Overview: A Cultural Approach to American Literature

Over this semester, we will adopt a cultural approach in our reading of American literature since 1865. We will interpret and analyze texts within their historical context to better understand the way they reflect and shaped the values and ideas of their times. The term "culture" has come to be used in a dizzying variety of ways, according to the critic Stephen Greenblatt, including: the limited sense of high culture (opera, oil painting, classical music), the sociological sense (youth culture, artistocratic culture, mtv culture), and as a descriptive equivalent of civilization (to be cultured and not savage). (225).

In cultural and literary studies of the last twenty years, many critics have helped to give a more specific or specialized meaning to the term so that it ultimately becomes more useful. Their notion of culture emphasizes "what appear to be opposite things: constraint and mobility" (225) or limitation and liberation. As one among many institutions that shape culture (including religion, government, education), "Western literature over a very long period of time has been one of the great institutions for the enforcement of cultural boundaries through praise and blame" (226).

As you read and prepare for discussion and other assignments this semester, I will ask you to keep in mind a series of broad "culturalist" questions that Greenblatt offers:
  1. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
  2. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
  3. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
  4. Upon what social understandings does the work depend? [i.e. what ideas about the world, social order, history are taken as a given?]
  5. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained [or unleashed] implicitly or explicitly by this work?
  6. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected? (226)

As we read particular works, part of your job will be to participate in revising these questions to make them more specifically applicable to particular American poems, essays, stories, and plays.

Several of these questions (2, 3, 4) may also be useful for students who are accustomed to pleasure reading in which "good" books are those that are most compelling to readers in this "time and place" and because they mirror one's own "values" and picture of the world. Doubtless many of the characters, stories, themes, etc. you encounter this semester will interest, engage, and amuse you because you can "identify" with them; how intense it can be to encounter a mirror of one's own experience on the page. Yet the virtue of others will be precisely in the fact that they present values, difficulties, aspirations, and fears very different from your own. The cultural emphasis of the course will help us to see, discuss, and better understand such differences.

 

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Culture," Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1995. 225-32.