cultural criticism essay definition

Why cultural criticism matters

Cultural criticism is journalism. And in an era when fewer outlets support it, we need more of it, not less

by Emily St. James

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I’ve been thinking about The Hateful Eight a lot lately.

There’s no real good reason for this, except that the movie, which came out in 2015 and is Quentin Tarantino’s most recent film, takes place in a kind of miserable, snow-covered hell, making it one of those non-Christmas films that still feels most appropriate to break out at the end of the year.

The movie was one of Tarantino’s lowest earners at the box office, and it hasn’t had the long tail that many of his other films have enjoyed in the cultural conversation. If Tarantino has ever made a movie that’s been largely forgotten, it’s The Hateful Eight .

And yet I can’t seem to shake it, over three years after I first saw it.

I didn’t think much of the movie at the time . Filmed largely on one set, where eight characters gab and gab and gab at each other until the bloodshed begins, the nearly three-hour film is an endless series of provocations by Tarantino that toy with big dividing lines around race, class, and especially gender in America, without tipping its cap toward what it really thinks.

• The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino's new film, is a deeply interesting failure

It’s a nasty, ugly movie, and it’s all but impossible to tell if Tarantino is reveling in that nastiness and ugliness (which he does from time to time, as in his 2007 movie Death Proof ) or depicting it so that we might reflect on our own nastiness and ugliness (which he did in his 2012 movie Django Unchained , whose core goal seems to be forcing white Americans to confront their ancestors’ role in the institution of slavery).

The Hateful Eight is just mean , and it feels like the work of someone who looked around at America and concluded that it was a land full of angry, spiteful people who would be more willing to burn their own lives to the ground than admit either their own sins or the sins of their country. It’s an apocalyptic story, even though it’s set in the Old West, about a country trapped in a cabin with itself and tilting toward murder.

In 2015, it played like Tarantino sticking his tongue out at you from the movie screen. But in 2018, it plays like a prophecy I missed at the time.

The two years since the 2016 election have been disastrous for the continued employment of cultural critics and journalists

The last two years have not been particularly great for cultural criticism and culture writing more generally. The twin pressures of a political situation that has a tendency to gobble up all available media oxygen and the increased centrality of review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (to the degree that movie studios routinely blame bad Rotten Tomatoes scores for their box office failures) have pushed more and more media companies to cut back on culture writing.

Often, these cuts have come to pass through the outright downsizing of culture-writing staffs. Buzzfeed dismissed four culture writers and editors in late 2017 (though it still employs the terrific critic Alison Willmore) and its culture-oriented podcast team in 2018. In July 2018, many staff members of The A.V. Club, perhaps the internet’s longest-running outlet focused solely on pop culture, took buyouts as part of an ongoing effort by the site’s corporate parent, Gizmodo Media Group, to trim costs. In October, veteran music publication The Fader laid off its most senior employees .

But some publications simply ceased to publish culture writing altogether, when they weren’t going out of business entirely. In particular, independent newspapers like the Village Voice, an important incubator of tremendous cultural writing for decades, shuttered completely , while its connected Voice Media has ceased film and TV coverage entirely as of December 31, 2018. Similarly, the website Mic has more or less been stripped for parts .

The above is not intended as an exhaustive list. Many, many more publications have cut cultural journalism either in part or in whole. And these job losses are often doled out piecemeal — a layoff here, or a position left unfilled after a departure there. The larger picture can be easy to miss unless you happen to notice culture writers announcing they’ve been laid off on Twitter or are a freelancer trying to pitch to an ever-shrinking pool of outlets. But the pool is shrinking, drip by drip.

It would be one thing if some publications were cutting cultural journalists, but those cultural journalists were still able to find jobs elsewhere. But over the past two years, in numerous discussions I’ve had with journalists at all levels of the cultural journalism ecosystem, it’s become more and more clear that the jobs simply aren’t there.

If you look beyond publications that have intentionally reduced the number of culture writers on their staffs, you’ll find many that have curtailed hiring around culture writing — often in favor of expanding political coverage. They’ve either mostly held pat with culture hiring since the 2016 election, or they’ve opted not to fill positions that opened because someone left, shifting those resources toward political writing.

That’s not to say that no one has hired culture writers of late. But for the most part, in 2017 and 2018, from major newspapers to tiny websites, anyone with enough money to hire new journalists usually wasn’t putting it toward an expanded culture section.

On the one hand, I get this. If I were in charge of a major publication, I would probably be hiring political reporters, too. But on the other hand, cultural criticism is important — vitally so. Sure, it’s how I earna paycheck, but long before I got into this line of work, great cultural journalism gave me other ways of looking at and understanding the world, which is core to journalism’s mission statement. We need cultural criticism not just to tell us which movies to go see and which ones to avoid, but to tell us things we already knew but didn’t know how to express. If reporting can explain the world to us, cultural criticism can explain us to us.

How our pop culture can offer a dim vision of where we might be headed, explained by the rise of Nazism in the early 20th century

One of the foremost critical texts ever written is Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler . Kracauer, a film scholar and critic, escaped his native Germany for France as the Nazis rose to power, then escaped France for the US in early 1941, after the Nazis had conquered the country.

Kracauer is associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxists who attempted to tackle questions of how better to build societies, after finding the various structures proposed in the early 20th century sorely lacking (this is an impossibly brief summary, but if you’re interested in the details or just writing and thought in general, you should read more about the Frankfurt School — try the solid history Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries ). But From Caligari to Hitler is concerned less with questions of how to build societies than it is with how societies build and conceptualize themselves via the dream logic of movies.

Kracauer starts from a seemingly self-evident premise: German expressionist filmmakers (like Robert Wiene, who made the 1920 classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , which gives the book its title) created startlingly artistic statements unlike any others in the rest of the world, shot through with a dark, foreboding sense of impending doom, which paired well with the rise of fascism slowly bubbling away in German society in the ‘20s and early ‘30s.

But Kracauer goes one step further, positing that both these films and the oft-forced cheerfulness of the films that were made after numerous central figures in expressionist movements departed for Hollywood are early psychological manifestations of something within German culture that made Nazism inevitable. He argues that films aren’t just documents of a culture’s values and chosen narrative tropes, but a kind of document of a culture’s subconscious, one that filmmakers often don’t know that they’re making.

Kracauer has a couple of explanations for why he thinks films are so vital to understanding a culture’s psyche, both of which could presumably be applied to television, video games, and maybe even pop music as well.

The first is that while there are always directors or producers “in charge” of a given film, it is inevitably the work of many, many artists — and the more people involved, the more accurately it reflects a culture’s buried hopes. Even if the corporations that make and release films are mostly interested in turning profits, Kracauer suggests, the best way for them to do so is to reflect things that a culture either badly wants to be true or deeply identifies with on some level.

The second is that films address themselves to “the anonymous multitude.” Writes Kracauer in his introduction:

What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions — those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness. ... Owing to diverse camera activities, cutting and many special devices, films are able, and therefore obliged, to scan the whole visible world. ... In the course of their spatial conquests, films of fiction and films of fact alike capture innumerable components of the world they mirror: huge mass displays, casual configurations of human bodies and inanimate objects, and an endless succession of unobtrusive phenomena. As a matter of fact, the screen shows itself particularly concerned with the unobtrusive, the normally neglected. ... That films particularly suggestive of mass desires coincide with outstanding box-office successes would seem a matter of course. But a hit may cater only to one of many coexisting demands, and not even to a very specific one. In her paper on the methods of selection of films to be preserved by the Library of Congress, Barbara Deming elaborates upon this point: “Even if one could figure out ... which were the most popular films, it might turn out that in saving those at the top, one would be saving the same dream over and over again ... and losing other dreams, which did not happen to appear in the most popular individual pictures but did appear over and over again in a great number of cheaper, less popular pictures.”

Kracauer spends the rest of his book providing a long, in-depth overview of German cinema from its inception to the reign of the Nazis, from pre-World War I examples to filmmakers like Leni Riefenstahl. But his central thesis holds true: Every film, even one of more marginal success, tells you something about the culture that produced it, and the more knowledge you have of how films are made, of how they can create false narratives we desperately want to be true, and of how they intersect with other forms of philosophy and thought, the more you can understand how they serve as signposts toward whatever is to come next.

Kracauer’s methods can be applied to our current pop culture — and the most astute cultural critics often do so

Kracauer, of course, was writing his book after the end of World War II. Nazism had been defeated, and German cinema was knocked back by the end of the war as much as everything else in the country. And his timing exposes one of the issues with these sorts of psychological readings — they predict the future, but only if you know what the future looks like already. Which is to say: They are often more useful in hindsight.

I suspect this is why I’ve been thinking so much about The Hateful Eight and its provocative statements about the dark heart of America as 2018 comes to a close; I’ve also been thinking about American Sniper and True Detective and Girls and a host of other entertainments that seemed to herald some sort of budding culture war in the first half of the 2010s with the discussions and debates they started, even as the sleek self-satisfaction of left-leaning media figures in those same years insisted that America was inevitably going to keep pushing further leftward, just very gradually. Demographics had solved everything!

What is important to note here is that the psychologically predictive elements of the works listed above (and numerous others — one could make an argument of this sort surrounding the superhero films of Marvel and DC’s movie studios, for instance ) exist independent of their actual quality. The popular understanding of what a critic does is that a critic tells you whether something is good or bad. But that is the least interesting part of a critic’s job, when all is said and done, because two critics can see the same movie, agree largely on its strengths and flaws, then weight them very differently in their heads .

The true role of a critic is to pull apart the work, to delve into the marrow of it, to figure out what it is trying to say about our society and ourselves. You can love a work and think its politics are deeply problematic; you can believe something is terrible yet offers some accidentally acute insights about the way the world works.

To choose two examples from my list above: I think the second season of True Detective (which was released in the summer of 2015) is an almost unwatchable misfire, a cluttered mess that never once shows any understanding of how to tell a complicated crime story in the time allotted to it. But it’s also one of the more insightful series of its particular generation when it comes to questions of how broken capitalist systems turn people into literal spare parts, exploitable cogs that can be hammered into place and treated like shit because they have no real value as human beings, just as pieces of the larger system. In this fashion, it anticipates more recent TV shows like Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale , in addition to so many debates we’ve had around politics and populism since it aired.

Girls , meanwhile, remains one of my favorite shows of the decade, but in 2018, it’s much harder to read as anything other than solipsistic. In 2012, when the series debuted, it was easier for at least some critics (myself included) to defend the way Girls ’ protagonists were almost fatally blinkered when it came to the world around them.

Over the course of the show’s six seasons (concluding in 2017), the characters did “grow up,” but their growing up involved so little actual struggle or conflict that it seemed as if the show was unaware of any person who existed outside of online comments sections or the pages of the New Yorker. Its greatest blinders were always to its own characters’ economic and racial privileges, and while it was sometimes aware of that, it was too often not.

• Duck Dynasty and Girls, from beginning to end, reflected a splintered America

And that unawareness is an important puzzle piece in a larger picture of how everything that America would go through in 2016 and beyond was already being stretched to a breaking point in pop culture, which embraced antiheroes who nonetheless exuded a kind of masculine code of ethics all over the place, a kind of dim harbinger of the man in the Oval Office.

None of this is to say that all culture writing should be about Donald Trump. Far from it. That particular rag has been wrung dry. Indeed, many of the most popular works of the past year, both commercially and critically, have been about building better worlds, about utopian ideals, about how great it would be to live in Wakanda (so long as you were in the ruling class), or about how Gilead or the afterlife of The Good Place must be radically altered to create a new, more just way of living.

Once we know where we’re going, all of this will make more sense. But culture writing isn’t about predicting the future — it’s about predicting the present.

Culture writing can help better explain a vast, sometimes contradictory society

When I make the above argument in favor of cultural criticism to journalistic colleagues who deal in what might be dubbed the “hard sciences” of journalism — data-driven, boots-on-the-ground reporting — I am always aware that it sounds just a little fantastical. And there have been many times that I and my critical brethren have just plumb missed something burbling away in the national subconscious. Few critics looked at the pop culture of the early 2010s and said, “Yep, a culture war’s brewing,” even if it seems blindingly obvious in hindsight.

You can attribute at least some of missing that particular boat to the geographical concentration of cultural critics in New York and Los Angeles (where I live). The homogeneity of critics — too many of us are white, too many of us are male, and too many of us live on one of the coasts — is a real problem that needs to be corrected sooner, rather than later, if we are to better understand the dreams a multicultural nation is having, sometimes in parallel and sometimes in bloody intersection.

Perhaps this is why The Hateful Eight looms so large for me even still. It is a movie that juts America’s lofty ideals right up against its bloody reality, a movie that understood better than most that the precipice we all stood on in 2015 was very different from the one we thought we were on. It’s an ugly movie, sure, but maybe it’s an ugly world. Maybe it was telling the truth, and hoping otherwise is a fool’s errand. It embraces contradiction, in a way that still unsettles.

And yet it is not a final answer, and no review of it will ultimately be a final answer. The movie’s meaning — all movies’ meanings — changes with time, as we change with time. No one piece of culture writing can explain us in all our contradictions. That’s why we need more, not less, of the form. There is probably too much stuff out there to ever get any accurate read of exactly what America is worked up about now — except, maybe, in broader trend pieces — but every new film, TV show, book, game, and album is a new brick in the wall, a new argument to be made.

We’re a country of angry, outsized reactions to any fanboy project that dares cast a woman or person of color in its lead, but also one that makes movies like Black Panther and Crazy Rich Asians and even BlacKkKlansman successful box office hits. We’re a country of Aquaman and The Mule and On the Basis of Sex — to choose three radically different movies, with very different political views, that were sold out for evening showings at my favorite multiplex a few nights ago. We’re a country where everything from The Big Bang Theory to The Good Place , from Game of Thrones to This Is Us , can be a major hit.

The fact that criticism is, on some level, the work of those of us who sit in a dark room and try to interpret dreams will probably always feel a little suspect to some of my colleagues, but it shouldn’t. It is just as deeply reported, just as astutely interpreted, just as rigorously thought through as any other form of journalism, just in a very different form, one that can sound fantastical but one that has centuries of thought and theory backing it up, all the way back to ancient Greece .

Cultural criticism isn’t necessary just so we know what movie to see when we head to the multiplex. It’s necessary because it is part of how we begin to understand both ourselves and this weird, vibrant, crumbling country we are all a part of.

Better than any data set I can think of, it tells us where we’ve been, where we are, and maybe even where we’re going. It’s vital to any publication, to any newsroom, and to any well-rounded news diet. Now, in 2019, let’s see even more of it.

7 great pieces of culture writing from 2018

If you’re excited to explore some great culture writing from the past year, here are seven of my favorite pieces (one of which isn’t in written form at all) digging into pop culture in all its forms.

“Ten Years Later, The Dark Knight and its vision of guilt still resonate,” Bilge Ebiri for the Village Voice

It’s hard to write a retrospective on a movie or TV show everybody has seen, but Ebiri digs deep into what The Dark Knight said about the late George W. Bush era, then shows how the movie pointed to what was to come.

Where then does that leave Gotham? The Dark Knight ends with the city living a lie, but seemingly out of the darkness. (At least for now, since The Dark Knight Rises would show the disastrous consequences of Gordon and Bruce’s duplicity.) And yet it’s hard to look at this movie, made at a time of violent divisiveness in the country over issues of surveillance, of complicity, of violence born of fear, and not see a snapshot of a society — not Gotham’s fictional one, but our own, real-life one — ready to plunge into the abyss of fragmentation, of self-serving chaos. Maybe that’s why Nolan’s film now feels so poignant. Today, it’s hard not to feel that humanity’s worst impulses have won, that those without conscience or shame were allowed to sow endless dissension, hatred, and cruelty, using our own sense of guilt against us.

“2018’s big horror film trend: inherited trauma,” Britt Hayes for ScreenCrush

I pitched this piece, then watched as Hayes wrote a far better version of it than I could have mustered. It’s a great example of noticing a trend in entertainment, then following it to its logical conclusion.

There is a house. Inside is a miniature dollhouse filled with perfect replicas of a life that could be, or might’ve been. Maybe it’s a better version of that life, but it is silent and still — unlike the people around it, who are consumed by trauma. Curiously, four of this year’s most poignant and effective horror stories — Hereditary , The Haunting of Hill House , Sharp Objects , and Halloween — are thematically connected by their exploration of familial mental illness and inherited trauma, and by these miniature dollhouses, which appear in some form in every single one.

“Why I’ve had trouble buying Hollywood’s vision of girl power,” Alison Willmore for Buzzfeed

Pop feminism was everywhere in 2018, and Willmore starts from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg action figure to dissect just why so much pop feminism feels so empty and consumerist.

2018 has been as rich with slogany, simplified women’s empowerment callouts as it has been with reasons for women to be filled with rage and dread, stretching way beyond the merch and mild cinema that’s come to surround Ginsburg. This kind of messaging has shown up all over the movies this year, and television too, from Ocean’s 8 to the Kevin Spacey-less final season of House of Cards. Some of it was sincerely meant, some of it was calculated as hell, and most of it left me in the dust.

“Hulu’s The Bisexual is here to make every queer a little bit uncomfortable,” Heather Hogan for Autostraddle

This is, ostensibly, just a review of a TV show, but it’s also so much more, pushing past merely telling you whether the show in question is good or not to interrogate Hogan’s own responses to it.

During the first two episodes of The Bisexual , I kept thinking, “There’s not a single queer person on the internet who isn’t going to be offended by this in some way” — and by the end of the season, I understood that was the point.

“ Adventure Time finale review: One of the greatest TV shows ever had a soulful, mind-expanding conclusion,” Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

Sometimes, writing critically just means celebrating something you loved. Franich offers a sweetly tempered eulogy to a beloved TV series in this extended breakdown of the finale.

Sans commercials, Monday’s “giantsized” final episode clocked 44 minutes, 47 seconds, the precise length of time it takes your average prestige drama to burp. The series finale — variously titled “The Ultimate Adventure” or “Come Along With Me” — found time for two epic showdowns, three epic kisses, two musical numbers, one gigantic personification of universal chaos. This was a last explosion of imagination, every millisecond a subreddit waiting to happen. Eight years is a healthy run, but the propulsive energy suggested a brilliant-but-canceled oddity, an epic saga with an episode order cut halfway through season 3, an “ending” crammed with ideas that could’ve engine-fueled another five seasons.

“CBS’s toxic culture isn’t just behind the scenes. It’s in the shows that it makes,” Kathryn VanArendonk for Vulture

VanArendonk uses deep knowledge of CBS crime procedurals to point to how a culture of sexual harassment was allowed to flourish not just at the company but in the shows it put on the air.

The stories CBS puts out into the world are the ones that reflect the interests of the people who make them, and what results is a self-perpetuating cycle. When we as CBS viewers watch stories that valorize male ego and male judgment, we’re bathed in a TV landscape that teaches us that men who have power are the default. So when men like Les Moonves, Brad Kern, and Michael Weatherly harass and abuse the women around them, their entitlement to hold positions of power appears normal in the context of the shows they make. They are entitled to that power, and that entitlement is confirmed and echoed by what we watch on TV, night after night.

“ Hereditary hot take,” May Leitz (aka NyxFears) for YouTube

Leitz’s deep dive into Hereditary genuinely changed how I thought about one of my favorite movies of the year and made me appreciate it even more. To say more would be to spoil her reading, but the video essay is peppered with evidence from the film itself.

And, of course, if you’re still looking for great culture writing to read, check out what we publish here at Vox , from Aja Romano on the history of Bert and Ernie as queer icons , to Alissa Wilkinson’s beautiful review of Eighth Grade ; from Alex Abad-Santos’s thoughts on the Victoria’s Secret fashion show in the time of corporate wokeness to Constance Grady on why so many TV shows right now are about people trying to be good. (And, okay, you can read my Gritty explainer if you like.)

Correction: The writers who left Buzzfeed, though culture writers, weren’t primarily focused on writing criticism.

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English: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Criticism

How to use this guide, literary & cultural criticism: background & context, literary & cultural critics / book reviews & bibliographies.

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• English Literature: Resources for Graduate Research by Micah Saxton Last Updated Jun 6, 2024 1530 views this year

Welcome to the Introduction to Literary and Cultural Criticism Guide. Use the table of contents to find definitions, topic overviews, books, articles, and more that will help you with your research. 

If you don't find what you are looking for or need help navigating this guide or any of the resources it contains, don't hesitate to contact the author of this guide or Ask a Librarian .

Want to learn more about the background and context of literary scholarship? Below is a selection of resources that can help you to develop a better understanding of literary research, including the discourses of critical theory.

Always remember that research is not a linear process--it takes a lot of moving back and forth between sources and ideas to understand a topic and how it has developed over time.

• A Dictionary of Critical Theory This is the most wide-ranging and up-to-date dictionary of critical theory available, covering the whole range of critical theory, including the Frankfurt school, cultural materialism, gender studies, literary theory, hermeneutics, historical materialism, and sociopolitical critical theory. Entries clearly explain even the most complex of theoretical discourses, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism.
• Critical Terms for Literary Study Each essay in this collection provides a concise history of a literary term, critically explores the issues and questions the term raises, and then puts theory into practice by showing the reading strategies the term permits.
• Key Terms in Literary Theory This book provides precise definitions of terms and concepts in literary theory, along with explanations of the major movements and figures in literary and cultural theory and an extensive bibliography.
• Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics is a comprehensive reference work dealing with all aspects of its subject: history, types, movements, prosody, and critical terminology.
• A History of Femnist Literary Criticism This book offers a comprehensive guide to the history and development of feminist literary criticism and a lively reassessment of the main issues and authors in the field.
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism presents a comprehensive historical survey of the field's most important figures, schools, and movements. It includes alphabetically arranged entries and subentries on critics and theorists, critical schools and movements, and the critical and theoretical innovations of specific countries and historical periods. In print in the library's reference collection (PN81.Z99 J64 1994)
• Oxford English Dictionary (OED) A complete text of the Oxford English dictionary with quarterly updates, including revisions not available in any other form.

The resources in this section provide information such as brief intellectual biographies of literary and cultural critics as well as annotations and reviews of the current scholarship on a topic.

I. Literary and Cultural Critics  Dictionary of Literary Biography Complete Online Tip: what you are likely to find here This type of sources offer overviews and summaries; use them to gather, possibly, the following information: 1. A literary/cultural critics/theorist's contribution in the field of literature . * his/her "new" approach/method/theory * his/her "impact" on the scholarship of a particular type of literature 2. Seminal publications by and about a critic/theorist (as mentioned in the essays and listed in the bibliographies) * note authors/scholars who are experts on the critic or the theory * note major journals in the fields, where you are likely to find current scholarship on your topics. * Are there scholars/journals from other fields as well? 3. People, events, ... related to an art historian * how a critic/theorist is shaped by his/her education; * who or what influenced their theory; * what was the field of study like prior. II. Recent Bibliographies & Reviews of Books    Literary and Critical Theory (an annotated bibliography) The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory Dissertations and Theses ( Check out the bibliographies of recent dissertations on a topic. ) Dissertation Reviews ( yet to be published, which " offer a glimpse of each discipline's immediate present ") H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1994 - ) New York Review of Books (1963 - ) Tip: Questions to ask about reviews of books 1.   You might consider such questions as: Does the reviewer agree or disagree with the book’s theses and approaches? Does the  reviewer provide new evidence not included in the book? What does  the reviewer see as the relevance of the book? What  questions not included in the book does the reviewer identify? Based on  this book review, what do you think are a few of the major questions or methodologies being used in your chosen field?  2. What's the next larger context? When there Aren't any (or many) books published on your topic, try place your idea in the knowledge hierarchy. For examples: connect Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling with 16th-century Italian art, focusing on patronage in Rome during the Renaissance and Baroque periods; or, dealing with influential Italian artists through history, etc.?

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture

Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 5, 2020 • ( 0 )

Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot himself gives an uncustomarily detailed account of the publication of Notes towards the Definition of Culture in his brief preface to the booklength edition first published in November 1948. Four years earlier, what he calls “a preliminary sketch” of the eventual work was published, under the same title, in three consecutive issues of The New English Weekly, accounting for Eliot’s apparent coyness later in calling such a thoughtful work, as the completed study turned out to be, mere “notes.” He goes on to tell his readers that those preliminary notes were subsequently perfected into a longer paper, “Cultural Forces in the Human Order,” and published in a 1945 volume, Prospect for Christendom . Revised, it is the first chapter of the finished book. He also tells his readers that the second chapter is a revised version of a paper first published in The New English Review in October 1945, and that there is an appendix compiled from three radio broadcasts he had made, in German, to the German people in 1946.

While Eliot may not have had any specific intention behind presenting such a detailed bibliographical history for the material at hand, the reader ought to be impressed by the fact that the ideas expressed therein did not simply spring full-blown onto the page in some effort of Eliot’s to write a book on the topic, but were themselves the products of much working out of issues and nuances over an extended period of time and in a variety of contexts and venues. One can go further than that, however. So much did Eliot’s literary criticism begin to merge with social criticism, social criticism with religious criticism, and religious criticism with cultural criticism, that anyone would have to say that Notes towards the Definition of Culture, his last major published prose work, is a culmination of Eliot’s thinking to date on a wide range of issues, all of which can be safely gathered together under the single heading, culture, at least inasmuch as he will set about defining the term. So much, indeed, are these earlier positions and opinions, though modified, embedded in the text of Notes that, for the sake of moving on into a consideration of its content, it would be more effective to contrast Eliot’s earlier with his present views as these relevant issues are raised and brought to bear by him the pages of Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

Eliot states at the outset that his sole purpose, rather than to propose a social or political philosophy, is to define culture , a term that he feels “has come to be misused.” He imagines that, as a result, perhaps, of the destructiveness of the recent war, the term has come to be used by journalists, for example, as if it were a term synonymous with civilization. Eliot does not deny that those two words may be interchangeable in certain contexts, so his aim is not to erect any artificial distinctions between them but to define the one, culture, in such a way that it will not continue to be easily mistaken for being a synonym for “art” in general or, even more vaguely, for “a kind of emotional stimulant.” It is the latter case that he implies, and fears, is becoming the more and more common.

As he outlines his approach to the topic in the coming essay, Eliot also reveals, of course, his personal bias, which is that there is a relation between culture and religion, so much so, indeed, that “the culture [of a people] will appear to be the product of the religion, or the religion the product of the culture.” Furthermore, he believes that a culture is “organic,” that is, that it grows and changes so that it may be transmitted through succeeding generations; that it should be reducible to more and more local manifestations, as is implied by regionalism; and that, as far as religion is concerned, it should reflect both unity and diversity.

By way of an example of his meaning here, readers familiar with the ideas that Eliot had already expressed in his book-length essay The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier would already be acquainted with his hope that, at least in the Christian nations of Western Europe, a universality of doctrine would be mitigated, but not diluted, by local devotional custom and practice. Where these three conditions—transmission through generations, regional flexibility, and diversity in unity—are not met, Eliot goes as far to say, a high civilization is not possible.

Finally, Eliot promises that any such discussion must close itself by “disentangling” just such a definition of culture from any consideration of the educational and political life of the community. Here Eliot freely admits that he is liable to trample on what others may regard as sacred ground by appearing to be elitist or exclusive in his definition of culture. That, however, he argues, underscores his very reason for wishing to define the term: If a culture is to be sacrificed in the name of other social and political goals, so be it, Eliot would say. But, he would add, let it be clear what one means to sacrifice when they speak of sacrificing culture.

This is an Eliot who, far back in his own career as a social commentator, in essays such as The Function of Criticism in 1923 and After Strange Gods in 1934, had been arguing, sometimes stridently but always with a passionate cogency, against literary and other intellectual forces that he saw to be at enmity with his own cherished beliefs and attitudes. Now he appears to be ready to accept that such intellectual and moral conflict is inevitable as long as it is recognized as a necessary conflict, not as a foregone conclusion. He seems to be ready to make peace with those positions with which he does not agree by continuing to explain why he does not agree with them rather than by trying to present the opposing position as patently disagreeable, as he had done in many an earlier diatribe.

Here now, Eliot makes every effort to establish himself as one who is opposed neither to change nor to opposition. Rather, he is opposed to those who “have believed in particular changes as good in themselves, without worrying about the future of civilisation, and without finding it necessary to recommend their innovations by the specious glitter of unmeaning promises.” Eliot would like to see enter such dialogues a “permanent standard” by which one could compare one civilization with another, not just one’s own with others’, but one’s own with the civilization that it has been at various times or may be becoming. So, then, his essay will ask “whether there are any permanent conditions, in the absence of which no higher culture can be expected.” Culture, for Eliot, is not something that one can “deliberately aim at” achieving, nor, one might suspect, changing either. The conditions of culture, he asserts as he concludes his introduction, are “natural” to human beings. If he places quotation marks around the word natural, it is only to suggest that one need not know what it means in order to recognize that it does nevertheless apply. In any event, it will be this emphasis on the naturalness of culture, as opposed to the idea, for example, that it can or should be consciously manipulated, that the reader should keep in mind, for Eliot certainly will as he continues to frame his definition.

In his first chapter, Eliot discusses “The Three Senses of ‘Culture.’ ” (Again, putting quotation marks around the word culture reminds the reader that these are uncharted seas that nevertheless seem deceptively familiar.) Culture, then, can describe the development of an individual, he says, a group or class, or the society as a whole. Since the last comprises the other two, it is there that he wishes to begin. Normally, however, it has been the other way around, Eliot argues, for he demonstrates convincingly that sociological and other treatments of culture, such as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, generally begin and end by focusing on the class or group if not even, as in Arnold’s case, just the individual. Such lapses, Eliot contends, give the term culture the “thinness” with which it is often popularly associated.

Furthermore, there are various contexts in which one may think of culture—in terms of manners, for example, or of learning, of philosophy, or of the arts—and these are all too often neither taken into account or accounted for. The net result is that people are thus encouraged to think of themselves as persons of culture when they are versed in one area of it but are totally unaware that there are other areas as well.

Eliot’s point is that all these various senses, then, and all these various levels of culture must be taken into account in a coherent manner if anything approaching an adequate definition can ever hope to be achieved. These various characteristics and categories of culture overlap; there is, for example, even in more primitive cultures, distinct separation between art and religion or between the activities of the individual and the goals of the group. The more advanced a culture, the more abstract distinctions are forced on these critical activities of any culture, specifically, religion, science, politics, and art, so that there begin equally abstract struggles for dominance of one over the other three. Those tensions, Eliot argues, may further become tensions within individuals, citing for his example the contention between the demands of the state and the demands of the church that form the basis for the tragedy in Sophocles’ Antigone.

A culture in which these kinds of conflicts begin to occur represents a very advanced stage of civilization, Eliot proposes, for it requires an audience already aware of those tensions in order for a dramatist to articulate them.

Little by little then, the culture of the class or group emerges from the intracultural tensions formed between the individual and society. These more highly cultured groups—groups, that is, whose motive for being is shaped by cultural tensions—lead to further specialization, and that, of course, can lead to cultural disintegration, a point that enables Eliot to begin to focus his discussion on the contemporary scene. “Cultural disintegration,” he writes, “is present when two or more strata so separate that these become in effect distinct cultures,” and this can result from a separation of classes as well. The religious sensibility becomes separated and distinct from the artistic, for example, or manners become a class distinction unique to a particular economic stratum within the society. This process of disintegration and stratification leads inevitably to a decline of the total culture, a decline manifested, internally, in social ailments and, on a global scale, in relations among nations. In the latter case, it becomes a matter of defining a nation or people in terms of its state or political identity rather than on the basis of each people’s own cultural cohesion, abstracting human-to-human interaction all that much more. These difficulties ultimately influence matters of education as trivial-seeming on the surface as the decline of a national cuisine, since that implies a lack of cohesion in the culture resulting in a disconnect between the requirements of life and the quality of life. “Culture,” Eliot can say at this juncture, “may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”

Thus, Eliot’s presentation arrives at a critical moment: “[N]o culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.” Indeed, Eliot goes even further in linking a people’s culture to their belief system by noting that all that he has just said by way of describing how a culture may decline and disintegrate may also be said of the same phenomena as they would occur in the history of a religion. Here, of course, he can again bring to bear as evidence present conditions in Western Europe, a situation that he had already addressed in 1939 in The Idea of a Christian Society. The divergence of belief in Christianity that commenced in the 16th century may not be, in Eliot’s view, anywhere near as pernicious a sign of its decline as a cultural mainstay as much as an increasing tradition of a nurtured skepticism is. Not only can culture, as Eliot views it, not be preserved or extended in the absence of religion, but in the absence of a religious foundation, it is possible, Eliot is afraid, to adopt an indifferent attitude toward culture.

Rather, Eliot would like to imagine a society in which “both ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ . . . should mean for the individual and for the group something toward which they strive, not merely something which they possess.” Religion can thus be “the whole way of life of a people, . . . and that way of life is also its culture,” or it may be a way of life that a people share with other peoples but with whom they do not share a common culture, as in the case of Christian Europe. Ultimately, then, if culture “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people”— and here Eliot cites numerous English interests and activities as disparate as Derby Day and beetroot in vinegar—then all those interests and activities are “also a part of our lived religion.”

But if culture is a people’s lived religion, the converse is not necessarily true: that religion is a people’s lived culture. “[T]he actual religion of no European people has ever been purely Christian, or purely anything.” Indeed, Eliot contends, “behaviour is also belief,” and the purity of line between how a people believe and how a people behave colors every aspect of their being and constitutes, ultimately, what may be called their culture, even if it is not seen exclusively as their religion. Or, as Eliot puts it, “bishops are a part of English culture, and horses and dogs are a part of English religion.” Put yet another way, a people’s culture is “an incarnation of its religion,” no matter how well they profess the particular faith that they otherwise adhere to. The truth or falsity of a faith, then, does not matter as far as culture is concerned, so that a people with a “truer light” may have a culture inferior to a people who live a lesser faith with a greater intensity.

Eliot is wise to avoid particular examples, but who would deny that a people who do not believe in the values by which the culture claims that lives ought to be led are leading a sham cultural existence that cannot long sustain itself? Eliot therefore can conclude his first chapter by proposing that “any religion, while it lasts, . . . gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the framework for a culture, and protects the mass of humanity from boredom and despair.”

Eliot begins his next chapter, “The Class and the Elite,” by carefully addressing two sensitive issues even for his time: the notion of higher civilizations versus lower or primitive societies, and the notion of cultural elites.

It has understandably become more and more difficult if not embarrassing to pronounce a particular way of life as more “advanced” than another or a particular social class as more inherently privileged than another, yet qualitative differences, whether or not such distinctions are openly addressed by a society, are made nevertheless and permeate every human society. Indeed the potential for allowing the pernicious nature of these ways of thinking and of behaving to dominate a society’s way of life and treatment of others is increased especially when distinctions of that kind are not openly addressed, analyzed, and questioned. For then it becomes an unspoken commonplace that the making of such judgments is “the way it’s always been done.”

Eliot’s addressing the entire matter, then, forms a very real part of the analysis that he is carrying on in order not to prescribe but to describe those elements that constitute a “definition of culture.” Seen from that perspective, his interest in describing how class and, ultimately, a class of elites eventually emerges in so-called higher civilizations is a way neither of justifying or condemning such a state of affairs but, rather, a necessary part of the analytical processes that enable definition. That said, Eliot quickly in his second chapter establishes a fact that is presented not as something to be praised or lamented, but merely understood. While a classless society remains the ideal at higher stages of development, a culture divides into classes. Higher classes emerge wherein “superior individuals” in political administration, the arts, science, philosophy, and physical prowess form “into suitable groups, endowed with appropriate powers, and perhaps with varied emoluments and honours.” These groups, he tells his readers, telling them nothing that they do not already know, “are what we call élites.”

Not to belabor the matter, but it is necessary for the reader to note that Eliot is neither defending nor attacking a cultural elitism, only describing the manner in which such a state of affairs comes about. Indeed, he imagines that at some future point in the development of a society stratified by class distinctions, congregations of elites will replace class structure by transcending it. Today such an idea might be called a meritocracy, and it seems to foster its own inequitable divisions.

Nevertheless, all that Eliot is really suggesting is that when a culture begins to identify inherent skill and talent, class distinctions are seen for the artificial criteria that they are and thus class is not a measure or reflection of the relative merits of an individual’s potential for contributing to the larger community. The result of the emergence of elites would, therefore, be that “all positions in society should be occupied by those who are best fitted to exercise the functions of the positions.” The danger of investing all cultural integrity in the hands of elites, however, is that they tend to become further and further isolated, one group from another, whereas the notion that there is within a culture, guiding and forming it, the elite enables its various groupings to interact more harmoniously for the common good.

Eliot takes up the views of Dr. Karl Mannheim to espouse his own opposing view. Mannheim, Eliot tells his readers, fails to distinguish between elites, with their tendency to cluster and become isolated in their various fields, and the elite, who through separate interests would nevertheless operate in concert in support of the common interest of a common culture. This elite may represent or be constituted of the ruling or governing class in some instances, but “in concerning ourselves with class versus élites,” which is what for Eliot has been a primary focus of his argument throughout, “we are concerned with the total culture of a country, and that involves a good deal more than government.”

It may be that, rather than a “classless” society, Eliot is making a case for what a society should want its so-called “ruling” class to be. So, then, “[w]hat is important is a structure in which there will be, from ‘top’ to ‘bottom,’ a continuous gradation of cultural levels.” This culture must, meanwhile, be transmitted primarily by the family rather than what Eliot calls educationists, inasmuch as the latter will dispute whether or not there ought to be a class structure present in the society at all, while the family, rather than concerning itself with the pros and cons of a class structure, will naturally represent the values of the culture in miniature, whatever class the particular family embodies or belongs to.

However, in order to ensure the viability of the family unit, Eliot ends his second chapter with what sounds like an impossible requirement for a modern industrial state such as England: that there must be “groups of families persisting, from generation to generation, each in the same way of life.” And he follows that stipulation by sounding once more his ominous caution that while such conditions may not bring about a higher civilization, “when they are absent, the higher civilization is unlikely to be found.”

Eliot’s chapters 3 and 4 are continuations of each other, inasmuch as he now sets out to describe how a unified culture must nevertheless both enable and express diversity in order to remain viable. In a manner of speaking, Eliot’s entire essay throughout to this point has been tacitly endorsing the same proposition, what with its talk of higher and lower levels of society acting in concert to make a way of national life constitute what, by his definition, can be rightfully called a culture. None of this should come as any surprise to present-day readers, who should already be well schooled in the idea that differences among and between groups and regions, nations and peoples, are both inevitable and welcomed.

Eliot’s contemporary readers would have been as equally well versed in that same proposition, however. Those political organizations that are now defined as “nations,” which may by now seem to have been the building blocks of diverse human societies since time immemorial, are actually fairly recent historical developments. There was not, for example, any such political entity as Germany or Italy before 1865, less than 100 years before the time of Eliot’s writing, and even Great Britain’s “United Kingdom” of England, Scotland, and Ireland is a political invention of the late 18th century. For Eliot to speak of regions and sects and cults within the context of a Christianized Western Europe is mandatory, then, since post-Reformation Europe, even within the relatively insular realms of the British Isles, had long ago become as fragmented religiously as it had always been regionally and, in the oldest sense of the term, tribally.

“Unity and Diversity,” the general title that Eliot gives to chapters 3 and 4, is hardly proposed as an original conceptualization by Eliot, who then discusses “The Region” in his third chapter and “Sect and Cult” in his fourth. Instead, it is his yielding to the social, spiritual, ethnic, and even geographical realities of the varied peoples of the very English culture that he had earlier defined as the “whole life of the whole people.” If these two chapters have a common thesis, as Eliot’s titulary way of linking them suggests that they do, it can be found in the epigraph from the 20th-century British thinker A. N. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World that Eliot cites at the opening of chapter 3: “A diversification among human communities is essential. . . . Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration.”

In summary, if differences inspire competition, that competition ought to be itself inspired by emulation. From that, the health of the entire human community emerges. What is true of the benefits of a healthy diversity between nations and peoples, Eliot happily and wisely contends in his next two chapters, must be true as well of the diversity among an otherwise common people sharing what, from the outsider’s point of view, appears to be a common culture.

Eliot’s is always the time-honored media via, middle way, of the Anglican tradition of England that was itself inspired by that people’s desire, during the Reformation, to be free of the dominance of what they regarded as a foreign culture, Rome’s, over their national religion and yet to remain true, by and large, to long-standing Catholic Christian practices, rituals, and devotions. Thus, Eliot is always taking pains to point out that a totally classless society is as pernicious to the maintenance and growth of a healthy national culture as a society that is very rigidly organized by class distinctions.

Rather, he writes, “[t]he unity with which I am concerned must be largely unconscious,” that is to say, it should not be something that is being perpetually identified and celebrated, “and therefore can perhaps be best approached through a consideration of the useful diversities.” Region is one. Citizens, then, should be encouraged to think of themselves as citizens not of the nation, but “of a particular part of [their] country, with local loyalties.” By the same token and in the same spirit, however, one’s loyalty to a locality or region, no matter how exotic or unique its cultural heritage may seem to be in its own right, cannot be fostered in such a way that it ends up taking precedence over one’s sense of belonging to those ever-enlarging groups that eventually make up the whole people and the whole culture.

Nor is this sense of locality or region limited to geographical entities, even when it may seem to be defined or interpreted in that manner. Dialects provide a point of immediate reference, and Eliot uses the Irish for an example. While as a people they had long since, at least in Eliot’s time, lost their own language and were for the most part, as a result of English colonial policies in Ireland, English- speaking, the English that they speak retains idiomatic and other markers of their original Gaelic tongue. Furthermore, it would be unfair to define their ethnic background and the dialect and other idiosyncratic habits that have emerged from it as distinctions peculiar of a region inasmuch as Irish could be found in every major metropolis in England itself. Still, such distinctions can nevertheless be identified as “regional” for all the other reasons already cited.

These satellite cultures, as Eliot comes to call them, using Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as outstanding examples, must be encouraged to maintain and nurture their original identities as well, but not so much as to cut themselves off completely from the primary culture, in this case England’s, through which they are linked to Europe and, through Europe, the world. Eliot does take a tangent here, however, that may not find universal agreement. When a satellite culture has become united by language to another, he argues, it ought to abandon its own language in favor of the central culture for literary purposes. This sort of cultural imperialism should certainly strike most as inexcusable, including even Eliot, who only a few years earlier, in “The Social Function of Literature,” had rightfully commended the Norwegians, just recently liberated from the control of Nazi Germany, for tenaciously clinging to a national, Norwegian-language literature and arguing that it is vital that every people do so for the benefit of all other peoples.

A special exception could be made in the case of English, nevertheless, as a common tongue for all the peoples of the British Isles. (The same phenomenon, for example, has occurred in modern Italy, a land of many dialects and of long literary traditions in each, where, nevertheless, the Tuscan dialect of Dante Alighieri has, since national unification, become what the world knows as the Italian language, a situation of which Eliot would have been well aware, although he does not cite it.) His argument, in any case, regards the transmission of a culture, not the dynamics of its political and often military history. A culture, he insists, is “a peculiar way of thinking, feeling and behaving.” He continues: “[F]or its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language— not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one. . . .” Regarded from that point of view, in fact, his comments on the maintenance of Norwegian as a literary language under Nazi rule are no less in keeping with his remarks here on the various peoples of the British Isles writing solely in English, although all individuals of Welsh, Irish, and Scottish extraction might not find themselves in agreement with his position.

Eliot himself would go as far as to defend and encourage such disagreements, for they too form a part of a culture. Whereas friction in the mechanical universe may be a waste of energy, in human cultures, all those frictions created by class and region, including those just discussed involving satellite cultures that have been reduced to secondary roles, “by dividing the inhabitants of a country into . . . different kinds of groups, lead to a conflict favourable to creativeness and progress.” As he puts it, paraphrasing the Whitehead epigraph for effect, “One needs the enemy.” Indeed, the disastrous transformation of Italian and German cultures by the ideological single-mindedness of fascism provides Eliot with a vivid and recent illustration of what can occur when dialogue and debate cease within a culture.

As the reader might have already observed, Eliot appears to be proposing a model of culture that involves ever-widening but concentric circles, from the village to the region to the nation to the world. The difficulty there, of course, is that once one transcends the idea of a national culture, one has to abandon most of the political associations that culture also implies. The United Nations had already been formed by the time of Eliot’s writing, and the visionary ideal of a world government had become a utopian commonplace ever since U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s proposing a League of Nations following hard on the catastrophe of World War I in 1919.

Still, Eliot contends that if his pleading for the integrity of local cultures has any practical validity, then “a world culture which was simply a uniform culture would be no culture at all.” Eliot is forced to conclude that although we are “pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture,” we are at the same time forced to admit “that it is something we cannot imagine. ” Indeed, the “colonization problem,” as he terms the imposition of one culture on another by force by an outside power, would only be exacerbated to an intolerable degree by any effort to impose a world culture, since cultures do not all follow the same processes of growth, a condition that such an imposition would require. Some areas of the world, Eliot notes in ending his remarks on unity and diversity as regional issues, citing as an example India, where a Hindu and Muslim culture existed side by side at the time, have seen the evolution of competing cultures to a degree that would make Eliot’s comments on British regionalism seem a mockery.

In his fourth chapter, as previously noted, Eliot takes up the topic of cultural unity and diversity as it is affected by cults and sects. Specifically, he defines his topic as “the cultural significance of religious divisions.” He begins by lamenting, in what he terms “more developed societies” such as one might find in Western Europe, the sort of cohesion between religious and nonreligious activities that one would expect to find in more primitive or less developed societies, keeping in mind that he is speaking of degrees of complexity and abstraction here, not quality and significance. As he puts it, the more conscious belief becomes, the more conscious unbelief becomes, leading to habits of indifference, doubt, and skepticism.

In The Idea of a Christian Society a decade earlier, Eliot had already addressed many of these same difficulties attendant on maintaining a meaningful national religious life in a postindustrial, highly materialistic, and contentious modern society. Now, however, he emphasizes that he wishes to explore those same issues not from the point of view of the Christian apologist but from that of the sociologist. As a result, “[m]ost of my generalisations are intended to have applicability to all religion, and not only Christianity.” If, then, he nevertheless appears to be discussing matters that are wholly Christian, it is because he is “particularly concerned with Christian culture, with the Western World, with Europe, and with England.” Finally, he emphasizes as well that whether one is a believer or an unbeliever, no one can be so completely detached from the religious experience as to approach and discuss it in a wholly objective manner.

That said, he continues by undertaking a consideration of “unity and diversity in religious belief and practice” in order to “enquire what is the situation most favourable to the preservation and improvement of culture.” Those religions that have the greatest universality, as he sees it, are most likely to “stimulate culture,” and their universality is determined in part by their being able to appeal to and be accepted by peoples of different cultures. Christianity certainly fills that bill; however, Eliot observes that there is always the danger that too broad a cross-cultural appeal can also result in the dilution of a religion’s core values.

These general premises established, Eliot announces that he will devote the remainder of this discussion to the relation of Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe, as well as to the diversity of sects that Protestantism has itself produced. It serves his purpose, for he finds himself compelled to admit that Europe since the 16th century, a convenient period reference for the Protestant Reformation, has certainly not suffered in terms of overall cultural development. While he must also admit that it is impossible to say what sort of cultural developments may have occurred instead had Europe remained Catholic and Christian, he cannot avoid the obvious conclusion that, based on the European experience, “[e]ither religious unity or religious division may coincide with cultural efflorescence or cultural decay.”

When he uses England itself as the focus for a similar discussion, however, he is less sanguine, for while the two dominant religious cultures in England are both Protestant—the Established Anglican Church and the various Protestant sects that have splintered from it during the centuries—the English atheist still shares in the religious life of culture when it comes to signficant social events such as births, marriages, and deaths. Nevertheless, Eliot sees the major Protestant cultures of Northern Europe, where the Protestant Reformation suffered its widest and most enduring successes, as having cut those regions off from the mainstream of European cultural development, which is largely Latin in origin. While he avoids evaluating the pros and cons of that separation for the cultures of the north, he returns again to its consequence for the English.

Since Anglicanism as an offshoot of Catholicism was the result of a decision made at the top, in this case by Henry VIII in his own dispute with Rome, whereas the Protestant dissenters were opposing themselves on native ground specifically against what they saw as little more than a national expression of Catholicism, England may be culturally more stratified religiously in ways that are themselves modified by cultural distinctions among classes. This Eliot is willing to attribute to the regional divisions based on ethnicities that he desribed in the preceding chapter. In the most basic terms, he is willing to concede that the British Isles’ having been home to many peoples makes it ripe for frequent dissension and stratification in all areas of culture, but especially religion.

The next logical step is to consider the ecumenical movements that are becoming more common. After making a distinction between intercommunion and reunion, he observes that complete reunion would entail a “community of culture.” The result would not, however, be that dreaded uniform culture worldwide, but rather a “Christian culture” manifested in its various local components. Here again, the danger would lie in such a Christianity’s attempting to be all things to all people, reducing “theology to such principles that a child can understand,” which he sees as a cultural debility. A worse danger, in keeping with the modern tendency to be polite to avoid the risk of appearing assertive, is that a sort of “cultural equality” may begin to prevail, and again the lowest-common-denominator approach to both theology and ritual might very well follow. When it comes to determining whether there should be an international church—Roman Catholicism—or a national church—here Anglicanism would provide a good example—or separated sects, Eliot takes the moderating position as he so often has done in this present treatise, proposing that the maintenance of a persistent tension among all three possibilities is desirable. “Christendom should be one,” but “within that unity there should be an endless conflict between ideas.”

Eliot devotes his last two chapters to culture and politics and culture and education. That he treats both topics in a far more cursory fashion than he had culture and class, culture and region, and culture and religion suggests that he does not view those last two categories as being as critical to the maintenance and transmission of cultural values. However, culture and religion, politics, and education together form a broader category, which is culture and the nation. Politics and education, from that point of view, are relatively equal to religion in forming the bedrock of a people’s culture as a nation, although the reader should recall at all times that, as far as Eliot is concerned, religion and culture are virtually inseparable.

No wonder, then, the short shrift that he gives to politics, which is in and of itself, though dominant in the short term, a transitory aspect of any culture’s ongoing health. Still, Eliot is enough a child of his time to recognize the importance that the culture itself, particularly in the postwar environment in which he is writing, attaches to the political sphere, so he treats it gingerly but with a profound respect for its genuine even if superficial importance. The political, for one thing, bandy the word culture about quite freely. Yet, while all may engage in the political process, by voting, for example, or paying taxes, few actually engage in politics, so that, in view of the considerable power that they wield, these few form a virtual elite unto themselves. It is that idea, if not practical reality, that Eliot hopes to short circuit somewhat as he now defines what he sees to be the place of the political in a culture.

“In a healthily stratified society,” he observes, “public affairs would be a responsibility not equally borne.” Nevertheless, the governing elite must not itself become one “sharply divided from the other elites of society.” To achieve this aim, he would not like to define the governing elite as opposed to the other elites as if the first were men of action as opposed to men of thought. Rather, he says, the relationship should be regarded as one “between men of different types of mind and different areas of thought and action.”

A society that is graded accordingly, Eliot contends, with “several levels of power and authority,” might find the politician “restrained” in his use of language by his fear of censure if not ridicule from “a smaller and more critical public,” composed of those other segments of the elite who are not directly involved with the governing elite. In other words, these “men of action,” the political, would not be isolated in their own dangerously and disproportionately powerful subculture but would instead be subject to the judgment of those who respect thought over action. This governing elite should, then, be required to study history and political theory, so that they are inculcated in the life of the mind.

Eliot has a pointed reason for bringing the political to the broader cultural table: “Today, we have become culture-conscious in a way which nourishes nazism, communism and nationalism all at once; in a way which emphasises separation without helping us to overcome it.” A more culturally astute governing elite would obviously go a long way toward overcoming those separations that are otherwise exposed to the exploitation of unscrupulous parties with agendas of their own.

Eliot cites present-day communist Russia as an example of a culture attempting to export their revolution to all kinds of disparate cultures throughout the world by presenting theirs as a culture condoning the equality of cultures at all cost—a successful strategy despite its patently obvious contradictions. The democratic West, meanwhile, does little better. Eliot cites the British Council, an official body created to promote “cultural exchanges,” to show how those tactics are little different, since it too makes the transmission and exchange of culture a function of the state apparatus.

Eliot rightfully wonders when it “again will be possible for intellectual elites of all countries to travel as private citizens.” As should be apparent, he imagines that that can occur only if there is a governing elite who do not imagine that the national culture and its dissemination and transmission is not the exclusive prerogative of the state. Eliot concludes chapter 5 on culture and politics by reiterating that we cannot “slip into the assumption that culture can be planned. Culture,” he says emphatically, “can never be wholly conscious.”

When Eliot, in chapter 6, takes up the topic of culture and education, the reader may recall that Eliot had, in chapter 2, argued that culture is better maintained and transmitted by the family than by those he calls educationists for the simple reason that the family unconsciously embodies the culture, while education, to be successful, must be a conscious process. And, as the reader is amply cautioned at the conclusion of chapter 5, culture can never—should never—be a “wholly conscious” affair. Rather than revisit that earlier argument in chapter 6, then, Eliot analyzes the general expectations associated with the idea of education by the culture, in order to extrapolate a more general idea of how education might best serve cultural purposes. To do so, he first sets out to examine and set in order the prevalent assumptions regarding education.

The first examination, involving the prevailing notions of the purpose of education, entails the most extensive summary on Eliot’s part, citing such contemporary authorities as H. C. Dent, Herbert Read, and C. E. M. Joad. In each instance, he convincingly demonstrates that to varying degrees education has come to be seen as an instrument for advancing social ideals. He remarks that it is therefore unfortunate if education as a means for individuals to acquire wisdom, knowledge, and a respect for learning is overlooked in the interest of serving broader social aims. If nevertheless it is finally agreed that education’s purpose is “making people happier,” then that assumption ought too to be examined. Eliot quickly concludes in this particular case that “education is a strain” that very often “can impose greater burdens upon a mind than that mind can bear.”

Eliot deals with his three other “assumptions” regarding the value and purpose of education in equally quick succession. (He could have as easily called them “myths” except that he has a poet’s respect for the meaning of words.) Thus, he is happy to debunk the notion that everyone wants an education. (“A high average of general education,” he observes, “is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than a respect for learning.”) He dismisses the notion that education makes for an “equality of opportunity” (he imagines instead that expanding educational opportunity can as likely lower educational standards) and the somewhat related notion that an exposure to education will unleash latent abilities that may otherwise lay dormant (the “Mute Inglorious Milton dogma” he calls it, invoking a central image from Thomas Gray’s sentimental masterpiece, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”).

If there is a commonality to these assumptions that he raises only to challenge them, it is that they all emphasize the social benefits of education rather than promoting it for its own sake and as a force to help shape individual lives. The emphasis on opportunity and education, for example, he sees as indicative of the “depression of the family” and the “disintegration of class.” The reader should recall how integral Eliot sees the role of the family and class to be in the maintenance, dissemination, and transmission of culture.

Eliot goes as far as to assert that in the modern world education has become an abstraction, “remote from life” and implying a disintegrated society. Meanwhile, education is thought to be the panacea for “putting civilisation together again.” If by education in that regard, Eliot continues, we mean “everything that goes to form the good individual in a good society,” then he has no problem with that, revealing in the process his own definition of education. If, however, education means a standardized curriculum mandated by government bureaucracies, then “the remedy is manifestly and ludicrously inadequate.”

Ideally, education, he continues, defining the term as he goes, is the “process by which the community attempts to pass on to all its members its culture.” But when in practice education becomes what today would be called a government-sponsored and -directed entitlement, thereby bringing preselected aspects of the whole culture to bear in order to satisfy social and political agendas, the more systematically is the root culture betrayed. “Whether education can foster and improve culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it,” Eliot concludes, imagining a future in which, the root culture lost to living human memory by the distortions of programmatic education, all that would be left of the culture would be “barbarian nomads . . . encamp[ed] in their mechanised caravans.”

Eliot closes by reminding his reader of what he clearly thinks is a cardinal point, perhaps the cardinal point of his entire presentation thus far: “. . . we cannot set about to create or improve culture, . . only will the means which are favourable to culture.” To do as much, returning to his purpose for composing the essay at hand, one must at least know what one means, what values of behavior, habits, and institutions one refers to, in invoking the term.

European Culture

In an appendix, which comprises the English-language transcriptions of three radio broadcast talks that Eliot originally made in German in 1946, he comments on the unity of European culture. Addressing a German-speaking audience in their own language within a year after they had suffered a deserved and total defeat in World War II, Eliot introduces himself as a poet and editor—a man of letters. He begins by commenting on the rich variety of languages that make up modern English, which he identifies as the best language for writing poetry, for that reason. It has extensive elements from German, Scandinavian through Danish, French through the Normans, not to mention the Celtic that has infiltrated the language through the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish peoples of the British Isles.

He goes on to comment on the other great contributions that Europeans, in particular the Italians, French, Germans, and English, have made in painting, music, and poetry, but he ends by singling out the advances that the French made in poetry in the 19th century under the leadership of poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Paul Valéry, who influenced later poets such as W. B. Yeats but who had themselves been influenced by the American poet Edgar Allan Poe. Musing so, he points out the irrefutable fact that “no one nation, no one language, would have achieved what it has, if the same art had not been cultivated in neighbouring countries and in different languages.” From there, using the experiences of the American contemporary poet Ezra Pound, Eliot also establishes the influences of Asian, in this case Chinese, poetry on the languages of modern Europe to make a further point: “For when I speak of the unity of European culture, I do not want to give the impression that I regard European culture as something cut off from every other.” He holds this to be as true of painting and music as of poetry, and in the second of his three broadcasts, he extends the notion that there is a unified European culture as much to be found in ideas as to be found in the arts.

Besides the fact that the thoughts expressed in this appendix are a reflection of Eliot’s overall thinking at the time, as they tended beyond his earlier parochial considerations toward broader and far less exclusive views of what values and behaviors ought to prevail in the human community, the appendix is appropriate to the overall topic of human culture. Throughout the book, Eliot has been defining culture as those inherited values, behaviors, and institutions that define the same people living in the same place, an idea borrowed somewhat from the early 19th-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel’s definition of nation . That while this culture is the expression of the whole people, that expression is continuously being modified, revised, and adjusted by the sometimes conflicting interactions and goals of the various groups, classes, and regions that make up any single culture.

Furthermore, because a culture so defined is as living and as organic a thing as any other natural product of the thinking, feeling universe, it is best transmitted by the human families that compose its most central collective unit. In any event, what must be most avoided is any effort by the state or other more rigidly organized entities, such as educators, to “stage-manage” cultural developments and dissemination in any conscious way, since that will automatically truncate the natural processes of growth and change that any culture requires. It should be apparent that Eliot would then, of necessity, take a long step back from English culture, which, sensibly enough, had been the primary focus of his presentation till now, to take a look at the same phenomena from the point of view of a larger cultural sampling, the European experience.

As he continues his survey of European cultural unity, he is indeed able to bring his own experience to bear by recounting in general but nevertheless detailed terms the 17 years, from 1922 to 1939, that he edited a literary review, the Criterion. Though it was published in English, he made every effort to publish, in translation, continental writers as well, particularly those who might otherwise be overlooked by the general reading public. In the process, he was in regular contact with other, similar reviews. That all these reviews failed he regards as the result of “gradual closing of the mental frontiers of Europe.” After 1933, the year that the Nazis came to power under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, for example, contributions from Germany became less and less easy to find; the same could be said of Fascist Italy, although in that case it had occurred even earlier. “A universal concern with politics does not unite,” Eliot can report with considerable authority, “it divides.”

Before then, foreign ideas, in all senses of the term, had been welcomed “without hostility, and with the assurance that you could learn from them.” More, there was the sense that within Europe there was “an international fraternity of men of letters” who were as united by a common respect for ideas as others were by a national or religious loyalty. That Eliot mourns the passage of such a time and spirit is very clear, but it also permits him, in the third and final part of his presentation, to introduce the idea of a European culture.

There can be no such thing, he asserts, if the countries of Europe are isolated from each other, as they had been, catastrophically, for the decade or more preceding his talk. After defining culture much in the same terms as he subsequently does in Notes, he makes it clear that, ultimately, there is no demarcation totally separating one human culture from another; still, he can insist on a unity of European culture. That unity is based, he feels, on Christianity, not as a communion of believers but as a common tradition. “If Asia were converted to Christianity tomorrow,” he says in order to illustrate his meaning, “it would not thereby become a part of Europe,” because although Asia would have embraced Christian beliefs, it would not have acquired the traditions in the arts, law, and thought that have developed over centuries in Europe as a result of its own unique Christian experience.

So, then, Eliot can assert as well that “[t]o our Christian heritage we owe many things besides religious faith,” and that “this unity in the common elements of culture . . . is the true bond between us,” a bond that, unlike political or economic bonds, does not require one loyalty; indeed, it may flourish best under many. Universities across Europe, however, should have “their common ideals” and “their obligations to each other.”

Eliot concludes on an ominous note regarding circumstances unique to the times, but that may reoccur without warning at any time. Because of the economic and other restrictions on personal freedom brought about by years of devastating warfare, men of letters throughout Europe are not as free to travel and to communicate with each other as they ought to be. They can try, he nevertheless pleads, to preserve the legacy of Greece, Rome, and Israel to which Europe is heir, for, as he sees it, “these spiritual possessions are also in imminent peril.”

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

For the present-day reader reasonably well-schooled in the idea of culture, there may not seem to be anything new about Eliot’s observations in their most general sense. Since the Smithsonian Institution decided to include Elvis Presley’s guitar among those artifacts that define American culture, for example, individuals had become used to the idea that culture is not limited to highbrow pursuits and interests but is, much as Eliot defined it, the whole expression of the whole people. A critical point not to be missed, however, is that that very dramatic and necessary sea change in the common perception of what culture means and of what it constitutes has Eliot’s own work and thought on the topic in part to thank.

From early in his career as a literary and social thinker, Eliot had invoked the idea of tradition and had taken his stand more and more as a conservator of those practices and beliefs and attitudes that he personally associated with the Anglo-American experience and, with it and by extension, the European experience as well. That he equally as often associated those concerns with England and Europe’s Christian background and traditions gave even him, perhaps, the impression that his was an exclusionary and conservative stance, one that may have beguiled him into making his extremely unfotunate remark regarding “free-thinking Jews” in After Strange Gods.

As his career as a social commentator and Christian apologist continued, however, it seems to have become apparent to him that his defense of Christian England and its traditions was not any endorsement of being Christian and English. Rather it was an argument that any individual should foremost be mindful of and loyal to the cultural legacy of his or her own people, not to the exclusion of an exposure to and respect for other cultures and their values, but in order better to appreciate those other cultures as a part of the continuing and mandatory dialogue regarding not what it is to be English and Christian, but what it is to be human. At least that is the turn that Eliot’s thought begins to take in The Idea of a Christian Society and that terminates in his literally definitive statement on this important matter in Notes towards the Definition of Culture.

To define culture, Eliot attempts to demonstrate in that work, is to define humanity at all its various levels—individually, ethnically, regionally, nationally, globally. Whether or not he succeeds in doing as much, his title boldly suggests that his is only a preliminary contribution to a dialogue that, once begun, can never be abandoned. Cultures may best develop unconsciously, but humanity can never be too overly conscious of how much the interactions of the world’s various cultures through time form what is called history. To shape that history to everyone’s benefit requires each person’s mindfulness of the culture that has nurtured him and an equal admiration for all those other cultures that nurture others. It is Eliot’s considered view that only the broadest and most generous definition of culture can acquaint individuals with the importance of that ongoing endeavor.

Meanwhile, there are other crucial considerations, to say the least. In a nutshell, the increasing abstractedness of the state and its more and more total control of the instruments of education at the expense of more natural units of human association, such as the family and the region, can result only in the stultification of culture, a prospect that humanity has never contemplated before. The shape of that future, Eliot would be the first to admit (as he was also one of the first to contemplate), is anybody’s guess, but its arrival is ensured if the maintenance and transmission of culture become consciously treated as the official prerogative of bureaucratic and commercial interests. As a bulwark against that possibility, Eliot envisions an elite of individuals in the arts, sciences, religion, philosophy, and government who are respected not for their inherited or appointed position in the culture but for the inherent capacity that they each exhibit for keeping the cultural life of the community viable and active, so that change occurs as a result of the shaping power of natural talents and skills among individuals, and most certainly not of preconceived public policies.

It is possible, however, that after all is said and done, Eliot may have missed a critical beat in his analysis of what makes human cultures work and develop, a lapse for which he can be forgiven but which still should be brought to the attention of interested readers. Quite simply, the processes by which cultures are formed and fostered may themselves have been undergoing a radical transformation in the 20th century, one that required an entirely new assortment of social methodologies for maintaining and transmitting them. Eliot himself had been able to speak of progressive stages and levels of cultural development. As much as such terms may make thinkers nowadays blush, he could point to primitive and high cultures in explaining how different rules and practices apply as cultures advance. If primitive and high were to be replaced by simple and complex, or if those words, too, seem too prejudiciously evaluative, then perhaps cluttered and uncluttered might do as well.

The point is that the more complex or cluttered a culture becomes, as the cultures of Western Europe certainly have over the past several hundred years of their development, the more they need precisely what Eliot, from his vantage point, is justified in regarding as the death blow of a viable culture, and that is a conscious management imposed from above. Perhaps there is, in other words, a point at which culture ceases to advance best by advancing unconsciously, and Eliot could not possibly have known that he was living through just such a period of not catastrophic but cataclysmic change, bringing with it not an end but the sort of new beginning that Eliot otherwise has always cherished. No doubt it remains to be seen how much the increasing pressure of both population growth and widespread urbanization on a virtually global scale during the 20th and 21st centuries may alone require an entirely new set of paradigms than Eliot’s. The only certainty is that Eliot’s efforts in that same regard and in the midst of that same pivotal century should at least provide a worthwhile point of reference for future thinkers and thinking on this critical and sensitive topic.

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Cultural critique.

Cultural critique is a broad field of study that employs many different theoretical traditions to analyze and critique cultural formations. Because culture is always historically and con textually determined, each era has had to develop its own methods of cultural analysis in order to respond to new technological innovations, new modes of social organization, new economic formations, and novel forms of oppression, exploitation, and subjugation.

The modern European tradition of cultural critique can be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) seminal essay entitled ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ Here, Kant opposed theocratic and authoritarian forms of culture with a liberal, progressive, and humanist culture of science, reason, and critique. By organizing society under the guiding principles of critical reason, Kant believed that pre Enlightenment superstition and ignorance would be replaced by both individual liberty and universal peace.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) historicized Kant’s version of critique through a technique called genealogy. Nietzsche argued that Kant’s necessary universals are born from historical struggles between competing interests. Compared to Greek culture, Nietzsche saw contemporary Germany as degenerate. Prominent figures such as David Strauss and Friedrich Schiller represented ‘‘cultural philistines’’ who promoted cultural conformity to a massified, standardized, and superficial culture. Thus contemporary culture blocked the revitalization of a strong, creative, and vital society of healthy geniuses. Here Nietzsche rested his faith not in universal categories of reason but rather in the aristocratic will to power to com bat the ‘‘herd mentality’’ of German mass culture.

Like Nietzsche, Karl Marx (1818–83) also rejected universal and necessary truths outside of history. Using historical materialism as his major critical tool, Marx argued that the dominant culture legitimated current exploitative economic relations. In short, the class that controls the economic base also controls the production of cultural and political ideas. Whereas Nietzsche traced central forms of mass culture back to the hidden source of power animating them, Marx traced cultural manifestations back to their economic determinates. Here culture is derived from antagonistic social relations conditioned by capitalism, which distorts both the content and the form of ideas. Thus for Marx, cultural critique is essentially ideological critique exposing the interests of the ruling class within its seemingly natural and universal norms.

Whereas Kant defined the proper uses of reason for the creation of a rational social order, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) argued that the liberal humanist tradition failed to actualize its ideal because it did not take into account the eternal and unavoidable conflict between culture and the psychological unconscious. Freud argued that the complexity of current society has both positive and negative psychological implications. On the one hand, individuals have a certain degree of security and stability afforded to them by society. Yet at the same time, this society demands repression of aggressive instincts, which turn inward and direct themselves toward the ego. This internalization of aggression results in an overpowering super ego and attending neurotic symptoms and pathologies. For Freud, such a conflict is not the result of economic determination (as we saw with Marx), but rather is a struggle fundamental to the social contract and is increasingly exacerbated by the social demand for conformity, utility, and productivity.

With the Frankfurt School of social theory, cultural critique attempted to synthesize the most politically progressive and theoretically innovative strands of the former cultural theories. Max Horkheimer (1895–1971), Theodor Adorno (1903–69), and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) are three of the central members of the Frankfurt School who utilized a transdisciplinary method that incorporated elements of critical reason, genealogy, historical materialism, sociology, and psychoanalysis to analyze culture. While heavily rooted in Marxism, the members of the Frankfurt School increasingly distanced themselves from Marx’s conception of the centrality of economic relations, focusing instead on cultural and political methods of social control produced through new media technologies and a burgeoning culture industry. In the classic text Dialectic of Enlightenment (1948), Horkheimer and Adorno demonstrate that Kant’s reliance on reason has not resulted in universal peace but rather increasing oppression, culminating in fascism. Here reason becomes a new form of dogmatism, its own mythology predicated on both external domination of nature and internal domination of psychological drives. This dialectic of Enlightenment reason reveals itself in the rise of the American culture industry whose sole purpose is to produce docile, passive, and submissive workers. Marcuse argued along similar lines, proposing that the American ‘‘one dimensional’’ culture has effectively destroyed the capacity for critical and oppositional thinking. Thus many members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno in particular) adopted a highly pessimistic attitude toward ‘‘mass culture,’’ and, like Nietzsche, took refuge in ‘‘high’’ culture.

While the Frankfurt School articulated cultural conditions in a stage of monopoly capital ism and fascist tendencies, British cultural studies emerged in the 1960s when, first, there was widespread global resistance to consumer capitalism and an upsurge of revolutionary movements. British cultural studies originally was developed by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson to preserve working class culture against colonization by the culture industry. Thus both British cultural studies and the Frankfurt School recognized the central role of new consumer and media culture in the erosion of working class resistance to capitalist hegemony. Yet there are distinct differences between British cultural studies and proponents of Frankfurt School critical theory. Whereas the Frankfurt School turned toward the modernist avantgarde as a form of resistance to instrumental reason and capitalist culture, British cultural studies turned toward the oppositional potentials within youth subcultures. As such, British cultural studies was able to recognize the ambiguity of media culture as a contested terrain rather than a monolithic and one dimensional product of the capitalist social relations of production.

Currently, cultural critique is attempting to respond to a new era of global capitalism, hybridized cultural forms, and increasing control of information by a handful of media conglomerates. As a response to these economic, social, and political trends, cultural critique has expanded its theoretical repertoire to include multicultural, postcolonial, and feminist critiques of culture. African American feminist theorist bell hooks is an exemplary representative of new cultural studies who analyzes the interconnected nature of gender, race, and class oppressions operating in imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Scholars of color such as hooks and Cornell West critique not only ongoing forms of exclusion, marginalization, and fetishization of the ‘‘other’’ within media culture, but also the classical tools of cultural criticism. Through insights generated by these scholars, cultural criticism is reevaluating its own internal complicity with racism, sexism, colonialism, and homophobia and in the process gaining a new level of self reflexivity that enables it to become an increasingly powerful tool for social emancipation.

References:

• Durham, M. G. & Kellner, D. (2001) Media and Cultural Studies. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
• Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its Discontents. J. Cape & H. Smith, New York.
• Kant, I. (1992) Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Ed. P. Guyer & A. Wood. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Kellner, D. (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
• Nietzsche, F. (1989) On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage, New York.
• Tucker, R. (Ed.) (1978) The Marx Engels Reader. Norton, New York.

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Back to  Sociology of Culture .

Situation Critical Fall 2016

Culture in the hands of the critic.

The term criticism has a bad reputation, so much so that high school teachers everywhere remind students about “constructive criticism” before any mutual evaluation occurs in the classroom. However, the phrase constructive criticism is, or should be, redundant. Criticism is not synonymous with insult, though it is unfortunately easy to conflate the two (especially in the vicious setting of public school). If criticism stops being constructive then it is no longer criticism. Though uncomfortable, criticism reveals potential, helping to further society’s progress as a result.

Cultural criticism takes on the vastness of art and literature created throughout society and tries to evaluate it. Though it may hurt to be criticized, it is necessary in regards to the notion that if everything is equally good, than nothing is. Tony Bennett offers his interpretation of the definition of “cultural criticism or cultural critique, in which works of culture serve as the occasion for the identification of the failings and shortcomings of society” ( Bennett , 65). This may seem like a pessimistic take, but I think it is safe to say that this world is far from utopian. A more optimistic definition comes from Dwight Garner, who thinks cultural criticism “means talking about ideas, aesthetics and morality as if these things matter (and they do). It’s at base an act of love” (Garner, A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical ). On the surface these definitions seem very different; Bennett emphasizes a need to police society’s failures while Garner’s more warm and fuzzy definition describes appreciating cultural products. These perspectives are just two sides to the same coin, and they might be even more indistinguishable than that.

Artists create works in the context of society, even if they do not intend to; therefore, comparison to other works is unavoidable. Critique and comparison go hand in hand; if something is identified as good then there must be something bad that makes it good. Everything contains this relative nature, which cyclically creates a need for criticism. Bennett describes the process as an “identification,” which requires some sort of evaluation of a work. Once a work is observed, studied and analyzed, then it can be identified as part of the “failings and shortcomings of society” (Bennett, 65). Or not. Though people perceive critics to have a universal loathing, some of their qualifications of works are favorable. These complimentary moments most obviously align with Garner’s definition that cultural criticism is an “act of love,” though negative reviews can be just as, if not more, thoughtful than a raving one. Observing something closely and with intention (which is necessary for true criticism) validates a work of art. Any carefully constructed review proves that the piece under scrutiny matters and is worth the attention it gets. Furthermore, it is easier and safer to agree with and compliment someone or something than to challenge it. That’s not to say critics can’t like things, but critical reviews are necessary, particular now, to escape potentially masturbatory circles of thought where everyone is complimented and ideas go unchallenged.

The internet makes it very easy to voice opinions, and though critiques are opinions, they surpass surface-level internet posts in their depth, contemplation, and substance. It’s also easy to isolate oneself as a creator online, surrounded by people with similar tastes, and get stuck in a feedback loop of compliments. Compliments are useful for stamina and confidence, but artists cannot sustain themselves without critique because critique enables improvement. In this sense, criticism is truly an “act of love” as Garner describes. Critics scour work for meaning, therefore proving that the cultural product they evaluate really matters, which is the highest compliment a work of art can get.

Bennett, Tony. “Culture.” Ed. Meaghan Morris.  New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society . Ed. Tony Bennett and Lawrence Grossberg. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 63-69. Print.

Garner, Dwight. “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical.”  The New York Times . The New York Times, 18 Aug. 2012. Web. 27 Sept. 2016.

The pen is mightier than the sword

667 Comments

I am particularly interested in your takes on “constructive criticism” and negative reviews. First, I didn’t know if I was totally convinced that constructive criticism is redundant. While I was initially drawn to this conclusion, I was left wondering—are there instances where negative criticism isn’t constructive? Then, however, when you spoke about how even a negative review can validate a piece of an artwork, I began to agree with your take on constructive criticism. Even negative reviews legitimize a work of art as something even worth talking about. Negative reviews can push conversations forward or at least add something new to the discussion.

Nice Comment on “Constructive Criticism” and Negative Reviews: This is a thought-provoking exploration of “constructive criticism” and negative reviews! I appreciate the nuanced perspective you offer.

Initially questioning whether constructive criticism is redundant opens up an interesting discussion. While striving for constructive and actionable feedback is often ideal, acknowledging that some negative criticism might not explicitly offer solutions is valuable.

The point about negative reviews validating a work of art by fostering discussion is insightful. Even if critical, the review acknowledges the work’s existence and potentially sparks valuable conversations or new interpretations.

Overall, your analysis highlights the complexity of the topic. While constructive criticism strives to improve works and guide development, negative reviews can still play a role in legitimizing a work’s place within the discussion and potentially pushing creative boundaries forward.

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You are quite correct in noting that today’s self-congratulatory culture poses problems for both artists and audiences. I also think your characterization of criticism as a mechanism for improvement is quite thoughtful and open-minded.

However, I do not agree with the sentiment you end on. You write that “Critics scour work for meaning, therefore proving that the cultural product they evaluate really matters.” I find this far too optimistic a view. For better or worse there are works of art which are insipid, lazy and boring. I know that sounds really harsh and a bit unfair, but I genuinely believe this is the case.

For example, in middle school I went to see the The Last Airbender Movie with my aunt and younger cousin. The only redeeming quality of those agonizing 103 minutes was the fact that I liked the people I was with and it made a good joke a few years down the line. But I would have been livid had I spent my money on that movie. It sucked.

I guess the point is that sometimes works of art are really bad and the reason we need critics is to maintain some semblance of standards. By saying these things are dreadful and lack substantive value, critics preserve the authenticity of a genre or craft so that the actually quality work can receive the attention it deserves. Now, the aforementioned “quality work” may still get the attention it deserves in either case, but I think if we care about the general population’s engagement with the arts, we need critics who draw a line in the sand somewhere and just cull the stuff that is truly horrendous.

I agree with your point that the existence of negative feedbacks is in fact the pre-condition for positive ones, and especially the way it is put: “If everything is equally good, then nothing is.”

It occurs to me that the necessity of “negative feedbacks” might not lie in the fact that they are negative: If our culture assign negative feedbacks as carelessly as it does positive ones right now, the prospect of “criticism” does not become any less dim.

Instead, the necessity lies in “care.” What makes criticism constructive is not whether it endorses or attacks, but in that (1) it puts effort into understanding what the original work is trying to say, (2) it makes careful assessment of such information and its communication, and/or (3) it points out possible improvements.

As we learned from “Slow Criticism,” although the time spent cannot be the sole criterion, it reflects the “care” that the critic gives to the work.

The vice of the positive (exchange) of reviews nowadays, then, is not its “positivity,” but its “carelessness.”

Your essay itself elicited “constructive criticism” with a mix of approval and disagreement, so in a way it realized the argument of your piece, which I take to be crystallized most in your final paragraph: “though critiques are opinions, they surpass surface-level internet posts in their depth, contemplation, and substance.”

In fact, I wonder if you have “buried the lead” a bit here, as they say in journalism. What would your essay look like if you start with this sentence and then use your quotations to unpack it fully: the difference between opinion and criticism becomes the theme, and your sense of *how* we might evaluate the difference through other keywords, such as Bennett’s notion of “identification”; Garner’s of “love”; Anna’s bringing in the notion of “care” (which after all is the etymological origin of the term curator, which we are putting in a sort of conversation with critic in our course).

In my reading, this question of opinion compared to criticism is the important theme you have come upon in your essay and I would only propose that you could bring it to the top of the essay and use it even more directly as your focus in this important reflection on what it means to critique rather than opine.

Nice work here.

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Actually, I’m wondering whether you haven’t “buried the lead,” as they say in the news business. Imagine starting with this line and using your quotes to thoroughly deconstruct it as the basis for your essay: You bring in phrases like Bennett’s “identification,” Garner’s “love,” and Anna’s “care,” and the distinction between opinion and criticism becomes the topic of the discussion (which after all is the etymological origin of the term curator, which we are putting in a sort of conversation with critic in our course).

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24 What Is New Historicism? What Is Cultural Studies?

When we use New Historicism or cultural studies as our lens, we seek to understand literature and culture by examining the historical and cultural contexts in which literary works were produced and by exploring the ways in which literature and culture influence and are influenced by social and political power dynamics. For our exploration of these critical methods, we will consider the literary work’s context as the center of our target.

New Historicism is often associated with the work of Stephen Greenblatt , who argued that literature is not a timeless reflection of universal truths, but rather a product of the historical and cultural contexts in which it was produced. Greenblatt emphasized the importance of studying the social, political, and economic factors that shaped literary works, as well as the ways in which those works in turn influenced the culture and politics of their time.

New Historicism also seeks to break down the boundaries between high and low culture, and to explore the ways in which literature and culture interact with other forms of discourse and representation, such as science, philosophy, and popular culture.

One of the key principles of New Historicism is the idea that literature and culture are never neutral or objective, but are always implicated in power relations and struggles. It also emphasizes the importance of the reader or interpreter in shaping the meaning of a text, arguing that our own historical and cultural contexts influence the way we understand and interpret literary works. When using this method, we often talk about cultural artifacts as part of the discourse of their time period.

New Historicism has been influential in a variety of fields, including literary and cultural studies, history, and anthropology. It has been used to analyze a wide range of literary works, from Shakespeare to contemporary novels, as well as other cultural artifacts such as films and popular music.

Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing literature that emerged in the late 20th century. Unlike traditional literary criticism that focuses solely on the text itself, cultural studies criticism explores the relationship between literature and culture. It considers how literature reflects, influences, and is influenced by the broader cultural, social, political, and historical contexts in which it is produced and consumed.

In cultural studies literary criticism, scholars may examine how literature intersects with issues such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and power dynamics. The goal is to understand how literature participates in and shapes cultural discourses. This approach emphasizes the importance of considering the cultural and social implications of literary texts, as well as the ways in which literature can be a site of contestation and negotiation.

Key concepts in cultural studies literary criticism include hegemony, representation, identity, and the politics of culture. Scholars in this field often draw on a variety of theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, to analyze and interpret literary works in their cultural context. We will explore these approaches to literature in more depth in future parts of the book.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how formal elements in literary texts create meaning within the context of culture and literary discourse. (CLO 2.1
• Using a literary theory, choose appropriate elements of literature (formal, content, or context) to focus on in support of an interpretation (CLO 2.3)
• Emphasize what the work does and how it does it with respect to form, content, and context (CLO 2.4
• Understand how context impacts the reading of a text, and how different contexts can bring about different readings (CLO 4.1)
• Demonstrate through discussion and/or writing how textual interpretation can change given the context from which one reads (CLO 6.2)
• Understand that interpretation is inherently political, and that it reveals assumptions and expectations about value, truth, and the human experience (CLO 7.1)

Scholarship: An Excerpt from the Introduction to Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, is widely credited with the ideas about history that led to the development of New Historicism as an approach to literary texts. In this passage, Foucault explains his aims in proposing that history does not consist of stable facts. Understanding Foucault’s approach to history is necessary for understanding the New Historicism critical approach to literature.

In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should like to begin with a few observations. My aim is not to transfer to the field of history, and more particularly to the history of knowledge (connaissances), a structuralist method that has proved valuable in other fields of analysis. My aim is to uncover the principles and consequences of an autochthonous transformation that is taking place in the field of historical knowledge. It may well be that this, transformation, the problems that it raises, the tools that it uses, the concepts that emerge from it, and the results that it obtains are not entirely foreign to what is called structural analysis. But this kind of analysis is not specifically used; my aim is most decidedly not to use the categories of cultural totalities (whether world-views, ideal types, the particular spirit of an age) in order to impose on history, despite itself, the forms of structural analysis. The series described, the limits fixed, the comparisons and correlations made are based not on the old philosophies of history, but are intended to question teleologies and totalisations; in so far as my aim is to define a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme, it is clear that the theory that I am about to outline has a dual relation with the previous studies. It is an attempt to formulate, in general terms (and not without a great deal of rectification and elaboration), the tools that these studies have used or forged for themselves in the course of their work. But, on the other hand, it uses the results already obtained to define a method of analysis purged of all anthropologism. The ground on which it rests is the one that it has itself discovered. The studies of madness and the beginnings of psychology, of illness and the beginnings of a clinical medicine, of the sciences of life, language, and economics were attempts that were carried out, to some extent, in the dark: but they gradually became clear, not only because little by little their method became more precise, but also because they discovered – in this debate on humanism and anthropology – the point of its historical possibility. In short, this book, like those that preceded it, does not belong – at least directly, or in the first instance – to the debate on structure (as opposed to genesis, history, development); it belongs to that field in which the questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off. But it would probably not be incorrect to say that the problem of structure arose there too. This work is not an exact description of what can be read in Madness and Civilisation, Naissance de la clinique, or The Order of Things. It is different on a great many points. It also includes a number of corrections and internal criticisms. Generally speaking, Madness and Civilisation accorded far too great a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I called an ‘experiment’, thus showing to what extent one was still close to admitting an anonymous and general subject of history; in Naissance de la clinique, the frequent recourse to structural analysis threatened to bypass the specificity of the problem presented, and the level proper to archaeology; lastly, in The Order of Things, the absence of methodological signposting may have given the impression that my analyses were being conducted in terms of cultural totality. It is mortifying that I was unable to avoid these dangers: I console myself with the thought that they were intrinsic to the enterprise itself, since, in order to carry out its task, it had first to free itself from these various methods and forms of history; moreover, without the questions that I was asked,’ without the difficulties that arose, without the objections that were made, I may never have gained so clear a view of the enterprise to which I am now inextricably linked. Hence the cautious, stumbling manner of this text: at every turn, it stands back, measures up what is before it, gropes towards its limits, stumbles against what it does not mean, and digs pits to mark out its own path. At every turn, it denounces any possible confusion. It rejects its identity, without previously stating: I am neither this nor that. It is not critical, most of the time; it is not a way of saying that everyone else ‘ is wrong. It is an attempt to define a particular site by the exteriority of its vicinity; rather than trying to reduce others to silence, by claiming that what they say is worthless, I have tried to define this blank space from which I speak, and which is slowly taking shape in a discourse that I still feel to be so precarious and so unsure. ‘Aren’t you sure of what you’re saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you, are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?’ ‘What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.’

After reading this brief excerpt from Foucault’s approach to history, how do you feel about his assertion that there are no stable facts, that history is essentially like any other text that we can deconstruct? Is there such a thing as “objective” or “true” history? Why or why not? How does this approach compare with what you learned about deconstruction in our previous section?

Scholar Jean Howard has said of the historical/biographical criticism (which we studied in part one) that it depends on three assumptions:

• “history is knowable”;
• “literature mirrors…or reflects historical reality”;
• “historians and critics can see the facts objectively” (Howard 18).

Foucault and the New Historicists reject these three assumptions.

Cultural Studies: From “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular'” by Stuart Hall

Now let’s look at an example of Cultural Studies criticism: Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.'” Hall, a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist, was one of the founders of British Cultural Studies. He explored the process of encoding and decoding that accompanies any interaction readers have with a text. When Hall talks about “periodisation” in the passage below, he is discussing historians’ and literary theorists’ attempts to classify works through “periods” (e.g., the English Romantic poets; the Bloomsbury Group , etc.). Hall extends this difficulty to the phrase “popular culture,” which is often used in cultural studies criticism.

First, I want to say something about periodisations in the study of popular culture. Difficult problems are posed here by periodization—I don’t offer it to you simply as a sort of gesture to the historians. Are the major breaks largely descriptive? Do they arise largely from within popular culture itself, or from factors which are outside of but impinge on it? With what other movements and periodisations is “popular culture” most revealingly linked? Then I want to tell you some of the difficulties I have with the term “popular.” I have almost as many problems with “popular” as I have with “culture.” When you put the two terms together the difficulties can be pretty horrendous. Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the labouring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history revealed themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life, and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward-looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the centre of popular life, actively marginalised. Rather than simply “falling into disuse” through the Long March to modernization, things are actively pushed aside, so that something else can take their place. The magistrate and the evangelical police have, or ought to have, a more “honoured” place in the history of popular culture than they have usually been accorded. Even more important than ban and proscription is that subtle and slippery customer—“reform” (with all the positive and unambiguous overtones it carries today). One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often, for their own good, of course—in their “best interest.” We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”— yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the labouring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. Popular culture is neither, in a “pure” sense, the popular traditions of resistance to these processes; nor is it the forms which are superimposed on and over them. It is the ground on which the transformations are worked. In the study of popular culture, we should always start here: with the double stake in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it.

Now that you’ve read examples of scholarship from these two approaches, what similarities and differences do you see? Despite significant overlaps—both approaches consider power structures and view texts as artifacts, for example—Cultural Studies tends to have a broader scope, incorporating insights from various cultural disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. New Historicism focuses more specifically on the interplay between literature and history. Additionally, Cultural Studies may engage more directly with contemporary cultural and political issues, while New Historicism tends to focus on historical periods and their relevance to understanding literature.

How to Use New Historicism and Cultural Studies as  Critical Approaches

When using a New Historicism or cultural studies approach to analyze a literary text, you should consider the connections between the text and its historical context. With cultural studies, you will also consider how the text influenced and was influenced by popular culture, and how the text’s reception changed over time. You can do this in a variety of ways. Here are a few approaches you might consider. Some of them such as author background, reader response, and identifying power dynamics will feel familiar to you from previous chapters.

• Research the Historical Context: Investigate the time period in which the literary work was written. Explore political events, social structures, economic conditions, and cultural movements.
• Author’s Background: Examine the life and background of the author. Consider their personal experiences, beliefs, and the historical events that may have influenced them.
• Identify Power Dynamics: Analyze power relationships within the text and in the historical context. Consider issues of class, gender, race, and other forms of social hierarchy.
• Interdisciplinary Approach: Draw on insights from various disciplines such as history, sociology, anthropology, and political science to enrich your understanding of the historical and cultural context.
• Cultural Artifacts: Treat the literary work as a cultural artifact. Identify elements within the text that reflect or respond to the cultural values, norms, and anxieties of the time.
• Dialogues with Other Texts: Explore how the literary work engages with other texts, both literary and non-literary. Look for intertextual references and consider how the work contributes to broader cultural conversations (the discourse Foucault talks about).
• Language and Literary Techniques: Analyze the language, narrative structure, and formal elements of the text. Consider how these literary techniques contribute to the overall meaning and how they may be influenced by or respond to historical factors.
• Ideological Critique: Investigate the ideologies present in the text and how they align with or challenge the dominant ideologies of the historical period. Consider the ways in which literature participates in ideological struggles. We will explore more specific examples of how to do this when we focus on Marxism and Postcolonial Studies in our next section.
• Social and Cultural Constructs: Examine how social and cultural constructs are represented in the text. This includes exploring representations of identity, social norms, and cultural practices.
• Historical Events and Allusions: Identify direct or indirect references to historical events within the text. Consider how the events are portrayed and what commentary they offer on the historical moment.
• Historical Change and Continuity: Assess how the text reflects or responds to processes of historical change and continuity. Consider whether the text aligns with or challenges prevailing attitudes and structures.
• Reader Response: Reflect on how the historical context might shape the way readers interpret and respond to the text. Consider how the meaning of the text may evolve across different historical and cultural contexts.

You do not need to consider every aspect of the text mentioned above to write an effective New Historicism analysis. You can focus on one or a few of these elements in your approach to the text.

As noted above, a cultural studies critical approach is similar to New Historicism but focuses more on the text as it is received in a particular culture, with more emphasis on intersectionality. A cultural studies approach may consider a variety of artifacts in addition to literary texts (such as film and other media) for analysis. A cultural studies approach might also consider how cultural influences, receptions, and attitudes have changed over time.

Let’s look at how do do these types of criticism by applying New Historicism to a text.

Applying New Historicism Techniques to Literature

As with our other critical approaches, we will start with  a close reading of the poem below (we’ll do this together in class or as part of the recorded lecture for this chapter). After you complete your close reading of the poem and find evidence from the text, you’ll need to look outside the text for additional information to place the poem in its context. I have provided some additional resources to demonstrate how you might do this. Looking at the text within its context will help you to formulate a thesis statement that makes an argument about the text, using New Historicism as your critical method.

“Lament for Dark Peoples”

I was a red man one time, But the white men came. I was a black man, too, But the white men came.

They drove me out of the forest. They took me away from the jungles. I lost my trees. I lost my silver moons.

Now they’ve caged me In the circus of civilization. Now I herd with the many— Caged in the circus of civilization.

The first thing we need to know is more about Langston Hughes as a poet. Who was he? When did he write? What was the cultural context for his writing? We can go to Wikipedia as a starting point for our research, but we should not cite Wikipedia. Instead, we will want to find higher-quality literary scholarship to use in our analysis.

The open source article “ Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language” by Christine Dualé informs us that “Hughes gained his reputation as a “jazz poet” during the jazz era or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s” ( Dualé 1). Dualé quotes a study of Black poets during the Harlem Renaissance that provides some context for this poem: “Many black intellects were disquieted by the white vogue for blackness. They recognized how frivolous and temporal it was, and the extent to which their culture was being admired for all the ‘primitive’ qualities from which they wished to be distanced” ( Dualé quoting Archer Straw). 

This quote helps us to understand lines 9-12 of the poem, where Hughes describes the “circus of civilization” that he felt under the gaze of this “white vogue for blackness.”

In considering the question of social constructs and power dynamics during this period, we need to know more about the Harlem Renaissance, preferably looking for contemporary sources that describe this period. JSTOR is a good database for this type of research. I limit my search by year to get five results, and I choose an article from Alain Locke (in part, because I already know enough about the Harlem Renaissance to know that Locke was an important part of it—it’s totally acceptable to use your own existing knowledge of the historical context, if you have it, to guide your research!).

When I read “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” written by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke in 1928,  I quickly find the prevailing social construct that the dominant intellectual culture at the time (white American men) had formed about African American writers during the period when this poem was written. I have quoted from the first page of the article below:

THERE are two distinctive elements in the cultural background of the American Negro: one, his primitive tropical heritage, however vague and clouded over that may be, and second, the specific character of the Negro group experience in America both with respect to group history and with regard to unique environing social conditions. As an easily discriminable minority, these conditions are almost inescapable for all sections of the Negro population, and function, therefore, to intensify emotionally and intellectually group feelings, group reactions, group traditions. Such an accumulating body of collective experience inevitably matures into a group culture which just as inevitably finds some channels of unique expression, and this has been and will be the basis of the Negro’s characteristic expression of himself in American life. In fact, as it matures to conscious control and intelligent use, what has been the Negro’s social handicap and class liability will very likely become his positive group capital and cultural asset. Certainly whatever the Negro has produced thus far of distinctive worth and originality has been derived in the main from this source, with the equipment from the general stock of American culture acting at times merely as the precipitating agent; at others, as the working tools of this creative expression (Locke 234).

In reading this article, it’s important to note that the author, Alain Locke, is  a noted African American scholar and writer and the first African American to win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship. He is widely considered to be one of the principal architects of the Harlem Renaissance. What does this passage tell us about the social constructs and contemporary views of African Americans in the late 1920s, when Langston Hughes wrote “Lament for Dark Peoples”? What important historical context seems to be “missing” or glossed over from this cultural description of African Americans in the 1920s? Hint: It’s only 60 years since President Lincolin signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet we see no explicit mention of slavery here.

Now to consider how history and context changes, I might also look for a contemporary appraisal of Langston Hughes’s work in the context of the Harlem Renaissance.

Again, I do a JSTOR search, limiting to articles from 2018 through 2023. I get 157 results using the same search terms. Clearly, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance are playing a prominent role in our contemporary scholarly discourse, especially in the fields of literature, history, and cultural studies. In fact, there’s even a journal called The Langston Hughes Review ! I choose an article from this journal entitled “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later” by Wallace Best, Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University.

In this article, I get some corroboration for what my search results have already told me: “Langston Hughes, one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, is having a renaissance all his own” (Best 1).

Best goes on to demonstrate how Langston Hughes’s role in our culture has shifted since his death:

“There is good reason for all this attention. Arguably one of the most significant writers in United States history, Hughes has left an indelible mark, culturally and politically, on American society. Hailed in his lifetime mainly as the “Poet Laureate of the African American community,” he is now generally embraced as one of the most important poets speaking to, and on behalf of, all Americans. Since his death in May 1967, his writing, particularly his poetry, has been invoked to articulate both our loftiest hopes and our deepest fears as a nation. Seldom has there been a national crisis or an important political event in the United States over the last half-century in which his work has not been recounted. Speakers from across the social, ideological, and political spectrum, from Tim Kaine, Rick Santorum, and Rick Perry to Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama have cited Hughes’s powerful compositions. His poetry has helped to shape our country’s thinking about itself, our often-troubled past, and our continuing hope for a brighter, more enlightened future.”

With these three external sources and the original poem, I can now begin to think about the kind of thesis statement I want to write.

Example of a New Historicism thesis statement: In one of his earlier poems, “Lament for Dark Peoples,” African American poet Langston Hughes makes a powerful argument against the “circus of [white] civilization (line 12), demonstrating how the cultural norms toward marginalized peoples in place during the early twentieth century damaged all Americans.

I would then use the evidence from the poem as one cultural artifact, including the additional sources I found to provide more context for when the poem was written, the social constructs and power dynamics in place at that time, and the shifts in culture that have now made Langston Hughes a poet for “all Americans” (Best 1).

With New Historicism, because we are considering the context, we must cite some outside sources in addition to the text itself. Here are the sources I cited in this section:

Works Cited

Best, Wallace. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Remembering Langston Hughes: His Art, Life, and Legacy Fifty Years Later.” The Langston Hughes Review , vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–5. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.5325/langhughrevi.25.1.0001 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

Dualé, Christine. “Langston Hughes’s Poetic Vision of the American Dream: A Complex and Creative Encoded Language.”  Angles. New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 7 (2018). https://journals.openedition.org/angles/920  . Accessed 3 Oct. 2023. Locke, Alain. “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science , vol. 140, 1928, pp. 234–47. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1016852 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2023.

One additional note: depending on your approach, it would also be appropriate to borrow research techniques from historians for a New Historicism analysis. This might involve working with archive primary source documents. One example of this type of document that I found in my research on the Harlem Renaissance is this one from the U.S. Library of Congress entitled “The Whites Invade Harlem.”

As noted above, a cultural studies approach would be similar to a New Historicism approach. However, if I were using cultural studies, I might want to focus on the difference between the text’s critical reception when it was published (how it affected and was affected by the discourse in the 1920s) and the text’s critical reception today, focusing on the explosion of academic interest on Langston Hughes’s work in since 2018. I would then look at the particular aspects of culture, such as the election of America’s first Black president and the backlash this created in popular culture, as well as the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia and how this was reflected in popular culture. For example, I could consider how twenty-first century scholarship focusing on Langston Hughes is one example of a larger desire for inclusion and representation of marginalized groups in literature, what we sometimes refer to as “exploding the canon” (Renza 257).

Limitations of New Historicism and Cultural Studies Criticism

While New Historicism offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of literature and historical context, it also has its limitations. Here are some potential drawbacks:

• Relativism: New Historicism can sometimes be accused of cultural relativism, as it emphasizes understanding a text within its specific historical context. This might lead to a reluctance to make broader judgments about the quality or significance of a work across different times and cultures.
• Overemphasis on Power Relations: Critics argue that New Historicism can place an excessive focus on power dynamics and political aspects, potentially neglecting other important elements of literary analysis, such as aesthetics or individual authorial intentions.
• Determinism: There’s a risk of determinism in assuming that a text is entirely shaped by its historical context. This approach may downplay the agency of individual authors and the role of artistic creativity in shaping literature.
• Selective Use of History: Scholars employing New Historicism may selectively use historical evidence to support their interpretations, potentially overlooking contradictory historical data or alternative perspectives that challenge their readings (don’t do this!)
• Overlooking Textual Autonomy/Author Authority: Critics argue that New Historicism sometimes neglects the autonomy of literary texts, treating them primarily as reflections of historical conditions rather than as creative and independent entities with their own internal dynamics.
• Tendency for Presentism: There’s a risk of imposing contemporary values and perspectives onto historical texts, leading to anachronistic interpretations that may not accurately reflect the attitudes and beliefs of the time in which the work was created (note how I initially looked for scholarship from the time period of the text I was analyzing above).

These limitations do not mean we shouldn’t use New Historicism; rather, they suggest areas where a more balanced and comprehensive approach to literary analysis may be necessary.

Similarly, cultural studies might place an overwhelming emphasis on cultural factors, sometimes neglecting economic or political considerations that could also shape social dynamics. The relativist stance of cultural studies may hinder critical evaluation and potentially overlook harmful practices or ideologies.

New Historicism and Cultural Criticism Scholars

New historicism.

• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher who viewed history as a text that could be deconstructed. Foucault’s concept of “the discourse” is essential to both New Historicism and Cultural Studies criticism.
• Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) is the American Shakespeare scholar who coined the term “New Historicism.”

Cultural Studies

• Stuart Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-born British philosopher and cultural theorist whose ideas were influential to the development of cultural studies as a field.
• Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German philosopher and thinker whose ideas about media were foundational to cultural studies.
• Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher and critic who focused on the importance of context over text in approaches to literary works.
• Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher whose 1967 essay “L’Morte de Auteur” critiqued traditional biographical approaches to literary criticism.

Further Reading

• Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Thinking Photography  (1982): 15-31.
• Brannigan, John.  New Historicism and Cultural Materialism . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
• Coates, Christopher. “What was the New Historicism?” The Centennial Review , vol. 37, no. 2, 1993, pp. 267–80. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/23739388. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Cotten, Angela L., and Christa Davis Acampora, eds.  Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings . State University of New York Press, 2012.
• Dollimore, Jonathan. “Shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism.” New Historicism and Renaissance Drama . Routledge, 2016. 45-56.
• Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt.  Practicing New Historicism . University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “Racial Memory and Literary History.” PMLA , vol. 116, no. 1, 2001, pp. 48–63. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/463640. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry , vol. 23, no. 3, 1997, pp. 460–81. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344030. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hall, Stuart. “Encoding and decoding in the television discourse.” .https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/SOP07.pdf
• Hall, Stuart. “Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies.”  Stuart Hall . Routledge, 2006. 272-285.
• Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Foucault and the New Historicism.” American Literary History , vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. 360–75. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/490057. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Hoover, Dwight W. “The New Historicism.” The History Teacher , vol. 25, no. 3, 1992, pp. 355–66. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/494247. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Howard, Jean E. “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies.” English Literary Renaissance  16.1 (1986): 13-43.
• Porter, Carolyn. “History and Literature: ‘After the New Historicism.’” New Literary History , vol. 21, no. 2, 1990, pp. 253–72. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/469250. Accessed 3 Oct. 2023.
• Renza, Louis A. “Exploding Canons.” Contemporary Literature , vol. 28, no. 2, 1987, pp. 257–70. JSTOR , https://doi.org/10.2307/1208391 . Accessed 13 Feb. 2024.
• Ryan, Kiernan. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Cultural Criticism and the Way We Live Now

By Louis Menand

Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything.

That’s the title of his new book, the subtitle of which is “Essays.” Neither is completely accurate. Greif is against the way things are, but he has hopes for the way things might become. And, although “Against Everything” is put together from essays written over the past twelve years, and published mostly in the journal of which Greif is a founding editor, n+1 , it is really a book on a single subject: contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone who would buy such a book, or write such a book, or read a column about such a book—in short, yourself—might right now be living. It’s meant to be consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think.

I guess “Against Everything” would be called a work of cultural criticism. I’ve always disliked that term, since it’s related to no body of knowledge and names no actual calling, unlike, say, movie criticism or book reviewing. Also, movies are movies and books are books, but culture is everything. How are you supposed to get a handle on everything?

“We are incompetent to solve the times,” Emerson said (though, characteristically, he then went on to try to solve them), and that has always seemed a sound journalistic maxim to me. The songs, the shows, the books and movies, the art-world sensations, fashion statements, political spectacles, and tech innovations, the celebrities, cover stories, foods, meds, drugs, diets, exercise regimens, and life-style themes that “everyone” seems to be talking about or taking up or disapproving of—there is just too much foreground. It’s like a classroom in which every student’s hand is raised. “Make sense of me ,” they all cry out.

The problem isn’t picking out what will last. That, actually, is relatively easy. Critical reception is imperfect and it’s not always aligned with popular taste, but major oversights are rare. The problem is figuring out, in the constant bombardment of attention-seeking missiles, which ones tell us something about who we are.

The main difficulty is not knowing what’s a trend, what’s a backlash, and what’s a blip. Many years ago, when people began jogging, I predicted, with the confidence of untried youth, that jogging was a fad that couldn’t last. It wasn’t that ordinary-looking people running in public in their shorts seemed kind of unnatural, although it did. I just couldn’t see how an activity that requires only a pair of sneakers could be sufficiently commercialized to become a fixture in the national life style. Such was my ignorance about the money in footwear.

Jogging didn’t end, but it did evolve into the current professional-class practice of “going to the gym”—a more high-cap and economically exploitable enthusiasm, and the subject of one of Greif’s most devastating “against” essays. The essay is devastating even if you think you have a sensible (or lazy) person’s ambivalence about regimented exercise. You will still feel, after reading him, that you have bought into a soul-destroying managerialism that has disguised itself as a means of enhancing “life.” (Greif’s essay on another professional-class fetish, food, is similarly unsettling.) Greif’s hero is Thoreau, which gives you an idea of the radicalism of his disaffection.

The cultural critic’s conceptual enemy is the smoothing formula known as “the wisdom of crowds.” On that theory, it must be the case that the person whose favorite song is the No. 1 song, whose favorite book is a best-seller, whose favorite food just switched from kale to quinoa, is the luckiest person in the world, because the culture is producing exactly the goods that he or she enjoys. This rule would apply right down all the rungs of life-style choices within your demographic: the kind of car you drive, the number of kids you have, where you take your vacations. On a wisdom-of-crowds hypothesis, what most people who are like you choose to do should be the optimal choice for you.

The cultural critic’s answer is that if you are doing what everyone around you is doing, you are not thinking, and if you are not thinking, you are missing out on your own life. The cultural critic is the person who worries that what everyone is doing right now is distracting us from what is really important, and precisely because it’s what everyone is doing.

The trouble, usually, is identifying the alternative. For the marketplace is flooded with alternatives: that’s what all those raised hands represent. You don’t like what all those people are doing? Do what all these people are doing. There are a lot of defiance goods out there offering an adversarial experience—like high-end pop music (for which Greif has a soft spot: his most brilliant essay is an amazingly multilayered piece called “Learning to Rap”).

But you don’t want to mistake some band’s assertion of autonomy (commercially enabled, but let’s leave that aside) for your own. What you want is something that seems unattainable in a society as saturated in mediated desires as ours is: you want uncoerced choice. Greif’s argument—and this is what separates him from the usual solver of the times—is that what’s killing us is deeply embedded in our social and economic system. It’s not the gym that’s the problem. It’s the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a solution to something.

Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to change before real choice is possible. Until then, it’s not enough to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against . . . everything.

It’s a peculiarity of this kind of criticism, criticism that takes on the whole culture, that it is often misread. Most people remember David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” as a critique of mid-century men and women as other-directed, but he actually thought that inner- and outer-direction are mixed in everyone. (He also tied his categories to a prediction about population growth that turned out to be wildly inaccurate, and which he cut from later editions.) Many readers also thought that what Christopher Lasch called “The Culture of Narcissism” referred to a surge of egocentricity. Lasch had to write another book, “The Minimal Self,” to explain that narcissism is symptom of the erosion of ego. Few people remember that one. I don’t think readers will make a mistake about Greif, but it will be interesting to see if they do.

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June 20, 2024

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The Tuning Fork in the Ear

June 25, 2024

Mara Corsino

In a series of conversations with Merve Emre at Wesleyan University, some of today’s sharpest working critics discuss their careers and methodology, and are then asked to close-read a text that they haven’t seen before. The Review is collaborating with Lit Hub to publish transcripts and recordings of these interviews, which across eleven episodes will offer an extensive look into the process of criticism.

While I hesitate to use the word “delicious” to describe anything other than food, Carina del Valle Schorske writes delicious essays. One in particular, which won a 2021 National Magazine Award, is about Covid-19 grief and postapocalyptic dance floors . “In Plato’s ‘Protagoras,’ Socrates argues that dancing girls have no place in philosophical gatherings,” she writes. She proceeds to prove Socrates wrong by weaving together social dancing, journalism, and a philosophy of visibility. Another essay, a profile of the rapper and singer Bad Bunny that appeared in both English and Spanish, does what the ideal profile should do: situates an enigmatic, alluring, and successful cultural figure in a particular time, place, genre, and language. It provides us with not only an account of a person, but a panoramic view of history.

Carina received her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in The Believer , The Point , Virginia Quarterly Review , and The New York Times Magazine , where she is a contributing writer, and she is currently at work on her debut collection of essays, The Other Island . 

Most people in this audience are college students. How do you get from where they are to where you are now?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. I do come from a family with where there’s a precedent for higher education. My father’s father was a professor. But on the other side, my mother’s mother was a singer on Puerto Rican radio before she migrated and worked regular blue-collar jobs her whole life. My mom was a performer in the Nuyorican scene when she was young. During my childhood, I had a sense of the value of artistic and intellectual life.

It was interesting being raised by New York and New Jersey people in the Bay Area. There weren’t really Puerto Ricans or Caribbean people there. The Jewish people were not the same as the Jewish people on the East Coast. So there was a certain sense of cultural dislocation, even though my parents both had strong leftist sensibilities and I was very aware of the Bay Area as the hotbed of a certain kind of radicalism—Black Panthers, César Chavez, ethnic studies—alongside the hippie spiritual stuff going on in my family. I went to Yale on full financial aid. In many ways, it was edifying, and, in many ways, it was very scary.

Why did you find college frightening?

I would say that I arrived in college already exhausted by the class conflicts and pressures of private school, where the fiction that I “deserved” to be there concealed the threat that I must continue deserving, must manifest my gratitude. And at Yale all of that was even more intense; I could see the gears of power turning. I was supposed to be in the Directed Studies program, which is a Great Books curriculum for freshmen who show promise in the humanities. It bothered me that the definition of rigor was submission to this list of European texts that hadn’t changed much since the nineteenth century. So I bailed: I took seminars on Orientalism, on Caribbean intellectuals. Hazel Carby was a big influence—my mom had books by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison at home, but she was my official gateway into Black feminism. Both of my majors, Literature and Ethnicity, Race & Migration, were global and interdisciplinary. Some might argue that I had no disciplinary training over the course of my whole academic career. But I feel grateful for the education that I ended up getting. It forced me to make connections and analogies.

I studied poetry. I wanted to be a poet, but I never quite figured out how to make my poetry accommodate the political and historical questions that seemed urgent to me. I was also interested in a form of writing that could possibly support me as a career. I loved essays. But I graduated into that very difficult economy after the 2008 crash. At that point all the magazine internships were still unpaid. The editorial assistant gigs in New York or D.C. paid $17,000 or $25,000 a year. I wasn’t able to take those jobs even though I was credentialed appropriately. My boyfriend at the time lived in Boston. He was getting a Ph.D. at MIT and he said, “Come live with me for six months and look for a job.”

I thought I wanted to work at Harvard’s Hiphop Archive. I sent them a review I’d written of Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III . They weren’t hiring, but I had a conversation with the director, Marcy Morgan. She connected me to the editors of Transition , a magazine of decolonial politics and culture that was founded in Uganda in 1961 by Rajat Neogy. In the 1990s, it was revived by Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah. Transition published a lot of interesting experimental work over the years: Bessie Head, V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Paul Theroux, interviews with Caetano Veloso and Julie Dash. When I was there, I worked with lots of amazing writers including Zinzi Clemmons and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah. It was so understaffed, and it didn’t pay much more than those other jobs, but because I was living with my boyfriend, the salary was feasible. On the side, I did some freelance editing and research for a psychoanalyst.

You applied to graduate school while working at the magazine?

That’s right. I started at Columbia five years after I graduated from college. It was also a strategic choice because it seemed like the most financially viable option—benefits, six years of funding, and guaranteed housing for six years in Manhattan, not far from my grandmother’s place in Washington Heights. I started the Ph.D. knowing that being a traditional scholar probably wasn’t a good match for me, but it seemed like the most capacious option for being intellectually self-directed and having time to figure out how I wanted to write. I started publishing during my second year in the program, using some of the materials that I was being introduced to in classes. I wanted to write about what I was reading—D.W. Winnicott, Clarice Lispector, Gwendolyn Brooks—in a voice for the public. My adviser, Saidiya Hartman, saw that I was yearning for a more intense, intimate, populist mode of engagement and sort of gave me her blessing. I started with little magazines like The Point , Boston Review , and Lit Hub. Because I wasn’t relying on those publications for money, I could afford to pursue my own subjects and style.

Almost every one of my guests has either an M.A. or a Ph.D., and has decided, for whatever reason, to take their talents somewhere other than the university. When you knew that you weren’t interested in being a traditional scholar, what kinds of things were you looking for in your education and how might you link that education to the essays that you’ve written—for instance, the essay on postapocalyptic dance floors?

That’s a great question because you wouldn’t think the links are very direct with that essay. But the stuff about Katherine Dunham really came from my oral exams. Katherine Dunham was a dancer, choreographer, scholar, pedagogue, and activist. I was very much inspired by the people I was reading, figures from the middle of the twentieth century like Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Deren, and the Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera. They had relationships to academic institutions, but their interventions were radical and experimental. They were in precarious economic or social positions and were trying to piece together viable careers, to get in where they could fit in. I was supposed to be working on them but I felt more like I wanted to work with them. 

It’s interesting that you brought up the midcentury anthropologists. When I read your pieces, I think of a roving, immersive, ethnographic writer who is, for instance, getting drunk with Bad Bunny and analyzing it afterward. I wonder if you could talk about how you position yourself as both a witness and an experiential subject in the essays that you write.

The phrase “participant observer” was helpful to me. The other thing I admire about anthropology, even with its colonial legacy—or in reaction to the colonial legacy—is the idea of writing a position paper. I don’t mean that in the legislative sense, but anthropologists are asked to account for their positionality in relation to what they’re writing about. I don’t think you need to make that the focus of every piece of criticism that you write, but I think that all writers should be taking stock of where their investment comes from. When I’m teaching, I like to present my students with a Gramsci line from his Prison Notebooks that Edward Said quotes in Orientalism : “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” Then he says you have to make that inventory. So it’s about reflexivity, but it’s also about the pleasure of participation and the rewards of intimacy. I know I’m never outside or above the situation I’m trying to describe, and I don’t aspire to be.

So, on the one hand, you’re trying to convey the politics of participation, and on the other hand, the pleasure of participation. There are different ways to make that inventory, and there is perhaps nothing as cringe-worthy as reading a piece in which a subject is strenuously trying to account for their own positionality and doing it in a way that feels either apologetic or insincere.

Or secretly self-aggrandizing. Like they feel obligated to say, Look how terribly privileged I am! And then they move on without letting that alter their analysis at all. It’s annoying.

How do you make sure your writing stays sensitive and reflexive in an intellectually robust way without being—I will use the word again—cringe?

You have to think about what’s relevant to the story. Not every element of your biography is relevant. To me it’s so much about tone. Margo Jefferson always talks about that. Not to draw a parallel with pornography, but you know it when you hear it. Does the tone sound sincere? Does it sound artificial? I feel like there’s a tuning fork inside my ear that helps me figure it out, which may not be a super cerebral answer to your question.

I will get back to the question of tone. In a sense, it’s a little unfortunate that you brought it up now because it would’ve been a nice pivot to the object that I’m going to give you. But I have one question to ask before we get to the object. The ways that you act as a participant observer are tremendously expansive. You engage with multiple people, sites, objects, and histories, all layered onto one another. Perhaps the most striking calibration that you attempt in these essays is between the history of individuals and the history of Puerto Rico. C ould you talk a little bit about your national or international, or transnational—whichever word you want to use—commitments?

The world comes to us in a tremendously complex tangle. The norms of contemporary journalism—maybe just journalism, period—insist on the present in a way that is flattening and not true to the thickness of time. In general, and definitely in the US, we are discouraged from historical thinking. Even in terms of what’s going on right now, in Israel and Palestine, you hear people say that referring to the occupation or anything that preceded October 7 is a distraction from the present. That attitude is not going to help us understand the violence of our world order. And it won’t help us transform it. I would say the same about nationalism. It’s not explanatory, and we miss so much if we insist on framing things that way. I come from self-consciously diasporic communities, but even if I didn’t, I hope I would still have enough sense to keep my moral focus on people rather than states.

In terms of Puerto Rico in particular, I know that you’re referencing the Bad Bunny profile, and, to a lesser extent, the dance essay, which does feature many Nuyoricans because we’ve always been creative drivers in the city’s music and dance scenes: mambo, salsa, hustle, hip-hop. With the profile, the fact-checkers wouldn’t let me use the word “nation” or “country” to write about Puerto Rico, even though Bad Bunny himself had used the word “país,” because that’s not Puerto Rico’s official political status. I ended up translating “país” as “homeland,” because another word that Puerto Ricans often use is “patria,” which is more like “fatherland.” I thought “homeland” kind of threaded the needle. But that’s an example of how seemingly small stylistic questions can be fraught with political conflict in American publications.

It’s not like I want to include Puerto Rican History 101 in every essay that I write. In fact, I find that work very thankless and frustrating and annoying. I want readers to have the tools to understand the meaning of a figure like Bad Bunny, but I don’t want to privilege the hypothetical “mainstream” readers who don’t have that context over the readers who do. I think it’s okay—good, actually!—for there to be some friction, some mystery. You said “layered” and that’s what I strive for.

I want to go back to what you said about having a tuning fork in your ear. I do not think of myself as a good listener of music. I’m good at listening to other people, I think, but I’m not a good listener of music, and I don’t even know what I mean when I say that exactly. I’m wondering if you could help us listen to something. I’ve previously given people texts to read or photographs to look at, but I was hoping that you could help us figure out how to listen to an object with an eye to making exactly the kind of argument that you have been detailing.

Do you recognize the object?

It’s “Yo Perreo Sola” by Bad Bunny—the lead single of the album that was out when I interviewed him, YHLQMDLG . It wasn’t my favorite track.

How does one begin to listen? I realize this is difficult because unlike having a text in front of you, the experience is over.

The first thing that I’m registering, always, is how the music makes me feel in my body. And this is a dance song.

That is already an interesting genre distinction to me. In our house, there are only two kinds of songs: there are jams and there are bangers. But you have a different kind of generic setup in your mind?

Yes. I’m interested in this typology of genre. It’s a dance song if I want to dance to it, which is maybe a simple definition. But this song is also making a claim about dance. The chorus is about “perreo”—twerking is not a perfect analogy, because “perreo” turns the word “dog” into the verb “perrear.” In the classical vision, the woman is maybe pinning the man to the wall with her butt. But on this song there’s a woman’s voice saying, “I do this by myself. I don’t need you.”

The genre judgement also has to do with a musical genealogy. When I first heard the song, with its quasi-feminist message, I immediately thought of “Yo Quiero Bailar” by Ivy Queen. Ivy Queen’s from the previous generation, sort of the Celia Cruz of reggaeton—the only girl who got any respect in that boys’ club. With “Yo Quiero Bailar,” she’s talking about how the kind of erotic movement that might happen on a Caribbean dance floor does not automatically imply consent for activities elsewhere. She wants to grind, she wants to sweat, but that doesn’t mean she wants to fuck. So for me, the message of “Yo Perreo Sola” feels derivative. And the sonics don’t make up for that.

On the one hand, you draw a distinction between what you feel like the song makes you want to do—the affective or embodied response to it—and, on the other hand, hearing the beats that plug the song into a whole history of genre. All you need to hear is the title of the song repeated to extract that generic history. Then, you can make a judgment. Is that all happening at the same time or is it sequential?

I always try to notice what my first reactions are, but I don’t privilege them too much, because music is a repetitive form. I guess these days you can “repeat” most anything. But with music, I think there’s an invitation to repeat. I’m interested in how my thoughts and feelings continue to evolve through multiple listens.

When I was getting my Ph.D., I taught freshman comp, and I would sometimes tell my students, “Feeling is thinking and thinking is feeling.” What I mean by “feeling is thinking” is that feelings are a useful starting point for understanding: you notice your feelings and then there’s an opportunity to step back and try to analyze where they’re coming from. Like, why am I angry? Why am I bored? And then “thinking is feeling”: when you experience yourself making a rational claim or critical judgment, you should inquire into the emotions that might be lurking under the surface of “thought.”

How do you land on the feeling or thought that this is a boring dance song? You offered a conceptual justification: It’s already been done, and the quasi-feminist message of it is not new. But when I think of a boring dance song, it’s one that makes me not want to dance.

Totally. It’s just as much rooted in my body as it is in a discourse analysis of the song’s freshness. I find the beat on “Yo Perreo Sola” a little frantic, and I don’t like the EDM escalation around the chorus. My sweet spot for dancing is more mid-tempo. And I prefer songs where you get a bunch of different beat switches, a super mix like “Safaera.” Those kinds of songs call back to salsa classics that are rooted in jazz and other Black improvisational traditions where there are long percussion breaks and polyrhythms.

But there’s still some pleasure for me in “Yo Perreo Sola.” It really developed another meaning in quarantine: the song came out in the summer of 2020, when we were all at home dancing on our own. There was something fun about that.

We haven’t really talked about the words. You’ve talked about the beat, the rhythm, and the callback to other songs in the same genre or subgenre. Where do lyrics come in? I have a recurring argument with my husband who hears rhythm first and doesn’t pay any attention to lyrics. I often only hear lyrics, and I’m quite dismissive based on lyrics and lyrics alone. Do you pay attention to lyrics in the same way you pay attention to words as a translation?

That’s funny, I have a similar conflict with my mother. She’s like, “You’re always paying attention to lyrics!” I don’t think that’s true exclusively, but listening to lyrics definitely made me want to be a writer. I was the kind of teenager that was always on those websites learning the words. But my dad listened to a lot of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. My mom listened to a lot of poetic Latin American singers. I came of age during the mainstreaming of rap as popular music. The voice is one of the instruments and the delivery of the words is one of the instruments. Words are rhythm. So to me, the distinction between words and music doesn’t feel tenable. I’ve always had the strong sense that words, music, and movement emerge together. We’ve disaggregated them in our society, but that’s not how it has to be.

I think a lot about rhythm, delivery, and tone in my own writing, especially when I’m writing about music. I’m allowing the object to influence the way that I’m expressing myself. One of the ways that I can show a reader what I’m writing about is by absorbing and performing some element of it.

Do you try to match your prose to, for instance, the rhythm of a lyric when you’re embedding it in a sentence? Are you trying to imitate or to perform what you’ve absorbed?

I did with the Bad Bunny story. I wanted to be funny. I wanted to be irreverent. I wanted to be slick and sticky. Or when I’m writing about a live performance of Smokey Robinson and Aretha Franklin singing “Ooh Baby Baby” on Soul Train, I want to take on a wistful legato. I want my structure and my sentences to have some of the tender lucidity that I feel there.

Since people can’t have the experience of listening to the music itself, the prose needs to approximate what you would judge its style to be like?

Exactly. There’s a line that people repeat when they want to describe the supposed difficulty of music writing: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” That’s crazy to me, because dancing is about architecture. Dancing is about space. It’s about how we navigate public space and our bodies in relation to one another. Dancing is already about architecture, and writing is about music because words are already a musical phenomenon. It’s not such a big leap to make the connection.

Part of the great joy of listening to music is listening to it with other people. I don’t get as much pleasure listening to something by myself as I do when I listen to something with my kids or my husband, or when I go to a concert. Listening with strangers is its own form of pleasure. How do you think about bringing other people’s experiences into the mix? Surely part of what’s happening when you’re listening in public is that your body is reacting to other bodies, reacting to the music?

I would argue that music is an inherently communal form even when you’re alone—or certainly when I’m alone. I’m thinking about all the other people it’s touched by the time it reaches me. I like to try to find ways to formalize that curiosity. In a profile, I like to look beyond the individual that our neoliberal media system has selected to be the hero. I’m more interested in how and why we collectively made them the hero. And in all my stories, it’s also about the interview practice, about refusing or reaching beyond traditional notions of expertise. Like, your average twentysomething in Puerto Rico has a richer sense of what Bad Bunny means than some musicologist.

When I’m listening to music or writing about a particular piece of music, I’m really trying to listen for how other people listen. If I hear a snatch of music coming from a car on my block, I like to see who’s driving. If I hear something out in public, how are other people reacting? If I’m on Twitter, I’m reading what people are saying about a new album drop. I think it’s fair to say that music is our most popular art form. That’s part of its value. Besides the supreme pleasure that I personally derive. Besides my wish that I could sing or play piano or play guiro. But I can’t. So, here we are.

An axis along which critics arrange themselves is the axis of authority that has, on its one end, the centralization of authority, and on the other, the active seeking or embrace of plurality. Another way to think of it might be as the difference between a centripetal and a centrifugal force in criticism. Have you always sought out that plurality of view? Does it change based on what your object is or where you are in your career as a critic? Were there more anxieties about being an authority figure, having just one voice, one view, one relation of experience?

In general, I’m not interested in a kind of criticism where people retweet it and say, “This is the last word on X or Y. Mic drop.” I’ve never been interested in those kinds of proprietary claims. I’m interested in a form of criticism that really opens up other desires, associations, lines of inquiry—because to me, an object is never exhausted, no matter how many people write about it. But there’s also so much where the idea of authority or expertise barely comes up because critics haven’t seen those objects as worthy of analysis. That’s my sweet spot.

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Carina del Valle Schorske is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine . She is at work on her debut collection of essays, The Other Island . (June 2024)

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism and the Director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan. She is the host of The Critic and Her Publics , a new podcast series produced in partnership with The New York Review and Lit Hub. (April 2024)

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Guest Essay

The Ground Is Shifting Under Biden and Trump

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Have Democrats and Republicans traded places?

How has the ascendance of well-educated, relatively affluent liberals among Democrats, alongside the dominance of non-college voters in the Republican coalition, altered the agendas of the two parties?

Are low-turnout elections and laws designed to suppress voting now beneficial to Democrats and detrimental to Republicans? Would the Democratic Party be better off if limits on campaign contributions were scrapped?

Nicholas Stephanopoulos , a law professor at Harvard, contends that the answer to these last three questions is changing from no to yes.

In a paper posted last week, “ Election Law for the New Electorate ,” Stephanopoulos argues that “the parties’ longstanding positions on numerous electoral issues have become obsolete. These stances reflect how voters used to — not how they now — act and thus no longer serve the parties’ interests.”

Stephanopoulos describes the consequences of the reversal of the traditional class bases of the two parties like this:

One of the old rules of elections that no longer holds is that poorer voters lean Democratic while richer voters tilt Republican. Strikingly, the dominant traditional cleavage in capitalist societies — material well-being — doesn’t currently divide the American electorate. If anything, more affluent voters now modestly prefer the party of the left.

This switch reflects what Stephanopoulos describes as “a post-Marxist electorate.”

Data cited by Stephanopoulos demonstrates how Donald Trump’s entry into presidential politics has accelerated these trends, pulling more voters without college degrees into the Republican Party while repelling Republican-leaning, well-educated suburban voters.

At the same time, Stephanopoulos continues:

The partisan divide between minority and white voters has narrowed somewhat. Cities have also become modestly less Democratic, exurban and rural areas have grown far more Republican, and suburbs have shifted from a reddish to a bluish shade of purple. And wealthier individuals’ campaign contributions have followed their votes by flowing increasingly to Democratic candidates.

A fundamental reason for the erosion of the traditional lines of cleavage, Stephanopoulos contends, is the emergence of education “as a potent new axis of electoral segmentation. Among white voters, in particular, individuals with at least a college degree are now a much more Democratic constituency than people with less schooling.”

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