Stopping Cultural Studies

Abstract

For those of us who were looking to leave the canonical home of literary studies in the late twentieth century, cultural studies was a hitchhiker's dream. Fresh from one crossing?the Atlantic?it promised another one: a journey beyond the then current horizons of literary study. For those who climbed aboard, cultural studies offered a way to make good on the poststructuralist insight that language and other symbolic systems play a constitutive role in the production of meaning; rather suddenly, there were few objects in the world that could not be usefully read as texts. Cultural studies also allowed us to overcome the limitations of a literary study that restricted itself to literary history, author-centered study, and various spe cies of formalism (genre theory, close reading, rhetorical analysis) to de cipher the meaning of the literary work. It demonstrated that discourses of knowledge (like literary studies) could not be separated from effects of power (Foucault). Finally, cultural studies aimed not to abandon literature but rather to inscribe literature into the amorphous but expansive term "culture." Because feminist and British Marxist cultural studies understood culture as a contested terrain (of the high and low, elite and popular, hege monic and emergent, spiritual and material), the term "culture" gave our critical interventions an immanent political valence. Not only would the horizons of literary study expand, but what was done within them would somehow be political.1 If being political is to participate actively in the processes of change, then