NP readership (was...

[Terrance]

owen j mcgrann wrote:
> 
> i can't claim to be anything remotely close to an expert in marxist or
> feminist literary criticism, but i have read marx, several feminist
> thinkers, and advocates of both schools of literary criticism.  i don't
> subscribe to either school, but grant that both have important insights
> into possible textual meanings.  my professor was simply an arrogant
> pseud-intellectual snob who indeed insisted that beowulf was a marxist and
> feminist text rather than presenting marxist or feminist critiques.

Was this course taught in an English Department or in a Cultural Studies
Department? 
Maybe there is no English Department? Maybe it is been divided and
conquered? Maybe there is no Classics Department? No Comparative
Literature Department? Maybe the professor is not a professor of English
Literature? Not a professor of OE or ME or Poetry? Maybe she is not a
pseud-intellectual snob, maybe she is like many professors today, a
cultural studies professor who majored not literature or English, but
politics. 

At your school, is English, be it OE, ME (Sir Gawain's & Chaucer's),
Modern English, Postmodern English, studied not as literature but as the
shattering intellectual locus in our semantic epoch? 


I can imagine reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight here on the
Pynchon List. From Doug we would get a Christian/Political  reading.
Imagine that! Foucauldians would not be silenced, they would surely take
up the issue of authorship. Marxist could bring in literary production
and demonstrate how Chaucer, for purely capital reasons is the lesser
poet despite and in spite of his multinational dominance. I would
probably post under a persona, probably "Nobody", an obscure and cryptic
allusion to Homer. 

Cultural studies foregrounds the social structures and analyzes the
social purposes that undergird and shape all forms of cultural
representation and practice.

Initially enabled by the work of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, who
"turned" the critical mirror to  political reflections and some say the
logic by which culture was divorced from politics. 

Cultural studies has both energized, divided, conquered, dismantled,
destroyed, eliminated,  English Departments and other departments too.
Can it heal itself? Will it 
stitch up the wounds it has inflicted. More importantly, will it do what
it says it must, prepare students for the global market, the postmodern
world? Should it? Well, it is this  objective that is most important to
the past/present/future of cultural studies, for without it, cultural
studies is stripped of its potential to effect political change. And,
that is what CS is all about. Not literature. Not English. Not Chaucer
or Pynchon or Plato or novels or plays or poems, but politics. 

Does your school have political science department?