文档介绍：LITERARY INTO CULTURAL
STUDIES
Antony Easthope
For fifty years the paradigm of literary studies has relied on an
opposition between the canon and its other, popular culture. The theory
wars of the 1980s changed all that. With the advent of post-structuralism
and the ‘death of literature’ the opposition between high and popular
culture became untenable, transforming the field of inquiry from
literary into cultural studies.
Antony Easthope argues that the new discipline of cultural studies
must have a new, decentred paradigm for mon study of
canonical and popular texts together. Through a detailed criticism of
competing theory, including British cultural studies, New Historicism
and cultural materialism, he shows how this new study should—and
should not—be done.
Easthope’s exploration of the problems, possibilities and politics of
cultural studies takes on the often evaded question of literary value; also
in a reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness alongside Burroughs’
Tarzan of the Apes he demonstrates how the opposition between high
and popular culture can be deconstructed.
Antony Easthope is Professor in English and Cultural Studies at
Manchester Metropolitan University. He has held visiting fellowships at
Wolfson College, Oxford, the University of Adelaide and at the
Commonwealth Center for the Study of Literary and Cultural Change at
the University of Virginia. His publications include Poetry as Discourse
(1983), The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture (1986) and British
Post-Structuralism (1988).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank all those who were at monwealth Center
for the Study of Literary and Cultural Change in 1990 for their support
and constructive criticism when I was working on this book, Carlos
Betancourth, Alice Gambrell, Ravindra Khare, Martin Kreiswirth and
Roland Simon, as well as visitors to the Center, Stephen Bann, Maud
Ellmann, Toril Moi, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Stephen Railton,
Andrew Ro