ENG 403 - Cultural Criticism

Semester Hours: 4

Cultural Criticism is slippery, hard to define, maybe because it takes in a lot of territory: Cultural Studies, Cultural Poetics, Cultural Materialism, and New Historicism. Some of these terms are even used interchangeably. (We’ll sort through that.) But, in general, when we practice cultural criticism, we think of a text as culture in action. As Charles Bressler puts it, we “blur the distinction between an artistic production and any other kind of social production and event” (217). In other words, literary texts are grounded in and inextricable from the social, political, and economic discourses of their time. Cultural critics don’t separate the text from the culture in which it was created because they believe that all texts both reflect and influence society. Society affects art, and art affects society. Therefore, as cultural critics, we’ll examine how this complex web of interrelationships, including the author, helps determine a text’s meaning and reveal the interrelatedness of all human activities. As a class, we’ll read essays by cultural critics as diverse as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Janice Radway, Edward Said, Catherine Gallagher, and William Greenblatt. As cultural critics, we will read several literary texts together, considering how these texts were formed by looking at the historical, social, political, and economic moments surrounding their production. We’ll also examine several different kinds of texts using our frame of cultural criticism-texts like toys, paintings, films. In short, by using this critical approach, we begin to see that no work of art is autonomous.