Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005
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Milner,
Andrew. Literature, Culture and Society. 2nd ed. 1996; London:
Routledge, 2005. pp. 336. ISBN 0-415-30785-6(PB). £18.99.
Reviewed by
University of Durham
As an academic discipline, cultural studies has always suffered from a
lack of both a coherently defined methodology and clearly demarcated boundaries
of investigation. As a result, recent developments in cultural studies have
shifted its emphasis away from its literary origins, as located in the
pioneering work of F.R. Leavis, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, in favour
of a more semiotic approach. Andrew Milner’s illuminating study explores the
hybrid tradition of cultural studies in an attempt to re-establish the central
importance of both literature and sociology to this burgeoning discipline.
Milner’s work continues a debate that has been ongoing at least since 1988 and
the publication of Colin McCabe’s important collection, Futures for English,
a book conspicuous by its absence from Milner’s bibliography. But whereas
McCabe’s collection focused predominantly on canonical writers and works of
literature (Shakespeare, Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wasteland,
for example), Milner prefers to explore the ways in which canonical literary
texts (‘high’ culture) have catalysed the production of ‘popular’
cultural artefacts.
Milner
begins his book by investigating the perennial problem of defining
‘literature’. In this, the ghostly presence of Williams looms large, both in
Milner’s projected ambitions and in his unabashed ideological leanings. For
Williams, the whole notion of literature needed to be defined in terms of its
social and cultural history, and not just as an imaginative, creative or even fictive
products: scripts for TV shows can be imaginative and creative, for example,
while Ruskin’s art criticism and Milton’s autobiographical sonnet on his
blindness are not fiction but are regarded as literature. Indeed the very
problem of defining what constitutes literature is at the heart of Milner’s
book. In a particularly instructive introductory chapter, Milner traces the
history and development of English literature as an academic discipline in its
own right. Having initially developed in line with English Nationalism, the
study of English literature evolved from nineteenth-century university courses
on comparative literature, and it is fascinating to learn that it was not
recognised as a stand-alone discipline in British universities until Oxford
appointed the first professor of English in 1904. It did not take long, however,
before the study of literature for its own sake metamorphosed into a rather
different beast. Literature courses have always been guilty of making value
judgements on creative works they deem to be sufficiently ‘authentic’ and
‘inspired’, works which now provide us with the canon, a quasi-isolated and
comparatively small group of works that constitute the edifying apogee of
literary achievement. Once established, the canon provided academics with little
scope for going beyond it: hence the rise of ‘criticism’ as an object and
focus of study in its own right. This led F.R. Leavis to complain that the study
of English literature should focus less on the contents of the canon and more on
“the Englishness of the language itself”; in other words, on the cultural
significance of language.
Influenced
strongly by Leavis’s stress on the organic continuity between literature and
society, Williams considered culture to be “a whole way of life” that must
necessarily include the artefacts of popular culture, which had previously been
regarded as antithetical to the high culture of which English literature was a
part. Williams refused to accept that academia must distinguish between
“minority and mass cultures”, believing that each influenced and illuminated
the other. This is a common attitude among democratic socialist writers such as
Williams, Orwell (who Milner discusses more as a publishing phenomenon than as a
political animal), and Milner himself. Milner makes no bones about where his
political allegiances lie, and he is loyal to Terry Eagleton’s Marxist
assessment that value judgements imposed on literary works are both an aspect of
“those doing the valuing” and designed to propagate particular purposes and
vested interests. Such an anti-elitist stance is at the heart of cultural
studies, and Milner writes that, “The best kind of cultural studies, it seems
to me, has never had the desire to substitute movies for Milton. Quite the
contrary, it would study both.” Consequently, Milner believes that the western
canon of literature “will almost certainly be far safer in the hands of an
immodest cultural studies than in those of an English or comparative literature
hell bent on turning itself into classics”.
This
is a large and contentious claim as it implies that Milner would like to see
cultural studies not as an adjunct to or even off-shoot of literary studies, as
has traditionally been the case, but vice versa. But where would this leave
English literature as an academic discipline? Milner certainly has a case where
literature as a cultural product is concerned, but does it really deserve to be
relegated below cultural studies in the academic hierarchy? Moreover, while it
is certainly true that works of art emerge from particular socio-cultural
climates, the theory of intentional fallacy (although admittedly flawed) and the
writings of Harold Bloom (equally problematic) have illustrated how literary
works might still be studied without recourse to explaining their capitalist
modes of production. (I realise there is an aspect of snobbery in raising these
questions but they are, I feel, still valid, although they perhaps deserve a
fuller treatment elsewhere.) Despite declaiming the value judgements involved in
the formation of the canon, Milner’s own political allegiances nevertheless
demand a remarkably similar process. He even admits that much of the raison
d’être of cultural studies “is flawed, often hideous and loathsome”,
yet Milner does not, I feel, provide sufficient evidence for English literary
studies to be demoted in its academic standing.
Milner
is at his strongest when discussing the intertextuality that lies at the heart
of cultural studies, and during the course of two especially intriguing chapters
he traces the treatment of the creation myth across texts as diverse as the Book
of Genesis, Paradise Lost, Blade Runner, and Buffy the Vampire
Slayer. What this reveals is a process of cultural transmission that
transcends the boundaries of cultural production and casts light on the ways in
which genres such as science fiction and postmodern gothic have developed from
religious texts to appeal to an increasingly secular world. Although while Literature,
Culture and Society seeks to reinstate the centrality of literature to
cultural studies, it remains somewhat unconvincing in its demands that English
literary studies be subsumed by its younger relation. Nevertheless, it remains
an intelligent, wide-ranging, comprehensively researched, humorous, and above
all democratic response to many of the problems faced by an increasingly
schizophrenic academic world. A Google search reveals that the first edition of
this book has become a standard text on many academic courses. I sincerely hope
that this wholly revised edition retains such estimable standing, if only for
its power to provoke heated discussion in the cloistered halls of academia.