November 8th LT Readings

Theorists Nealon and Giroux engage in a discussion of western capitalism’s view of time and space in their chapter “Space/Time” in Theory Toolbox.  They characterize time as something determined by labor and management battles and organized around the capitalist view that “time is money,” although they concede that social progress has been made through the years by negotiations between labor, management, and subordinated racial groups in an effort to correct abuses and inequities between these groups.  In defining space, they discuss how the spaces we occupy, whether personal, family, school, state, regional, or national, provide frameworks for us to experience who we are in those contexts.  They also cite Foucault’s preoccupation with modern institutions and their attempts to control “the [social] space of the body”.  This brings to mind Emerson’s distrust of religious, educational, and civil institutions; his distrust based on the belief that reliance upon institutions prevents men and women from discovering the “divinity” within, something that Foucault would disagree was possible since individuals are always products of culture.  I thought the observation by Nealon and Giroux that the acceleration of travel time in the last 160 years has compressed concepts of both time and space was interesting, and I couldn’t help but think of another Romanticist, Thoreau, and how he might view the “advances” of technology and mobility, since even in his lifetime in the early-to-mid 19^th century, he thought of these as encumbrances to the development of one’s spirituality and enlightenment.

Barry’s chapter, “New Historicism and Cultural Materialism,” details the similarities and differences between these two theoretical view points.  New Historicism assigns equal value or weight to literary and non-literary texts from the same historical period, no longer placing a higher value on the “classic” works of the past.  These theorists object to and seek to deconstruct traditional attitudes toward society, deity, and the created universe that are foundational to these works.  It appears that they thereby seek to deconstruct the Judeo-Christian ethic by focusing attention on what they consider abuses of state power, patriarchal structures, colonization, etc.  Although new historicism holds to Derrida’s tenet that every facet of reality is contextual, it does not go so far as to say that it is impossible for men and women to ever attain some measure of knowable truth.  If I understand this correctly, new historicism retains some vestige of the belief that people can exercise a degree of agency when attempting to arrive at historical truth, a view which distinguishes it from cultural materialism.  Cultural materialism asserts that men and women, being cultural products, cannot transcend the material forces to which they are captive, and it opposes the view of “idealism” which represents works such as Shakespeare’s as the successful efforts of enlightened individuals to provide readers with themes and lessons of “timeless” significance.  By emphasizing the value of contemporary Marxist and feminist analysis, cultural materialism sees Shakespeare, for instance, as a cultural idol whose works support the cultural ideology of patriarchal authority, and therefore questions the validity of institutions that perpetuate the study of his works.  I find this devaluing of literature to a cultural practice distressing and am thankful that the debate between theorists and traditionalists continues.  Can it be, as Culler posed in a previous chapter on “Literature and Cultural Studies,” that we should seriously argue the value of studying contemporary soap operas rather than Shakespeare?