Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern
by Linda Hutcheon |
At the risk of succumbing to New Historicist fashion, I should nonetheless like to begin with a personal anecdote. But I shall ask you, the reader, to take an active role: I should like you to pretend you are me and imagine your response to the following situation. The time is a few years ago; you are in London, England. You have just that hour submitted to your publisher the final version of the manuscript of a book on the theory and politics of irony.1 In a celebratory mood, you walk into a bookstore. One of the first things that catches your eye--for obvious and deeply personal reasons--is the cover of an English magazine entitled The Modern Review. On it is pictured the equivalent of a "no smoking" sign, but this time the barred red circle of forbiddenness surrounds a pair of inverted commas, reinforcing the headline: "The End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic Condition." You might be somewhat nonplussed: you know you delivered the manuscript a bit later than you had promised--but you had not really counted on the book being utterly out of date before it was even published.
Perhaps you might react as I did: you might quickly (and not a little nervously) turn to the article inside on the commodification of irony by the very generation (the "twentysomething" generation) that was said to be using irony as its only defence against commodification.2 Depending on your temperament, you might think this entire incident was uncannily odd or disturbingly interesting or downright irritating. But stretch your imagination a little more and consider how you might then feel if, on the same pages as this article about the end of irony, you found a companion article about the seven types of (not ambiguity, but) nostalgia that were said to greet the "end of irony."
Remember, you are me in this exercise of the imagination: and you have therefore spent not a little time and energy over the last decade arguing that (at least what you would like to call) the "postmodern" has little to do with nostalgia and much to do with irony.3 The forces ranged against such a reading of postmodernism were formidable in the extreme,4 but you have always been a little stubborn. Of course, you have never denied that a lot of contemporary culture was indeed nostalgic: you cannot close your eyes (and ears) to everything going on around you. But there was also lots of irony--maybe too much irony--and that is what you have been trying to think through for the last few years. But here was irony's end and nostalgia's proliferating types sharing not only the same page, but the same popular culture examples. What's worse, to believe the authors of these articles, the end of irony seemed actually to necessitate this proliferation of nostalgia. Now (use your imagination) would you feel some kind of challenge in all this? Would you feel that welcome (or unwelcome) sense of unfinished business? Obviously, I did. I thought this issue of the magazine was Destiny, Fate, ... and all those other capitalized monstrosities by which we excuse our obsessions in life. And this essay represents my attempt to deal with this unfinished business, to try to understand why I had earlier chosen to all but ignore the nostalgic dimension of the postmodern in favour of the ironic. It cannot simply be put down to the fact that I am utterly un-nostalgic, though that is a personality fault to which I must admit. I am also relatively un-ironic (and I certainly miss many ironies)--as countless colleagues and students over the years have learned, much to their consternation and, no doubt, amusement. I simply believed irony to be more complicated, more interesting, more "edgy" than nostalgia, and in so believing, I all but ignored the very real and very uneasy tension between postmodern irony and nostalgia today.
The specific cultural forms of the postmodern are not my only focus here, because I also want to consider more broadly certain forms of contemporary culture, not all of which can be considered complicitously critical and deconstructing--that is, not all of them are postmodern. But it was postmodernism that brought the conjunction of irony and nostalgia quite literally into the public eye through the forms of its architecture. The early debates focussed precisely on that conjunction in response to postmodern architecture's double-coding, its deliberate (if ironized) return to the history of the humanly constructed environment.5 This return was in reaction to modern architecture's ostentatious rejection of the past, including the past of the city's historical fabric. The terms of the debate were basically as follows: was this postmodern recalling of the past an example of a conservative--and therefore nostalgic--escape to an idealized, simpler era of "real" community values?6 Or did it express, but through its ironic distance, a "genuine and legitimate dissatisfaction with modernity and the unquestioned belief in ... perpetual modernization"?7 The question soon became: how is it that the same cultural entity could come to be interpreted (apparently) so widely differently as to be seen as either ironic or nostalgic? Or as both ironic and nostalgic?8 The American television series "All in the Family" was one example of the latter conflation. Despite its allegedly progressive intent--what its creators intended as ironic de-bunking--it seems that Archie Bunker was popular in large segments of various populations because of the show's conservative, indeed openly nostalgic, appeal to attitudes perhaps consciously denied but deeply felt.9
In general cultural commentary in the mass media--as in the academy--irony and nostalgia are both seen as key components of contemporary culture today.10 In the 1980s, it was irony that captured our attention most; in the 1990s, it appears to be nostalgia that is holding sway. David Lowenthal has even asserted that, while "[f]ormerly confined in time and place, nostalgia today engulfs the whole past."11 Perhaps nostalgia is given surplus meaning and value at certain moments--millennial moments, like our own. Nostalgia, the media tell us, has become an obsession of both mass culture and high art. And they may be right, though some people feel the obsession is really the media's obsession.12 Yet, how else do you account for the return of the fountain pen--as an object of consumer luxury--in the age of the computer, when we have all but forgotten how to write?
The explanations offered for this kind of commercialized luxuriating in the culture of the past have ranged from economic cynicism to moral superiority. They usually point to a dissatisfaction with the culture of the present--something that is then either applauded or condemned. Leading the applause, an apocalyptic George Steiner claims that the decline in formal value systems in the West has left us with a "deep, unsettling nostalgia for the absolute."13 And, I suspect more than one reader longs for a time (in the idealized past) when knowledge--and its purveyors--had some purchase and influence on what constituted value in society. But even on the less contentious level of retro fashions or various other commercial nostalgias, it does appear that the "derogatory word 'dated' seems to have vanished from our language."14 It has been taken over by "nostalgic," a word that has been used to signal both praise and blame. But, however self-evident (on a common sense level) it may seem that an often sentimentalized nostalgia is the very opposite of edgy irony, the postmodern debates' conflation (or confusion) of the two should give us pause.
Before beginning to tackle this conflation, I need to lay out briefly the definitions of my principal concepts and the terms of my argument. I have already defined my particular usage of the term "postmodern"--which is not synonymous with the contemporary, but which does have some mix of the complicitous and the critical at its ambivalent core. And I am going to trust that readers will all have some sort of sense of what "irony" means--either in its rhetorical or New Critical meanings or in its more extended senses of situational irony or, with an historical dimension, of "romantic" irony. What exactly is "nostalgia," though? Or perhaps the first question really should be: what WAS nostalgia? With its Greek roots--nostos, meaning "to return home" and algos, meaning "pain"--this word sounds so familiar to us that we may forget that it is a relatively new word, as words go. It was coined in 1688 by a 19-year old Swiss student in his medical dissertation as a sophisticated (or perhaps pedantic) way to talk about a literally lethal kind of severe homesickness (of Swiss mercenaries far from their mountainous home).15 This medical-pathological definition of nostalgia allowed for a remedy: the return home, or sometimes merely the promise of it. The experiencing and the attributing of a nostalgic response appeared well before this, of course. Think of the psalmist's remembering of Zion while weeping by the waters of Babylon. But the term itself seems to be culturally and historically specific.16
This physical and emotional "upheaval ... related to the workings of memory"--an upheaval that could and did kill, according to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physicians--was seen as a "disorder of the imagination" from the start.17 But by the nineteenth century, a considerable semantic slippage had occurred, and the word began to lose its purely medical meaning,18 in part because the rise of pathologic anatomy and bacteriology had simply made it less medically credible. Nostalgia then became generalized,19 and by the twentieth century, it had begun to attract the interest of psychiatrists.20 But curious things happened in that generalizing process: nostalgia became less a physical than a psychological condition; in other words, it became psychically internalized. It also went from being a curable medical illness to an incurable (indeed unassuageable) condition of the spirit or psyche.21 What made that transition possible was a shift in site from the spatial to the temporal. Nostalgia was no longer simply a yearning to return home. As early as 1798, Immanuel Kant had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth.22 Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to--ever; time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact.23 As one critic has succinctly put this change: "Odysseus longs for home; Proust is in search of lost time."24
Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia's power--for both conservatives and radicals alike. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire. In this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the present. It operates through what Mikhail Bakhtin called an "historical inversion": the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past.25 It is "memorialized" as past, crystallized into precious moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire's distortions and reorganizations.26 Simultaneously distancing and proximating, nostalgia exiles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed (and then experienced emotionally) in conjunction with the present--which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from "the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal"27--in other words, making it so very unlike the present. The aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore, be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present. And it can do so with great force. Think of how visceral, how physically "present" nostalgia's promptings are: it is not just Proust for whom tastes, smells, sounds, and sights conjure up an idealized past. If you are not like me (that is, if you are capable of nostalgia), you can think of your own experience--or, if need be, do as I have to do and think of the power of the taste of Proust's madeleine or the scent of violets in Tennyson's " A dream of fair women" or of a geranium leaf in David Copperfield.28
There are, of course, many ways to look backward. You can look and reject. Or you can look and linger longingly. In its looking backward in this yearning way, nostalgia may be more of an attempt to defy the end, to evade teleology. As we approach the millennium, nostalgia may be particularly appealing as a possible escape from what Lee Quinby calls "technological apocalypse."29 If the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Mont Blanc fountain pen? But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires the availability of evidence of the past,30 and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility of "compelling vitality."31 Thanks to CD ROM technology and, before that, audio and video reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely recyclable past.
That original theory of nostalgia as a medical condition was developed in Europe "at the time of the rise of the great cities when greatly improved means of transportation made movements of the population much easier";32 in other words, you would be more likely to be away from home and thus yearn for it. The postmodern version of nostalgia may have been developed (in the West, at least) at the time when the rise of information technology made us question not only (as Jean-François Lyotard told us we must33) what would count as knowledge, but what would count as "the past" in relation to the present. We have not lacked for critics who lament the decline of historical memory in our postmodern times, often blaming the storage of memory in data banks for our cultural amnesia, our inability to engage in active remembrance. But, as Andreas Huyssen has convincingly argued, the contrary is just as likely to be true. In his words: "The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen," making the past simultaneous with the present in a new way.34
Nostalgia, however, does not simply repeat or duplicate memory. Susan Stewart's provocative study, On Longing suggestively calls nostalgia a "social disease," defining it as "the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition."35 The argument is that, denying or at least degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the idealized (and therefore always absent) past into the site of immediacy, presence, and authenticity. And here she approaches one of the major differences between nostalgia and irony. Unlike the knowingness of irony--a mark of the fall from innocence, if ever there was one--nostalgia is, in this way, "prelapsarian" and indeed utopian, says Stewart.36 Few have ever accused irony (even satiric irony) of successfully reinstating the authentic and the ideal.
Nostalgia has certainly not lacked for defenders, most of whom are psychoanalytically-oriented.37 This is not surprising if you think of the significant relationship psychoanalysis posits between identity and the personal psychic past unearthed by memory. This relationship becomes the model for the link between collective identity and memory for those who see a move to nostalgic transcendence and authenticity as a positive move. As one person in this camp has put it: "Longing is what makes art possible."38 By "longing," he means the emotional response to deprivation, loss, and mourning. Nostalgia has, in this way, been deemed the necessary inspirational "creative sorrow" for artists.39 This position draws on the original seventeenth-century meaning of the word; it sees nostalgia in our century as the positive response to the homelessness and exile of both private "nervous disorder and [public] persecution of actual enslavement and barbaric cruelty."40 When I think of the displaced homeless peoples of Rwanda or Bosnia, however, the more trivialized, commercialized connotations of the word "nostalgia" do stand in the way for me. My feelings when experiencing those lushly nostalgic Merchant/Ivory film versions of earlier novels must be different (in kind and not only in degree) from the experience of political refugees yearning for their homeland. But perhaps not.
In other words, despite very strong reservations (based in part on personality limitations), I do know that I should never underestimate the power of nostalgia, especially its visceral physicality and emotional impact. But that power comes in part from its structural doubling-up of two different times, an inadequate present and an idealized past.41But this is where I must return to that other obsession of mine--irony--for irony too is doubled: two meanings, the "said" and the "unsaid," rub together to create irony--and it too packs considerable punch. People do not usually get upset about metaphor or synecdoche, but they certainly do get worked up about irony, as they did a few years ago in Toronto, where I live and work, when the aptly named Royal Ontario Museum put on an exhibition that used irony to deal with the relationship of Canadian missionaries and military to Empire in Africa. Sometimes, as we all know well, people get upset because they are the targets or victims of irony. Sometimes, though, anger erupts at the seeming inappropriateness of irony in certain situations. Witness the remarks of the Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education at the time: "The implied criticism of colonial intrusion and the bigotry of the white missionaries and soldiers relies heavily on the use of irony, a subtle and frequently misunderstood technique. In dealing with issues as sensitive as cultural imperialism and racism, the use of irony is a highly inappropriate luxury"--especially, I might add, when condemnation is what is expected and desired.42
What irony and nostalgia share, therefore, is a perhaps unexpected twin evocation of both affect and agency--or, emotion and politics. I suspect that one of the reasons they do so is that they share something else--a secret hermeneutic affinity that might well account for some of the interpretive confusion with which I began, the confusion that saw postmodern artifacts, in particular, deemed simultaneously ironic and nostalgic. I want to argue that to call something ironic or nostalgic is, in fact, less a description of the ENTITY ITSELF than an attribution of a quality of RESPONSE. Irony is not something in an object that you either "get" or fail to "get": irony "happens" for you (or, better, you make it "happen") when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not something you "perceive" in an object; it is what you "feel" when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of response--of active participation, both intellectual and affective--that makes for the power.
Because people do not talk about this element of active attribution, the politics of both irony and nostalgia are often written off as quietistic at best. But irony is what Hayden White calls "transideological": it can be made to "happen" by (and to) anyone of any political persuasion. And nostalgia too is transideological, despite the fact that many would argue that, whether used by the right or the left, nostalgia is fundamentally conservative in its praxis, for it wants to keep things as they were--or, more accurately, as they are imagined to have been.43 But, the nostalgia for an idealized community in the past has been articulated by the ecology movement as often as by fascism,44 by what Jean Baudrillard calls "[m]elancholy for societies without power."45 From the seventeenth century on, nostalgia seems to have been connected to the desire to return specifically to the homeland. In nineteenth-century Europe, that homeland became articulated in terms of the nation state, and nostalgia began to take on its associations with nationalism--and chauvinism.46 Even its more innocent-seeming forms--such as the preparing and eating of familiar foods by immigrant groups--can be seen as a nostalgic enactment of ethnic group identity, a collective disregarding, at least temporarily, of generational and other divisions.47
One brave anthropologist has claimed that, unlike such searches for ethnicity, feminism has "no tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in the past."48 It has been suggested that this lack of nostalgic response is because the narratives of nostalgia--from the Bible onward--are male stories, Oedipal stories which are alienating to women (who usually remain at home like Penelope, while men wander the world and risk getting homesick).49 And, in support of such a theory, literary and film critics alike have located strains of a current antifeminist, nostalgic retreat to the past in the face of the changes in culture brought about by the rise of feminism.50 Humankind has not infrequently responded with a nostalgic defensive retreat into the past when feeling threatened: for example, despite its forward-looking ideology, the late nineteenth-century United States gave great new value to its Colonial past--as an "exclusive WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] heritage"--in part to combat the mass immigration that was accompanying industrialization and that felt so new and so un-"American."51
The politics of nostalgia are not only national or gender politics, of course. Think of the popularity in the 1980s of the David Lean film of Forster's A Passage to India or ofThe Jewel and the Crown, the television adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. The intended anti-nostalgic exposé of the corruption and exploitation of empire in India may have been less the cause of their success than either a nostalgic liberal-utopian hope that two races might have been able to live as equals--despite history--or a nostalgic memory of the time when Britain was not a minor world power but, rather, ruler of an empire upon which the sun never set.52 This is what Renato Rosaldo calls "imperial nostalgia," the kind that makes racial domination appear innocent through elegance of manners.53 But, this nostalgia puts us, as viewers, into the same position as the very agents of empire, for they too have documented at length their paradoxical nostalgia for the cultures they had colonized--in other words, the ones they had intentionally and forcefully altered. This is the nostalgia of those who believe in "progress" and innovation, a nostalgia (again, paradoxically) for more simple, stable worlds--such as those of the putatively static societies they destroyed.
Post-colonial critics have pointed to nostalgic moments in the history of the colonized, too, however. To some, the "négritude" move in African cultural theory, with its focus on the pre-capitalist, pre-imperial past, was the sign of a nostalgic search for a lost coherence.54 Many oppressed people--Holocaust survivors and North American First Nations peoples among them--have had a strong and understandable nostalgia for what is perceived as their once unified identity. But most often, the post-colonial focus of attention has been on the nostalgia of the (usually) European colonizers, on their sense of loss and mourning for the cultural unity and centrality they once had.55 But, as Fredric Jameson has said, "a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos."56
Jameson's own attack on the postmodern is in itself worth examining in this context because it is an attack on both its regressive nostalgia and its trivializing irony. One of Jameson's main targets is what he calls the postmodern "nostalgia film"--a term that he has used to refer to anything from George Lukas's American Graffiti to Laurence Kasdan's Body Heat. These are what he calls "fashion-plate, historicist films" that reveal "the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past."57 To him, these are the inauthentic, nostalgic "celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past" which he sees as "something of a substitute for that older system of historical representation, indeed as a virtual symptom-formation, a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time."58 This medicalized psychoanalytic language--"symptom-formation", "compensation"--is used quite deliberately by Jameson because he feels that the postmodern taste for such films corresponds to certain needs in what he calls "our present economic-psychic constitution."59
But film theorist Anne Friedberg has pointed out that what Jameson is really protesting here is the distanced relation of every film from its historical referent. In other words, it is the medium and not postmodernism that gives the illusion of a "perpetual present interminably recycled."60 Or, as Derek Jarman put it when rewriting Marlowe in his postmodern film version of Edward II, "[f]ilmed history is always a misinterpretation. The past is the past, as you try to make material out of it, things slip even further away."61But, even if Jameson is wrong in where he puts the blame for the nostalgia, what interests me is that, when he finds something nostalgic--be it in the theorizing of the Frankfurt School or the novels of J.G. Ballard--nostalgia is meant to be taken negatively as "regressive."62 Yet his own rhetoric and position can themselves at times sound strangely nostalgic: in article after article in the 1980s, he repeatedly yearned for what he called "genuine historicity" in the face of a postmodernism which, in his words, was "an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way."63 And yet, it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of "lost authenticity" that has proved time and time again to be paralyzing in terms of historical thinking.64 Indeed Jameson's position has been called both regressive and defeatist.65 Is Jameson's implicit mythologizing and idealizing of a more stable, pre-late-capitalist (that is, modernist) world not in itself perhaps part of an aesthetics (or even politics) of nostalgia? If so, it is one he shares with his Marxist predecessor, Georg Lukács, for whom it was not modernism but realism that constituted that implied "moment of plenitude"66 in the past around which literary historical nostalgia revolved.
Michael Bérubé has, in fact, suggested that the Left, in America at least, has at times recently seemed paralyzed "by dreams of days when things were better." As he puts it: "it was only the repeated interventions of women, ethnic minorities and variously queer theorists that finally shattered the pernicious sense of nostalgia to which so many men on the antipostmodern left fell victim."67 Nostalgia can certainly be, in Tim Reiss's strong terms, "functionally crippling."68 Jameson's preference for science fiction over these period-recreation "nostalgia" films is a bit deceptive, for it simply points to his orientation toward the very common futuristic dimension of an equally nostalgic utopian drive.69If the present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward. The nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common rejection of the here and now.
It is not that the here and now, the present, does not have its problems, however. All "presents" have always had their problems, but there is little doubt that there has been, in the last few decades, a commercialization of nostalgia, especially in the mass media, a commercialization that many have seen as a real evasion of contemporary issues and problems.70 Ralph Lauren's "Safari" fashion and perfume line a few years ago allowed us to experience the nostalgic style of an era without bearing any of its historical costs; it also offered us, as one writer put it, "a chance to relive the days of the tragically doomed upper class engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the Serengeti"71--"living without boundaries", as the ads said. This is a combination of commercial nostalgia--that teaches us to miss things we have never lost--and "armchair nostalgia"--that exists without any lived experience of the yearned-for time.72
Is this part of the "postmodern"? Since it is part of late-capitalist culture, Jameson would say it is. But, to generalize the term "postmodern" into a synonym for the contemporary is to abandon its historical and cultural specificity--an abandonment Jameson would never condone for modernism, for example. To illustrate what I mean about the need to make distinctions, think of the difference between contemporary postmodern architecture and contemporary revivalist (nostalgic) architecture; the postmodernarchitecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia's affective power. In the postmodern, in other words, (and here is the source of the tension) nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized.73 This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfilment of that urge.74
Perhaps the history of the wider cultural entity called postmodernity would help explain this paradox. If, as it has been argued often, nostalgia is a by-product of culturalmodernity (with its alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community),75 then postmodernity's complex relationship with modernity--a relationship of both rupture and continuity--might help us understand the necessary addition of irony to this nostalgic inheritance. It has become a commonplace to compare the end of the nineteenth century to the end of our own, to acknowledge their common doubts about progress, their shared worries over political instability and social inequality, their comparable fears about disruptive change.76 But if nostalgia was an obvious consequence of the last fin-de-siècle panic--"manifest in idealizations of rural life, in vernacular-revival architecture, in arts-and-crafts movements, and in a surge of preservation activity"77--then some, not all (not the commercial variety, usually), but some nostalgia we are seeing today (what I want to call postmodern) is of a different order, an ironized order. If the nineteenth century turned nostalgically to the historical novels of Walter Scott and familiar Gothic Revival architecture, the twentieth has combined nostalgia with irony to produce the historiographic metafictions of Salman Rushdie and historically suggestive, parodic architectural ideas of Charles Moore's once splendid Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans. Gone is the sense of belatedness of the present vis-à-vis the past; the act of ironizing (while still implicitly invoking) nostalgia undermines modernist assertions of originality, authenticity, and the burden of the past, even as it acknowledges their continuing (but not paralyzing) validity as aesthetic concerns.
Our contemporary culture is indeed nostalgic; some parts of it--postmodern parts--are aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia, and seek to expose those through irony. Given irony's conjunction of the said and the unsaid--in other words, its inability to free itself from the discourse it contests--there is no way for these cultural modes to escape a certain complicity, to separate themselves artificially from the culture of which they are a part. If our culture really is obsessed with remembering--and forgetting--as is suggested by the astounding growth of what Huyssen calls our "memorial culture" with its "relentless museummania,"78 then perhaps irony is one (though only one) of the means by which to create the necessary distance and perspective on that anti-amnesiac drive. Admittedly, there is little irony in most memorials, and next to none in most truly nostalgic re-constructions of the past--from Disney World's Main Street, USA to those elaborate dramatized re-enactments of everything from the American Civil War to medieval jousts restaged in contemporary England. But there is much ironized nostalgia too--in Angela Carter's meditation on gender and the dawn of the twentieth century inNights at the Circus or in the wonderful generic paradox of a new work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera of New York: William Hofman and John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles. It is ironically and paradoxically called a "grand opera buffa"--for "grand" is the only kind of "intimate" opera buffa you can put on at that particular opera house, with its more than 3000 seats and its penchant for spectacle and indeed for "grand opera." From a postmodern point of view, the knowingness of this kind of irony may be not so much a defense against the power of nostalgia as the way in which nostalgia is made palatable today: invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is--a comment on the present as much as on the past.
Seen from that angle, though, not only have irony and nostalgia gone hand in hand in the postmodern, but perhaps they have done so for a long time (as those who work in earlier periods may know only too well): Don Quijote gave us those wonderful ironies of incongruity and inappropriateness precisely through his nostalgia for a chivalric past. In like vein, the all too ready attribution of irony to someone like Madonna in her Marilyn (and maybe even in her Evita) phase cannot really be separated from nostalgia. This may in part be because irony and nostalgia are not qualities of objects; they are responses of subjects--active, emotionally- and intellectually-engaged subjects. The ironizing of nostalgia, in the very act of its invoking, may be one way the postmodern has of taking responsibility for such responses by creating a small part of the distance necessary for reflective thought about the present as well as the past.
Endnotes
1. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
2. Toby Young and Tom Vanderbilt, "The End of Irony?" The Modern Review 1.14 (April-May 1994): 6-7.
3. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1987); The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998).
4. The list would be endless, but let me simply note the most cited opponent of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson, whose 1984 essay on "Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in the New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92 in many ways provoked my own work in the field.
5. See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977) and Post-Modern Classicism: The New Synthesis (London: Academy, 1980).
6. See Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture (London: Granada, 1980), 52-9.
7. Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," reprinted in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds., A Postmodern Reader (Albany: SUNY P, 1993), 112.
8. Of course in the 1960s Susan Sontag characterized camp in precisely these terms in her "Notes on 'Camp'" in Against Interpretation and other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), 275-92.
9. See Sherry Lynne Rosenthal, "Four Essays on the Nostalgic Appeal of Popular Fiction, Film, and Television: Hard Times, The Birth of a Nation, The Grapes of Wrath,All in the Family." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1983.
10. See Peter Rist, "Nostalgia: Stars and Genres in American Pop Culture," Canadian Review of American Studies 20.1 (1989): 111-17.
11. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 6.
12. See Christopher Lasch, "The Politics of Nostalgia," Harper's Magazine (November 1984), 68; Lowenthal 29; Sandra Ernst Moriarty and Anthony F. McGann, "Nostalgia and Consumer Sentiment," Journalism Quarterly 60 (1983): 85 on the impact of nostalgic professional design magazine advertisements on the media.
13. George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute, Massey Lectures, 14th series (Toronto: CBC, 1974), 50.
14. Robert Rubens, "The Backward Glance--A Contemporary Taste for Nostalgia," Contemporary Review (September 1981): 149.
15. Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel, 1688), translated in The Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 7 (1934): 379-91.
16. This is in spite of early medical attempts to universalize it into something felt by all beings--of all ages and temperaments--anywhere on the face of the earth. E.g. Philippe Pinel's nostalgia entry in the Encyclopédie Méthodique: Médecine, 10 (Paris: Agasse, 1821). See also B. Ruml, "Theory of Nostalgic and Egoic Sentiments," Psychological Bulletin 30 (1933): 656-7.
17. See Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia," Diogenes 54 (1966): 81-103. The citations are from pages 90 and 87 respectively.
18. The medical meaning did see a revival, evidently, during the American Civil War. See J. Theodore Calhoun, "Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service," Medical and Surgical Reporter 11 (27 February 1864); DeWitt C. Peters, "Remarks on the Evils of Youthful Enlistments and Nostalgia," American Medical Times (14 February 1863).
19. See Antonio Prete, "L'assedio della lontananza," in Antonio Prete, ed., Nostalgia: storia di un sentimento (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 1992), 17.
20. See the discussion of, among others, Karl Jaspers' Heimweh und Verbrechen (1909) in Starobinski 99-101.
21. For more on the medical and psychological angle on nostalgia, see Willis H. McCann, "Nostalgia--A Review of the Literature," Psychological Bulletin 38 (1941): 165-82 and "Nostalgia: A Descriptive and Comparative Study," Journal of Genetic Psychology 62 (1943): 97-104; George Rosen, "Nostalgia: A 'Forgotten' Psychological Disorder," Clio Medica 10.1 (1975): 28-51.
22. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). More recently, it has been argued that the appeal of the comic strip in French culture today is nostalgia for childhood. See Irène Pennacchioni, La Nostalgie en images: une sociologie du récit dessiné (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1982).
23. See Vladimir Jankélévitch's meditation on this in L'Irreversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
24. James Phillips, "Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia," in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, eds., Descriptions (Albany: SUNY P, 1985), 65.
25. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1881), 147. Thanks to Russell Kilbourn for calling this to my attention.
26. See Phillips 65.
27. Lowenthal 62; Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
28. But is this perhaps how nostalgia only "masquerades as memory," as one theorist puts it? See E.B. Daniels, "Nostalgia: Experiencing the Elusive," in Ihde and Silverman 84.
29. Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994), xvi.
30. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia," in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Cross, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia(Manchester and NY: Manchester UP, 1989), 4. Chase and Shaw also point out that the photograph is the "paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia" (9).
31. Lowenthal 30.
32. Starobinski 101-2.
33. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
34. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 253.
35. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 23.
36. Stewart 23.
37. See, for instance, Roderick Peters, "Reflections on the Origin and Aim of Nostalgia," Journal of Analytic Psychology 30 (1985): 135-48; or Nandor Fodor, "Varieties of Nostalgia," Psychoanalytic Review 37 (1950): 25-38.
38. Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), 52.
39. Michael M. Mason, "The Cultivation of the Senses for Creative Nostalgia in the Essays of W.H. Hudson," Ariel 20.1 (1989): 23. It has also been called our "moral conscience" for it is said to let us know what values we hold most dear and help us fight "the sickness of despair." See Ralph Harper, Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfilment in the Modern Age (Cleveland: P of Western Reserve U, 1966), 28.
40. Harper 21.
41. All nostalgia, then, would be what Fred Davis calls "interpreted nostalgia" wherein an analysis of an experience, however brief or mistaken, comes to be fused with that primary experience and thus alters it. See Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free P, 1979), 25.
42. The Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education, cited in "Analyzing Racism at ROM" in The Varsity (June 1990), 4.
43. See Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 5; 161, n.4.
44. See Anthony Arblaster, Viva la libertà: Politics in Opera (London: Verso, 1992), 180.
45. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in Natoli and Hutcheon 361. He goes on to call nostalgia "the phastasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials" (372).
46. See Jankélévitch; Kathleen Parthé, "Village Prose: Chauvinism, Nationalism, or Nostalgia?" in Sheelagh Duffin Graham, ed., New Directions in Soviet Literature(London: Macmillan, 1992), 106-21.
47. See Richard Raspa, "Exotic Foods among Italian-Americans in Mormon Utah: Food as Nostalgic Enactment of Identity," in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds.,Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984), 185-94.
48. Michael M.J. Fischer, "Autobiographical Voices (1, 2, 3) and Mosaic Memory," in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 92.
49. Teresa Maria Brown, "Rewriting the Nostalgic Story: Woman, Desire, Narrative," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1989.
50. See Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), xiii. See also Barbara Creed, "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism," Screen 28.2 (1987): 47-67 on film nostalgia and issues of gender which Fredric Jameson does NOT deal with. For a discussion of the condemnation of utopian "future nostalgia" by feminist writers, see Kathe Davis Finney, "The Days of Future Past or Utopians Lessing and LeGuin Fight Future Nostalgia," in Donald M. Hassler, ed., Patterns of the Fantastic (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983), 31-40. For a general critique of various kinds of utopian thinking, including nostalgic ones, see Vincent P. Pecora, Households of the Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996).
51. Lowenthal 121.
52. On Shakespeare's role in this kind of nostalgia, see Bennett 145: "To reproduce a classic text of the European imperial archive is always to risk its willing and wistfully nostalgic assent to (re)claim its own authority. Those texts are simply so heavily overcoded, value laden, that the production and reception of the 'new' text necessarily becomes bound to the tradition that encompasses and promotes the old 'authentic' version. This remains the argument against the revival/rewriting of The Tempest or any other classical text: that containment is an inevitable effect."
53. Renato Rosando, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon P, 1989), 68. Thanks to Monika Kaup for calling this to my attention.
54. Simon Simonse, "African Literature between Nostalgia and Utopia: African Novels since 1953 in the Light of the Modes-of-Production Approach," Research in African Literatures 13.4 (1982): 451-87.
55. See Ien Ang, "Hegemony-in-Trouble: Nostalgia and the Ideology of the Impossible in European Cinema," in Duncan Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992): 21-31.
56. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), 156.
57. Jameson, Postmodernism xvii and 19, respectively.
58. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 85 and 130 respectively.
59. Fredric Jameson, "Nostalgia for the Present," The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 527.
60. Anne Friedberg, "Les Flaneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition," PMLA 106.3 (1991): 419-31.
61. Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 86.
62. See, respectively, Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Volume I: Situations of Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 110 andPostmodernism 156.
63. Jameson, Postmodernism 19 and 21, respectively.
64. John Frow, "Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia," October 57 (1991): 135.
65. Simon During, "Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today," Textual Practice 1.1 (1987): 32-47.
66. See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971), 38. The phrase is used to describe Adorno's critique of theories of history organized around the covert hypothesis of such a "moment of plenitude" in the past or future.
67. Michael Bérubé, "Just the Fax, Ma'am, Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter," Village Voice (October 1991), 14.
68. Timothy J. Reiss, "Critical Environments: Cultural Wilderness or Cultural History?" Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 10.2 (June 1983): 193.
69. But it does so at a time when, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, Western culture's utopian imagination "is shifting from its futuristic pole toward the pole of remembrance." See Huyssen, Twilight Memories 88.
70. See Allison Graham, "History, Nostalgia, and the Criminality of Popular Culture," Georgia Review 38.2 (1984): 348-64. See also Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985, on nostalgia in fashion as a "strangely unmotived appropriation of the past" (172).
71. Vanderbilt 7.
72. These are the terms of Arjun Appadurai, in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 77-8.
73. This is one step beyond what has been called the ironic nostalgia of, say, post-Soviet artists who, according to Svetlana Boym, "reconfigure and preserve various kinds of imagined community and offer interesting cultural hybrids--of Soviet kitsch and memories of totalitarian childhood." See Svetlana Boym, "From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia," Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 151.
74. There may be analogies here with what Bennett calls "queer nostalgia" wherein "identity-forming discourses of the past are both confirmed and fractured at the moment of performance" (159).
75. See Chase and Shaw 7.
76. See Lowenthal 394-6.
77. Lowenthal 396.
78. Huyssen, Twilight Memories 5; see Lasch for contrasting view: "If Americans really cared about the past, they would try to understand how it still shapes their ideas and actions. Instead they lock it up in museums or reduce it to another object of commercialized consumption" (69).
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What do you think of when you think of culture? The opera or ballet? A performance of a Mozart symphony at Lincoln Center, or a Rembrandt show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Does the phrase "cultural event" conjure up images of young people in jeans and T-Shirts or of people in their sixties dressed formally? Most people hear "culture" and think "High Culture." Consequently, most people, when they first hear of cultural criticism, assume it would be more formal than, well, say, formalism. They suspect it would be "highbrow," in both subject and style.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In one of the goals of cultural criticism is to oppose Culture with a capital C, in other words, that new of culture which always and only equates it with what we sometimes call "high culture." Cultural critics want to make the term culture refer to popular culture as well as to that culture we associate with the so-called classics. Cultural critics are as likely to write about "Star Trek" as they are to analyze James Joyce's Ulysses. They want to break down the boundary between high and low, and to dismantle the hierarchy that the distinction implies. They also want to discover the (often political) reasons why a certain kind of aesthetic product is more valued than others.
A cultural critic writing on a revered classic might concentrate on a movie or even comic strip version. Or she might see it in light of some more common form of reading material (a novel by Jane Austen might be viewed in light of Gothic romances or ladies' conduct manuals), as the reflection of some common cultural myths or concerns (Huckleberry Finn might be shown to reflect and shape American myths about race, concerns about juvenile delinquency), or as an example of how texts move back and forth across the alleged boundary between "low" and "high" culture. A history play by Shakespeare, as one group of cultural critics has pointed out, may have started off as a popular work enjoyed by working people, later become a "highbrow" play enjoyed only by the privileged and educated, and, still later, due to a film version produced during World War II, become popular again--this time because it has been produced and viewed as a patriotic statement about England's greatness during wartime (Humm 6-7). Even as this introduction was being written, cultural critics were analyzing the "cultural work" being done cooperatively by Mel Gibson and Shakespeare in Franco Zeffirelli's recent movie, Hamlet.
In combating old definitions of what constitutes culture, of course, cultural critics sometimes end up combating old definitions of what constitutes the literary canon, that is, the once-agreed-upon honor roll of Great Books. They tend to do so, however, neither by adding books (and movies and television sitcoms) to the old list of texts that every "culturally literate" person should supposedly know, nor by substituting for it some kind of Counterculture Canon. Rather, they tend to combat the canon by critiquing the veryidea of canon. Cultural critics want to get us away from thinking about certain works as the "best" ones produced by a given culture (and therefore as the novels that best represent American culture). They seek to be more descriptive and less evaluative, more interested in relating than rating cultural products and events.
It is not surprising, then, that in an article on "The Need for Cultural Studies," four groundbreaking cultural critics have written that "Cultural Studies should . . . abandon the goal of giving students access to that which represents a culture." Instead, these critics go on to argue, it should show works in reference to other works, economic contexts, or broad social discourses (about childbirth, women's education, rural decay, etc.) within whose contexts the work makes sense. Perhaps most important, critics doing cultural studies should counter the prevalent notion that culture is some wholeness that has already been formed. Culture, rather, is really a set of interactive cultures, alive and growing and changing, and cultural critics should be present- and even future-oriented. Cultural critics should be "resisting intellectuals," and cultural studies should be "an emancipatory project" (Giroux 478-80).
The paragraphs above are peppered with words like oppose, counter, deny, resist, combat, abandon, and emancipatory. What such words suggest--and quite accurately--is that a number of cultural critics view themselves in political, even oppositional, terms. Not only are cultural critics likely to take on the literary canon while offering political readings of popular films, but they are also likely to take on the institution of the university, for that is where the old definitions of culture as High Culture (and as something formed and finished and canonized) have been most vigorously preserved, defended, and reinforced.
Cultural critics have been especially critical of the departmental structure of universities, for that structure, perhaps more than anything else, has kept the study of the "arts" more or less distinct from the study of history, not to mention from the study of such things as television, film, advertising, journalism, popular photography, folklore, current affairs, shoptalk, and gossip. By doing so, the departmental structure of universities has reasserted the high/low culture distinction, implying that all the latter subjects are best left to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and communication theorists. But such a suggestion, cultural critics would argue, keeps us from seeing the aesthetics of an advertisement as well as the propagandistic elements of a work of literature. For these reasons, cultural critics have mixed and matched the most revealing analytical procedures developed in a variety of disciplines, unabashedly jettisoning the rest. For these reasons, too, they have formed--and encouraged other scholars to form—networks other than and outside of those enforced departmentally.
Some initially loose interdisciplinary networks have, over time, solidified to become Cultural Studies programs and majors, complete with courses on comics and surveys of soaps. As this has happened, a significant if subtle danger has arisen. Cultural critics, Richard Johnson has warned, must strive diligently to keep cultural studies from becoming a discipline unto itself--one in which students encounter cartoons as a canon and belief in the importance of such popular forms as an "orthodoxy" (39). The only principles that critics doing cultural studies can doctrinally espouse, Johnson suggests, are the two that have thus far been introduced: namely, the principle that "culture" has been an "inegalitarian" concept, a "tool" of "condescension," and the belief that a new, "interdisciplinary (and sometimes antidisciplinary)" approach to true culture (that is, to the forms in which culture actually lives now) is required now that history and art and media are so complex and interrelated (42).
Johnson, ironically, played a major part in the institutionalization of cultural studies. Together with Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, he developed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded by Hoggart and Hall at Birmingham University, in England, in 1964. The fact that the Centre was founded in the mid-1960s is hardly surprising; cultural criticism, based as it is on a critique of elitist definitions of culture, spoke powerfully to and gained great energy and support from a decade of student unrest and revolt. The fact that the first center for cultural studies was founded in England, in Europe, is equally unsurprising. Although the United States has probably contributed more than any other nation to the media through which culture currently lives, critics in Europe, drawing upon the ideas of both Marxist and non-Marxist theorists, first articulated the need for something like what we now call cultural criticism or cultural studies. Indeed, to this day, European critics are more involved than Americans, not only in the analysis of popular cultural forms and products but also in the analysis of human subjectivity or consciousness as a form or product of culture. ("Subjectivities," Johnson argues, are "produced, not given, and are . . . objects of inquiry" inevitably related to "social practices," whether those involve factory rules, supermarket behavior patterns, reading habits, advertisements watched, myths perpetrated, or languages and other signs to which people are exposed [11 15].)
Among the early continental critics now seen as forerunners of present-day cultural critics were those belonging to the Annales school, so-called because of the name of the journal that Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre launched, in France, in 1929: Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilizations. The Annales school critics greatly influenced later thinkers like Michel Foucault, who, in turn, influenced other Annales thinkers such as Roger Chartier, Jacques Ravel, Francois Furet, and Robert Darnton. Both firstand second-generation Annales school critics warn against the development of "topics" of study by cultural critics--unless those same critics are bent on "developing . . . [a] sense of cohesion or interaction between topics" (Hunt 9). At the same time, interested as they are in cohesion, Annales school critics have warned against seeing the "rituals and other forms of symbolic action" as "express[ing] a central, coherent, communal meaning." They have reminded us that texts affect different readers "in varying and individual ways" (Hunt 13-14).
Michel Foucault is another strong, continental influence on present--day cultural criticism--and perhaps the strongest influence on American cultural criticism and the so-called new historicism, an interdisciplinary form of historical criticism whose evolution has often paralleled that of cultural criticism. Influenced by early Annales critics and contemporary Marxists (but neither an Annales critic nor a Marxist himself), Foucault sought to study cultures in terms of power relationships. Unlike Marxists and someAnnales school critics, he refused to see power as something exercised by a dominant over a subservient class. Indeed, he emphasized that power is not just repressivepower: a tool of conspiracy by one individual or institution against another. Power, rather, is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens.
Thus even a tyrannical aristocrat does not simply wield power, for he is empowered by "discourses"—accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking--and practices that amount to power. Foucault tried to view all things, from punishment to sexuality, in terms of the widest possible variety of discourses. As a result, he traced the "genealogy" of topics he studied through texts that more traditional historians and literary critics would have overlooked, looking at (in Lynn Hunt's words) "memoirs of deviants, diaries, political treatises, architectural blueprints, court records, doctors' reports--applying consistent principles of analysis in search of moments of reversal in discourse, in search of events as loci of the conflict where social practices were transformed" (Hunt 39). Foucault tended not only to build interdisciplinary bridges but also, in the process, to bring into the study of culture the "histories of women, homosexuals, and minorities"—groups seldom studied by those interested in culture with a capital C (Hunt 45).
Of the British influences on cultural studies and criticism as it is today, several have already been mentioned. Of those who have not, two early forerunners stand out. One of these, the Marxist critic E. P. Thompson, revolutionized study of the industrial revolution by writing about its impact on human attitudes, even consciousness. He showed how a shared cultural view, specifically that of what constitutes a fair or just price, influenced crowd behavior and caused such things as the food riots and rick burnings of the nineteenth century. The other, even greater, early British influence on contemporary cultural criticism and cultural studies was the late Raymond Williams. In works like The Long Revolution and Culture and Society: 1780-1950, Williams demonstrated that culture is not a fixed and finished but, rather a living and changing; thing. One of the changes he called for was the development of a common socialist culture.
Like Marxists, with whom he often both argued and sympathized, Williams viewed culture in relation to ideologies, what he termed the "residual," "dominant," or "emerging" ways of viewing the world held by classes or individuals holding power in a given social group. But unlike Thompson and Richard Hoggart, he avoided emphasizing social classes and class conflict in discussing those forces most powerfully shaping and changing culture. And, unlike certain continental Marxists, he could never see the cultural "superstructure" as being a more or less simple "reflection" of the economic "base." Williams's tendency was to focus on people as people, on how they experience conditions they find themselves in and creatively respond to those conditions in their social practices. A believer in the resiliency of the individual, he produced a body of criticism notable for what Hall has called its "humanism" (63).
As is clear from the paragraphs above, the emergence and evolution of cultural studies or criticism are difficult to separate entirely from the development of Marxist thought. Marxism is, in a sense, the background to the background of most cultural criticism, and some contemporary cultural critics consider themselves Marxist critics as well. Thus, although Marxist criticism and its most significant practitioners are introduced elsewhere in this volume, some mention of Marxist ideas— and of the critics who developed them--is also necessary here. Of particular importance to the evolution of cultural criticism are the works of Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Mikhail Bakhtin.
Bakhtin was a Russian, later a Soviet, critic so original in his thinking and wide-ranging in his influence that some would say he was never a Marxist at all. He viewed language--especially literary texts--in terms of discourses and dialogues between discourses. Within a novel written in a society in flux, for instance, the narrative may include an official, legitimate discourse, plus another infiltrated by challenging comments and even retorts. In a 1929 book on Dostoyevsky and a 1940 study Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin examined what he calls "polyphonic" novels, each characterized by a multiplicity of voices or discourses. In Dostoyevsky the independent status of a given character is marked by the difference of his or her language from that of the narrator. (The narrator's voice, too, can in fact be a dialogue.) In works by Rabelais, Bakhtin finds that the (profane) language of the carnival and of other popular festivities play against and parody the more official discourses, that is, of the magistrates or the Church. Bakhtin influenced modern cultural criticism by showing, in a sense, that the conflict between "high" and "low" culture takes place not only between classic and popular texts but also between the "dialogic" voices that exist within all great books.
Walter Benjamin was a German Marxist who, during roughly the same period, attacked certain conventional and traditional literary forms that he felt conveyed a stultifying "aura" of culture. He took this position in part because so many previous Marxist critics and, in his own day, Georg Lukacs, had seemed to be stuck on appreciating nineteenth-century realistic novels-and opposed to the modernist works of their own time. Benjamin not only praised modernist movements, such as Dadaism, but also saw as hopeful the development of new art forms utilizing mechanical production and reproduction. These forms, including radio and films, offered the promise of a new definition of culture via a broader, less exclusive domain of the arts.
Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist best known for his Prison Notebooks (first published as Lettere dal caracere in 1947), critiqued the very concept of literature and, beyond that, of culture in the old sense, stressing not only the importance of culture more broadly defined but the need for nurturing and developing proletarian, or working-class, culture. He suggested the need to view intellectuals politically--and the need for what he called "radical organic" intellectuals. Today's cultural critics calling for colleagues to "legitimate the notion of writing reviews and books for the general public," to "become involved in the political reading of popular culture," and, in general, to "repoliticize . . . scholarship" have often cited Gramsci as an early advocate of their views (Giroux 482).
Finally, and most important, Gramsci related literature to the ideologies of the culture that produced it and developed the concept of "hegemony," a term he used to describe the pervasive, weblike system of meanings and values--ideologies--that shapes the way things look, what they mean and, therefore, what reality is for the majority of people within a culture. Gramsci did not see people, even poor people, as the helpless victims of hegemony, as ideology's idiotic robots. Rather, he believed that people have the freedom and power to struggle against ideology, to alter hegemony. As Patrick Brantlinger has suggested in Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America(1990), Gramsci's thought is unspoiled by the "intellectual arrogance that views the vast majority of people as deluded zombies, the victims or creatures of ideology" (100).
Of those Marxists who, after Gramsci, explored the complex relationship between literature and ideology, the French Marxist Louis Althusser also had a significant impact on cultural criticism. Unlike Gramsci, Althusser tended to see ideology in control of people, and not vice versa. He argued that the main function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relations of production, and that that function is even carried out in most literary texts, although literature is relatively autonomous from other "social formations." Dave Laing has explained Althusser's position by saying that the "ensemble of habits, moralities, and opinions" that can be found in any work of literature tend to "ensure that the work-force (and those responsible for re-producing them in the family, school, etc.) are maintained in their position of subordination to the dominant class" (91).
In many ways, though, Althusser is as good an example of where Marxism and cultural criticism part ways as he is of where cultural criticism is indebted to Marxists and their ideas. For although Althusser did argue that literature is relatively autonomous--more independent of ideology than, say, Church, press, or State--he meant by literature not just literature in the narrow sense but something even narrower. He meant Good Literature, certainly not the popular forms that present-day cultural critics would want to set beside Tolstoy and Joyce, Eliot and Brecht. Those popular fictions, Althusser assumed, were mere packhorses designed (however unconsciously) to carry the baggage of a culture's ideology, mere brood mares destined to reproduce it.
Thus, while cultural critics have embraced both Althusser's notion that works of literature reflect certain ideological formations and his notion that, at the same time, literary works may be relatively distant from or even resistant to ideology, they have rejected the narrow limits within which Althusser and other Marxists have defined literature. In "Marxism and Popular Fiction" (1986), Tony Bennett uses "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and another British television show, "Not the 9 o'clock News," to argue that the Althusserian notion that all forms of popular culture are to be included "among [all those] many material forms which ideology takes . . . under capitalism" is "simply not true." The "entire field" of "popular fiction"—which Bennett takes to include films and television shows as well as books--is said to be "replete with instances" of works that do what Bennett calls the "work" of "distancing." That is, they have the effect of separating the audience from, not rebinding the audience to, prevailing ideologies (249).
Although there are Marxist cultural critics (Bennett himself is one, carrying on through his writings what may be described as a lover's quarrel with Marxism), most cultural critics are not Marxists in any strict sense. Anne Beezer, in writing about such things as advertisements and women's magazines, contests the "Althusserian view of ideology as the construction of the subject" (qtd. in Punter 103). That is to say, she gives both the media she is concerned with and their audiences more credit than Althusserian Marxists presumably would. Whereas they might argue that such media make people what they are, she points out that the same magazines that may, admittedly, tell women how to please their men may, at the same time, offer liberating advice to women about how to preserve their independence by not getting too serious romantically. And, she suggests, many advertisements advertise their status as ads, just as many people who view or read them see advertising as advertising and interpret it accordingly.
The complex and subtle sort of analysis that Beezer has brought to bear on women's magazines and advertisements has been focused on paperback romance novels by Tania Modleski and Janice Radway, in Loving with a Vengeance (1982) and Reading the Romance (1984), respectively. Radway, a feminist cultural critic who uses but finally exceeds Marxist critical discourse, points out that many women who read romances do so in order to carve out a time and space that is wholly their own, not to be intruded upon by their husband or children. Also, Radway argues, such novels may end in marriage, but the marriage is usually between a feisty and independent heroine and a powerful man she has "tamed," that is, made sensitive and caring. And why do so many such stories involve such heroines and end as they do? Because, Radway demonstrates through painstaking research into publishing houses, bookstores, and reading communities, their consumers want them to be that way. They don't buy--or, if they buy they don't recommend--romances in which, for example, a heroine is raped: thus, in time, fewer and fewer such plots find their way onto the racks by the supermarket checkout.
Radway's reading is typical of feminist cultural criticism in that it is political--but not exclusively about oppression. The subjectivities of women may be "produced" by romances--that is, their thinking is governed by what they read--but the same women also govern, to some extent, what gets written or produced, thus doing "cultural work" of their own. Rather than seeing all forms of popular culture as manifestations of ideology, soon to be remanifested in the minds of victimized audiences, non-Marxist cultural critics tend to see a sometimes disheartening but always dynamic synergy between cultural forms and the culture's consumers.
Mary Poovey does this in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), a book in which she traces the evolution of female "propriety." Poovey closely connects the proprieties taught by eighteenth-century women who wrote conduct manuals, ladies' magazines, and even novels with patriarchal notions of women and men's property (Since property was inherited, an unfaithful woman could threaten the disposition of a man's inheritance by giving birth to children who were not his. Therefore, writings by women that reinforced proprieties also shored up the proprietary status quo.) Finally, though, Poovey also shows that some of the women writers who reinforced proprieties and were seen as "textbook Proper Ladies" in fact "crossed the borders of that limited domain" (40). They may have written stories showing the audacity, for women, of trying to lead an imaginative, let alone audacious, life beyond the bounds of domestic propriety. But they did so imaginatively and audaciously.
Whereas Mary Poovey, in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, viewed Frankenstein in terms of its relation to conduct manuals and novels by Jane Austen, most cultural critics who have written about Mary Shelley's best-known novel have instead read it in the context of a very different popular form: the Gothic tale. Paul O'Flinn, for instance, begins his essay on "Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein" by pointing out that the novel was published in the same year as a famous attack on the fifty-year-old tradition of Gothic fiction.
In the essay that follows, Lee E. Heller begins by treating Frankenstein as Gothic fiction and by suggesting that the interesting thing about Gothic is its "existence in both 'highbrow' and popular forms." What is true of Gothic in general, Heller goes on to argue, is especially true of Frankenstein, which in its book and movie versions has cut a wide swath of audience appeal through boundaries that usually prove impenetrable. Although it remains a classic, Frankenstein is also, quite dearly, a fit subject for the new cultural criticism.
Heller next places the Frankenstein "original" in the cultural contexts of a late-eighteenth-century debate about education and literacy. This was a period during which the "reading class" had grown to include most of the middle class, a fact that at once had allowed the novel to emerge (as a form, it is more dedicated to representing ordinary life than is poetry) and which, at the same time, had set off a somewhat moralistic debate about what constitutes proper entertainment for readers in need of instruction. That debate had been intensified by the advent of Gothic fiction, the audience for which tended to be more female than male and less prosperous than the audiences of, say, Fielding and Smollett. Should such an audience be reading a kind of writing that seemed only to excite the emotions needlessly and not to instruct? Perhaps because many people were answering that question in the negative, the Gothic evolved to combine the moral elements of the "serious" eighteenth-century novel with the entertaining, escapist excitement that it had come to be known for.
Heller's interest in audience--and in the novel as a consumer product -is as typical for a critic practicing cultural criticism as is her interest in a text that defies the boundaries between "Literature" and popular fiction. So, of course, is her concern with the "cultural work" (Jane Tompkins's phrase) done by a given form in a given historical moment. What makes Heller's version of the new cultural criticism particularly complex and exciting is that she identifies within a given literary form (here Gothic) three distinguishableforms of that form (horror Gothic, sentimental-educational Gothic, and "high" philosophical Gothic), each of which is then shown to have been doing a different kind of cultural work for a different class or kind of audience--but all within the same text.
Thus, she explains Frankenstein's ability to persist in popularity over the centuries, among a range of socioeconomic classes and via a variety of forms, by showing it to be a hybrid form, a variegated thread twisted together of sensational, middle-class sentimental, and philosophical strands. In the process, she provides a strikingly original reading, one that shows not only how a cultural debate lies behind a text but also how it is foregrounded within the text. For she shows that Frankenstein is as much about good and bad education, salutary books, and (Cornelius Agrippa's) corrupting, "sad trash," as it is about ghouls and their horrifying acts.
Finally, though, Heller's work represents cultural criticism at its best by virtue of the fact that it sets the text in its later historical periods, including our own. Through her essay, we can see the radical metamorphosis of its meaning and function in subsequent film versions (from the 1931 classic through the crop of "Freddie" and "Jason" movies); the changing ways in which we have used the word Frankenstein to speak of historical figures and atrocities (from Adolf Hitler to the atom bomb to the monstrous "wildings" that have been committed in Central Park). Thus, Heller makes Frankenstein speak in a way that critics taking other approaches to the novel can only hope to make it speak, for she shows all Frankensteins to be versions of Frankenstein and shows how the current version speaks now.
CULTURAL CRITICISM: A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
General Introductions to Cultural Criticism, Cultural Studies
Brantlinger, Patrick.
Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Desan, Philippe, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, and Wendy Griswold. "Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on the Sociology of Literature."Literature and Social Practice. Ed. Desan, Ferguson, and Griswold. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1989. 1-10.
Eagleton, Terry. "Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 469-76.
Giroux, Henry, David Shumway, Paul Smith, and James Sosnoski. "The Need for Cultural Studies: Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres." Dalhousie R eview 64.2 (1984): 472-86.
Gunn, Giles. The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture. New York: Oxford, 1987.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72.
Humm, Peter, Paul Stigant, and Peter Widdowson, eds.Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History. New York: Methuen, 1986. See especially the intro. by Humm, Stigant, and Widdowson, and Tony Bennett's essay "Marxism and Popular Fiction." 237-65.
Hunt, Lynn, ed. The New Cultural History: Essays. Berkeley: U of California P. 1989.
Johnson, Richard. "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology 16 (1986-87): 38-80.
Pfister, Joel. "The Americanization of Cultural Studies." Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1991): 199-229.
Punter, David, ed. Introduction to Contemporary Critical Studies. New York: Longman, 1986. See especially Punter's "Introduction: Culture and Change" 1-18, Tony Dunn's "The Evolution of Cultural Studies" 71-91, and the essay "Methods for Cultural Studies Students" by Anne Beezer, Jean Grimshaw, and Martin Barker 95-118.
Cultural Studies: Some Early British Examples
Hoggart, Richard.
Speaking to Each Other. 2 vols. London: Chatto, 1970.
--. The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1961.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
-- . William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York: Harper, 1958.
--. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia UP, 1961.
Cultural Studies: Continental and Marxist Influences
Althusser, Louis.
For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, 1969.
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon, 1971.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Austin: U of Texas P. 1981.
--. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge: MIT, 1968.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. with intro. by Hannah Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Bennett, Tony. "Marxism and Popular Fiction." Humm, Stigant, and Widdowson.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
--. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International, 1971.
Modern Cultural Studies: Selected British and American Examples
Colls, Robert, and Philip Dodd, eds.
Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880-1920. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden: Archon, 1982.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1988.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 1984.
Cultural Studies of Frankenstein
Baldick, Chris.
In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987.
Bewell, Alan. "An Issue of Monstrous Desire: Frankenstein and Obstetrics." Yale Journal of Criticism 2.1 (1988): 105-28.
LaValley, Albert J. "The Stage and Film Children of Frankenstein: A Survey." The Endurance of Frankenstein. Ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: U of California P. 1979. 243-89.
O'Flinn, Paul. "Production and Reproduction: The Case of Frankenstein." Literature and History 9.2 (1983): 194-213.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P. 1984. See especially ch. 4: "'My Hideous Progeny': The Lady and the Monster."
Rieder, John. "Embracing the Alien: Science Fiction in Mass Culture." Science-Fiction Studies 9.1 (March 1982): 26-37.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism." Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 243-61.
Vlasopolos, Anca. "Frankenstein's Hidden Skeleton: The Psycho-Politics of Oppression." Science-Fiction Studies 10.2 (1983): 125-36.
visitnte fiel / cali 
Es además una ciudad empresarial cuya infraestructura ofrece todas las facilidades para las reuniones de negocios, el alojamiento, las compras, la gastronomía y la diversión.
El simbólico trayecto que maquina Nemescu viste el ligero fuselaje de una fábula localista, neuralgia de conflictos personales bajo el gran conflicto burocrático que enhebra la función. Armand Assante -rotunda presencia- encara sin éxito el bloqueo de su convoy ordenado por el corrupto jefe de estación de esa recóndita e imprevista aldea, verdadero escollo en el camino hacia una Kosovo en los estertores. La tozudez del personaje choca con la cuestionable eficacia de las altas esferas occidentales, trasiego de llamadas telefónicas mediante, en la práctica estériles. Radica en esta premisa lo insólito de una propuesta amable sólo en continente, pronto desplegará el libreto su arsenal de crítica mordaz al caciquismo provinciano frente al intruso -en este caso, la soldadesca de la era Clinton-, hilando con delicado esmero las intimidades que despierta situación tan descabellada entre invasores y autóctonos. Es por ello que los tintes políticos del conjunto, 
¿Pueden los americanos, tantos años esperados, dirimir estas diferencias aunque no les incumba? ¿Pueden erigirse en héroes de causas peregrinas, en salvadores de patrias chicas? La comicidad, sin rozar el ámbito delirante y macarrónico de Kusturica, orienta cualquier posible respuesta. Lo que equivale a afirmar el talento de alguien sobrado de ingenio por bascular entre lo costumbrista y lo burlesco, por torear la rigidez del cine combativo e instalarse en un equilibrado sarcasmo. Por hacer de su fábula un atemporal recinto de esperanzas regadas de sabor agridulce que nunca deja de sorprendernos.
Ayúdanos a mantener muchocine sin fallos, 
