From the issue dated September 17, 1999

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Cultural Studies vs. Literary Studies

To the Editor:

The complicated dance that Rita Felski performs in distinguishing between types or varieties of cultural studies -- "Cultural Studies A," which is British and sophisticated and good, versus "Cultural Studies B," which is American, derivative, and bad -- is wholly beside the point.

The essential distinction is very simple. Literary studies takes the literary work as its object of inquiry. Whatever is not literary studies does not. Thus, a literary-studies teacher takes Hamlet to be a self-contained world of motive and action whose immense complexity is the subject of discussion with students. Many other things may be discussed in elucidating this world -- Renaissance cosmology, social history, theology, alchemy, etc. -- but they exist for the purpose of understanding Hamlet, not the other way around.

Cultural studies, on the other hand -- this covers both Ms. Felski's type A and type B -- does not take Hamlet, or any other literary work, as its object of inquiry. Ms. Felski clearly thinks she's making a decisive point when she talks admiringly about "the multileveled meanings of black hairstyles" as a shining example of the sort of thing about which American critics of cultural studies need to be more aware. But she's missing the point.

The point is that American universities are so structured that they already have departments -- anthropology, sociology, history, communications -- that study the sort of thing she's interested in. The problem with cultural studies is that, like a parasite flourishing at the expense of its host, it has left the study of literary works and literary tradition in a desperately enfeebled condition, with most younger English-department faculty members incompetent to do so much as help students learn how to read a lyric by Donne or Wyatt, let alone Hamlet or Paradise Lost.

I have many colleagues who have come to loathe the empty trendiness of cultural studies. Not one of them is against studying the things that Ms. Felski wants to see studied -- rap music, TV sitcoms, slasher movies, etc. -- in the appropriate academic departments. The argument is about whether, in a culture where young people have grown up with TV sitcoms and slasher movies, their one opportunity to enter the imaginative universes of Hamlet and Paradise Lost and Pride and Prejudice ought to be abolished in favor of having some professor talk for an hour about the differences between Lost Boyz and Snoop Doggy Dogg.

William C. Dowling
Professor of English
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, N.J.