1. Literature and Culture (I) (PGECL2C002T)
Course Instructor
Raj Thakur

2. Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy
Background :Matthew Arnold and Victorian Compromise
Culture :
Arnold’s extension of criticism
Culture as a tool for restructuring the social ideology of England
Devoid of anthroplological perspective, Arnold’s view of culture is deeply humanistic
Idealised view of culture :
i) Culture as a “study of perfection”
ii) “Best that has been thought and known”
iii) “class distinction”, “badge”
iv) “from other people who have not got it”

3. Anarchy Opposite to the idealised sphere, “best self”
Class wars of England :
i) Barbarians (Aristocrats)
ii) Philistines (Middle class)
iii) Populace (Working class)
Individualism, “ordinary self”, “doing as one likes”, Romantic passion
Utilitarianism , material progress
Darwinism
Religious fanaticism, Puratinism

4. Dominant mode of thought
“Sweetness and Light”
i)Eclectic bent of best, perfection, harmony, balance, “synthesis and exposition
ii)Beauty and intelligence, delight and wisdom
iii) Euphuias – ideal man of culture, “goodness of body and soul”
“Hellenism and Hebraism” i) Graeco-Roman ideals
ii) Creativity and Discipline
iii) Beauty and Religion
iv) Spontaneity of consciousness and Structure of consciousness
Culture is not having and resting but growing and becoming through the ideals of “grand style” , “touchstone”, “disinterestedness”

5. Raymond Williams Culture is Ordinary (1958)
Raymond Williams and New Left school of Marxism
Culture's ordinary notion:
Anthropological idea of culture, unlike Matthew Arnold’s “best self”, culture is associated with the “lived” sense
Agrarian origin, to ‘cultivate’, “whole way of life”
What culture is not: “culture vultures”
Refinement and specialness, high culture or highbrow, being “civilized”
Snobby teashop culture at Cambridge

6. Influence and Contradictions: Karl Marx and F .R Leavis Marx:
i)In accordance that culture must be interpreted in “ relation to its underlying system of production”. ii) Disagrees: masses are “ignorant” and donot participate in the national/ artistic/English cultures. iii) Dominant class dictate and impose the idea of art and learning

7. Leavis:
Agrees to the idea that English industrial romance destroyed traditional culture and only saviour would be eductaion
Disagrees to the idea of burgeoning people as “masses” and subsequent “badness…of popular culture”
Disagrees that “bad culture” drove out “good culture”

8. Stuart Hall “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”
Stuart Hall and New Left wave in Post war Britain
Founding figure of Cultural Studies
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (CCCS) in 1964
Popular is Political
Complexity of “popular” and “culture” on the wake of agrarian to industrial transformation in England
Popular culture is not mass culture
Popular culture’s carnivalesque inversion of high culture and low culture
Popular culture is an ongoing site of struggle. “zone of contestation”

9. Neo Gramscian Approach
Discourse of popular culture: Popular culture being transformed, banned, remediated and moralised
Transition from “containment to resistance”
Culture is not the idea of pure, authentic and unified organic form
Away from the conventional idea of museum, galleries, T.V, soap opera and shopping mall culture

10. Hall’s categorization of culture
Mass consumed culture, passive consumption: “false consciousness” and “cultural dopes”
All thongs which people do or have done: leads to unwarranted categorisation between of “the people” and the “elite cultures”
Most preferred idea of culture: Culture is rooted in “class struggle or consciousness”.
Volsinov’s idea of “signifying practices”, language as “multiaccentual zone”.

11. Popular is Political
For Instance: ‘Black’ in Afro-American culture, “black is beautiful”, Queer as a rallying cry behind gay cultural politics
Famous “black salute” in Mexico Olympics 1968
Cricket and Caribbean identity, Cricket and Dalit identity
Football and working class culture
Music: Folk artists like Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen