Re-Imagining Cultural Studies : The Promise of Cultural Materialism

by Andrew Milner

• ISBN13: 9780761961130
• ISBN10: 0761961135
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-09-17
• Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd

Summary

'His wealth of scholarship and sharp insights make this a very fine book indeed. It is probably the fullest statement of Raymond Williams's enduring influence upon cultural studies' - Jim McGuigan, University of Loughborough'An accessible, engaging book' - TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural StudiesThis important book traces the continuing influence on contemporary cultural studies of the kinds of cultural materialism developed by Raymond Williams and his successors. Williams now often appears in cultural studies as a vaguely remembered 'founding father', rather than a theorist whose work is still actively relevant to our present condition. Milner's book restores Williams to a central position in relation to the formation and development of cultural studies. It stresses the differences between Williams and that other founding father, Richard Hoggart, arguing that the label 'culturalism' cannot properly be applied to both. It argues that Williams stands in an essentially analogous relation to the British 'culturalist' tradition as do Foucault and Bourdieu to French structuralism and Habermas to German critical theory and that his cultural materialism is not so much culturalist as positively 'post-culturalist'.To those who have complained that contemporary cultural studies is insufficiently concerned with history, embeddedness and political economy, Milner suggests that this is so, in part, because Williams has become such a neglected resource. The book is a much needed reappraisal of the Williams approach, correcting misinterpretations and demonstrating its singular relevance to the problems and potentials facing cultural studies today. What emerges most powerfully is a logically consistent and penetrating way of 'doing cultural studies' that successfully challenges many of the dominant approaches in the field.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Cultural Materialism and Cultural Theory	1	(23)
Cultural Studies and Cultural Theory	3	(4)
Western Marxism and Cultural Studies	7	(3)
Culture and Cultures	10	(4)
Idealism and Materialism	14	(4)
Cultural Materialisms	18	(6)
Politics and Letters	24	(26)
(Politics and) Letters	27	(9)
Politics (and Letters)	36	(8)
Under Which King, Bezonian?	44	(6)
From Culture to Society	50	(30)
Culturalism and the First New Left	51	(5)
From Culture to Society	56	(8)
The Long Revolution	64	(4)
Selective Tradition	68	(3)
Structures of Feeling	71	(3)
Materialising Culture	74	(6)
Theorising Culture	80	(27)
Theory and the British New Left	82	(4)
Turning to Gramsci: Hegemony, Culture, Ideology	86	(4)
Traditions, Institutions, Formations	90	(2)
The Alternatives to Hegemony	92	(4)
Theorising Culture: Deconstructing Base and Superstructure	96	(3)
Theorising Culture: Toward a Social Theory of Literature	99	(4)
Beyond Marxism, Beyond Literature	103	(4)
Rethinking Mass Civilisation	107	(28)
Cultural Materialism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism	108	(2)
Williams and Hall	110	(8)
Cultural Studies and Postmodernism	118	(4)
Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy	122	(6)
Media, Culture and Society	128	(3)
Back to the Future - or Backs to the Wall?	131	(4)
Rethinking Minority Culture	135	(27)
Cultural Materialism and the Crises in English Studies	136	(3)
The Structuralist Controversy, Williams and MacCabe	139	(4)
Williams and Eagleton	143	(6)
Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism	149	(9)
Said and Williams	158	(4)
Towards 2050	162	(20)
Cultural Materialism as Post-Culturalism	163	(7)
Cultural Materialism and Cultural Studies	170	(3)
Cultural Materialism and Socialist Politics: Towards 2050	173	(9)
Bibliography	182	(16)
Index	198