’s institutionally strong but intellectually unsettled:

“There isn’t a crisis in any straightforward sense… Nonetheless, in the last twenty years literature departments have been unsettled by uncertainties” (Frith, 1991, p. 2).

• Cultural Studies Has Redefined English Departments
  • English studies have expanded to include media, gender, race, and popular culture:

“What is now offered in many ‘English’ departments… would be better described as discourse analysis, or text analysis, or cultural studies” (Frith, 1991, p. 4).

• Origins of Cultural Studies Are Class-Based and Political
  • Early cultural studies responded to elite literary traditions by incorporating working-class culture and media:

“Literature described a narrow band of experience for a narrow social group” (Frith, 1991, p. 5).

• The Rise of Theory Brought Politics into English Studies
  • Feminist and poststructuralist critiques challenged the literary canon and demanded ideological analysis:

“The effect (a ’68 effect) was to politicise English studies” (Frith, 1991, p. 6).

• Cultural Studies Appealed to Market Pressures and Institutional Needs
  • English departments adopted cultural studies partly to justify their relevance:

“English departments had to restate their purpose… persuade academic colleagues of their importance” (Frith, 1991, p. 6).

• Expansion of the Canon Doesn’t Always Mean Transformation
  • Frith critiques how even radical changes in curriculum risk becoming institutionalized:

“Literary theory… absorbed into English departments not as a form of woodworm… but as a new scholasticism” (Frith, 1991, p. 8).

• Definitions of Culture Are Shifting Nationally
  • Governmental and arts institutions increasingly treat pop culture as legitimate culture:

“The British Council’s sudden interest in ‘cultural studies’… clearly meaning an attention to ‘low’ as well as to high culture” (Frith, 1991, p. 9).

• Debates on National Identity and Canon Are Politically Charged
  • Conservatives fear cultural studies undermine national cohesion and traditional values:

“The transmission of the culture that unites… is faltering” (Will as cited in Frith, 1991, p. 11).

• The Notion of Literary Transcendence Is Historically and Socially Constructed
  • What is called “great literature” often excludes minority voices and serves elite identities:

“‘National identity’ is a class, gender and racial identity” (Frith, 1991, p. 13).

• Cultural Studies Challenges Academic Elitism But Risks Losing Aesthetic Judgment
  • Frith warns that critical rigor may be replaced with political checklists:

“Nowhere… is there room to ask whether a book… is any good or what the answer might mean” (Frith, 1991, p. 17).

• Popular Culture and Literature Are Interwoven in Contemporary Narratives
  • Examples from fiction show how pop music and mass media shape sensibility:

“For both writers… the point is precisely to follow the ways in which sensibilities are shaped by pop culture” (Frith, 1991, p. 24).

• The Role of Experience and Identity in Reading Is Complex
  • Frith challenges the simplification of reading as vicarious empathy or mere representation:

“Is literary experience the equivalent of any other sort of experience?” (Frith, 1991, p. 23).

🎭 Cultural Studies

• 📌 Frith positions cultural studies as a transformative force within literary studies, expanding English beyond the traditional literary canon to include media, popular culture, and everyday texts.

“What is now offered in many ‘English’ departments… would be better described as discourse analysis, or text analysis, or cultural studies” (p. 4).

• 📌 Emphasizes the democratization of literature, arguing that cultural studies allows inclusion of marginalized voices (women, working-class, racial minorities).

“Adding ‘suppressed’ women’s texts or Afro-American writing to reading lists means that history reenters the domain of literary study” (p. 7).

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🗳️ Marxist Theory / Ideology Critique

• 🧭 Frith discusses how literature reflects and resists dominant ideologies, reshaping literature as a space of ideological struggle rather than pure aesthetic value.

“To treat literary studies as cultural studies is to treat literature as ideology… the question for students becomes how a fiction works to reproduce (or resist) dominant values” (p. 18).

• 📉 Critiques the market-driven shift in education, noting how neoliberal forces push literary studies to justify itself through “transferable skills.”

“The impact of cultural studies… can also only be understood as a consequence of the impact of free market ideology on the education system” (p. 6).

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♀️ Feminist Literary Criticism

• 💡 Frith acknowledges feminist challenges to canonical authority, helping validate literary studies that include gendered experience and critique.

“A political dissatisfaction… hence, for example, the feminist critique of taken-for-granted tables of literary merit” (p. 5).

• 📚 Supports inclusion of women’s texts as ‘representative’ writing, recognizing literature as a vehicle for identity and resistance.

“Experience re-emerges… in the concept of ‘representative’ writing – women’s writing representing the female experience…” (p. 23).

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🕳️ Poststructuralism / Deconstruction

• ❓ Questions the possibility of fixed meaning and authority in literary criticism, aligning with poststructuralist concerns.

“Theory already seems to have been absorbed… not as a form of woodworm… but as a new scholasticism” (p. 8).

• 📎 Frith notes the conservative backlash to deconstruction, portraying it as a destabilizing force that undermines national and cultural unity.

“So-called literary theory mocks the very idea of ‘truth’… students are now compelled to read ‘politically correct’ feminist and black and gay ‘literature’” (p. 11).

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🌐 Postcolonial Theory

• 🌍 Touches on how literary curriculum can reinforce or challenge national identity, a core concern in postcolonial theory.

“The issue that faces literature departments is not the place of ‘theory’ as such, but how to respond to a general cultural tendency towards populism and relativism” (p. 10).

• ✈️ Acknowledges multiculturalism and globalization in education, even quoting curriculum concerns over including “works from different cultures” (p. 12).

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💬 Reader-Response Theory

• 📖 Critiques the suppression of reader experience in favor of rigid theoretical applications, calling for attention to literary engagement.

“Teachers are apt to be dismissive of the ‘personal response’… but cultural studies teachers want to map texts onto people” (p. 23).

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🎨 Aesthetic Theory

• 🎭 Warns that aesthetic value is being replaced by political readings, cautioning against losing sight of literature’s formal and emotional dimensions.

“Discrimination is taught as a political rather than as an aesthetic act” (p. 17).

• 📌 Calls to revive attention to beauty, ambiguity, and form, aligning with critics like Northrop Frye.

“Culture also describes an aesthetic sensibility… we need to draw from literature as Raymond Williams suggested in his concept of ‘a structure of feeling’” (p. 19).