Summary of Criticism and Culture Material (Con Davis & Schleifer) The path of Criticism and Culture goes

from eighteenth-century attempts to define the nature of critique through the institution of literary criticism in the twentieth-century in the Anglo-American academy in response to a number of cultural texts and forces. The study of literature has come to address this reconception or reorientation in many different guises. All of them rise from the conflict between the new subculture of theoretical opposition and the old traditions now fighting against theory with appeals to humanism, tact, good sense, and the like. Criticism and Culture, according to the material, focuses on critics who attempt to define culture and situate literary criticism within cultural studies. These critiques constitute the critical viewpoint, the positioning of the subject, within a specific historical and ideological context. For these critics cultural studies is essentially and necessarily a participatory relation within the discourse of inquiry. There are four basic assumptions about modes of inquiry in the human sciences. These assumptions, and the grounds they form, make certain kinds of understanding possible by organizing the play of discourses in the human sciences, discourses that correspond to various focuses of cultural critique in psychology, linguistics, philosophy and history. These at the same time seem to resist, reduce and dismiss all other explanationsand contemporary versions of these grounds Marxist, structuralist, psycholanalytic and deconstructive. Critique and Learning

The potential of critique in literary studies has ethical implications for the understanding of culture and those implications are perhaps clearest in the institutional conduct of the study of literature. If critique calls into question the institutional structures that transmit knowledge then it also questions the concepts of teaching and education. The description of the teacher using rather than exchanging knowledge also suggests a reorientation in English studies into the study of literature as a form of cultural critique that examines the conditions and realization of discourse in its various groundings. Criticism becomes critique, though, only when it becomes self-consciously framed in this activity. Critique, therefore, is constitutive of literary and cultural study at the most basic level in the formation of the objects of study. Feminist Critiques If critique entails a rethinking of the object of knowledge, it also means a rethinking of the subject of knowledge in ways that question the grounds of dominant critical activities. In this reorientation, there is the urgency to understand literature subjectively, from the viewpoint of a culturally gendered subject, the project that has already led many to rethink their assumptions and practices. All readings are not the same, they are historically and socially situated through gender markingsas well as class issues. The ground of male/female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to an economic, political, ideological order. Feminist critiques, more explicitly than other forms of cultural critique, call for social, linguistic and ideological interrogations of their own premises. It is for this transformative potential, and the opportunity not merely to understand but to change culture that the feminist

critiques of cultural understanding has been highlighted. The cultural studies critic will not seek to perform a strictly disinterested inquiry but will always be enacting a participatory relation within the discourse of inquiry, in other words, the critic cannot be an innocent observer passively recording an other world. The Instituted Subject of Cultural Studies In the challenge of feminist critiques, the instance of cultural critique is seen as a pedagogical mode. The strategy for cultural studies is derived from the critical reformulation of the four groundings of criticism and fundamental to this the instituted subjectivity within cultural inquiry. Analysis of the subject, as a construction within a cultural frame then begins with the critics own subjective historical placement, the investigators own insertion into a historically and ideologically specific moment. The Transformed Object of Cultural Studies A cultural and political position wagered on an always to be enacted interpretation of a social text interwoven by social relations. The subjective and ideologically motivated interest of cultural studies derives from a commitment to a continual resituating within multiple contextual frames that include, and perhaps begin with, the local situation in institutions in which we can act as teachers and intellectuals and, in so doing, discover our mutual interests in a collectivity. Critics read the discourses and texts of contemporary culture to expose crucial oppositions and contradictions that govern the exercise of power, to expose the political rationality of the nation as a form of narrative. In creating the possibility of the realization and transformation of culture, the possibility of bringing us in touch with the lives of strangers, often ourselves, can be achieved.