‘Englishness’ and ‘British’ values: cultural rhetoric and representations of identity from the 1950s to the present day.

By investigating the web of rhetorical and cultural representations which have characterized the post-WWII period up to the present day, this course explores concepts of nationand traditionacross multiple public spheres and the media, focusing on the conflicting aspects of Englishness and Britishness. Drawing on literary criticism, cultural studies and discourse analysis, it ranges from fiction to political communication to disclose the strategies and results of this process of identity construction. After a methodological introduction and a brief overview of the social and cultural legacy of WWII, the module will investigate the consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s policy on the nation’s sense of itself in the 1980s, followed by the conceptual freshness of "New Labour" and the discursive branding of Great Britain that started in the mid-1990s.

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Rhetoric: the art of eloquence, an art that aims to improve the capability of writers or speakers that attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations; language that is intended to influence people and that may not be honest or reasonable.

Cultural representation(of race, ethnicity, gender): Culture can be understood as a set of common beliefs that hold people together.It is through representation that people organize the world and reality, whose meaning is ascribed and constructed (→ identity construction). The focus is on Subjectivity, the approach is `perspectivist' and `relativist'.

Discourse: set of constructed and pre-ordered beliefs around a topic or subject (i.e. "Women are weak and emotional"; "Third-world people are needy"). It is related to power as it operates by rules of exclusion (power-knowledge → Antonio Gramsci's "cultural hegemony").Discourse analysis is the questioning of assumptions (taken-for-granted concepts) and of power.

CULTURAL STUDIES − object and methodology

- a method (a critical practice) that developed in the English-speaking world from the 1950s (officially born when Richard Hoggart founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964, it became prominent in the 1980s as part of postmodernist criticism)

- not a unitary theory but a field where many disciplines converge (not interdisciplinary but multidisciplinary − a multidisciplinary approach involves drawing appropriately from multiple disciplines to redefine problems outside normal boundaries)

- history and political discourse, sociology and anthropology, communication and media studies, art criticism and advertisement, philosophy and literary criticism, psychoanalysis and linguistics (none of them has got a prominent role but they are all part of a 'reading' process →meaning in progress)

- the main focus is on culture at large, not traditionally conceived as 'high' culture, but as the product of all social practices:

  • it downplays the barriers between 'high' and 'low' culture, 'mass' culture also becomes object of study and investigation ('low' or 'popular' literary genres − thriller, fantasy, sci-fi, Western, folklore, romance − are worth studying, but also films, videos, radio broadcasts, magazines and newspapers);
  • literary and non-literary texts are read together, on the same level and with the same dignity

- material analyzed in this module:

  • essays (G. Orwell, S. Rushdie, H. Kureishi)
  • political speeches (W. Churchill, E.Powell, M. Thatcher, T. Blair, D. Cameron)
  • a socio-cultural pamphlet (M. Leonard)
  • journal articles (The Daily Mail, The Guardian)
  • novels (G. Swift, K. Ishiguro, J. Barnes)
  • a screenplay (H. Kureishi)
  • unofficial national anthems performed at festivals ("The Last Night of the Proms")
  • movie clips
  • advertisement
  • coins
  • maps

- difference between work and text (from S. Greenblatt, Redrawing the Boundaries):

“ What we once conceived as a ‘work’ is now construed as ‘text’, a critical shift of focus from forms of the signified to processes of signification”.

- text as 'texture': it is imagined as a piece of fabric where many threads are interwoven. These threads are the conditions in which a cultural product comes into being (again: 'text' is not just the literary work, but the cultural product; 'culture' is not just 'high', but it is intended as social practice; 'reading' is not the simple act of deciphering a written work but it means 'interpreting' at large).

- intertextuality: reading practice (reading = interpretation) that confers meaning to a text by means of a comparison with other texts, not necessarily in a chronological or logical order (the focus is on the reader/interpreter, not on the author/maker of a text, so that the meanings attached can be as many as the reader's external references are→ reader-response criticism)

- all these aspects of culture (that is, products of all social practices → texts) are seen as part of a process that brings those cultural products into being and gives them a meaning: the signifying process (meaning construction→put meaning into things = make things mean)

- discourse:the aim is to unveil the discourse underlying a cultural product, a text, that is, the implicit message that this product conveys and the way this message is conveyed, the representation (the version of reality) that is given, the manipulative force of this message.

- discourse analysis deals on the one side with the form of a text (i.e. the rhetoric; the internal construction and the external references of a written piece of work), on the other side it deals with the web of meanings and messages that are implicitly conveyed (i.e. the ideology).

- what is at the basis of discourse analysis is that no cultural product is neutral, unbiased, unconditioned and free from social constraints; all cultural products are the expression of some form of ideology, that is, they want to convey a particular point-of-view (even when they do not seem to→ the aim of the rhetorician is to make a highly artificial and biased piece of work sound natural).

- the aim of discourse analysis is to disclose and deconstruct the discourse −the message, the ideology, the narrative (constructed assumption) − of all cultural products that seem neutral but are actually highly artificial (i.e. the idea conveyed by traditional English novels that the subject to be taken as a model is male, white, middle-class, bourgeois, ...; or the idea conveyed by Renaissance works that the world we inhabit is the best possible world)

- the focus is on the context of production (historical and economic conditions), transmission (by what means?) and consumption (who is it addressed to?).

- discourse is closely linked to different theories of power and State (concept of ‘cultural hegemony’ first conceived by A. Gramsci → when a minority of people manage to impose their version of reality on a majority through the manipulative force of discourse).

- grand narratives, like History (with a capital H, that is, the mainstream, canonical and accepted version of events) or Identity (unitary, unproblematic and undisputable) are questioned.

Seminal books for Cultural Studies (and for this course):

- E. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983.

- B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983.

- H. K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 1990.

- S. Greenblatt, Redrawing the Boundaries, 1992.

S. GREENBLATT − REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES

"The boundaries to be reckoned with in literary studies range from national, linguistic, historical, generational, and geographical to racial, ethnic, social, sexual, political, ethical, and religious. Moreover, literary studies have many demarcation lines that are less visible but no less determinative, boundaries that differentiate reading from writing, print cultures from oral, canonical traditions from heretical, elite cultures from vernacular, high art from popular. These boundaries can be crossed, confused, consolidated, and collapsed; they can also be revised, reconceived, redesigned, or replaced. The one thing they cannot be in literary studies is entirely abolished".

Modern criticism is based on the elision of traditional categories and hierarchies:

  • Western canon vs. lack of canonicity
  • tradition vs. intertextuality
  • work vs. text
  • monologic vs. dialogic
  • 'author'-ity vs. reader response
  • high culture vs. low culture
  • theoretical dogma vs. reading practice
  • English literature vs. literature in the English language

TEXT ANALYSIS:

  • IDEATIONAL level: the idea − message, ideology, narrative − that the 'author' wants to convey (in Churchill, images of strength, firmness, determination,...)
  • INTERACTIONAL level: the address to the reader/interpreter:

a) the kind of relationship that the author wants to establish with the audience (i.e. "Dear friends" communicates proximity and peer-to-peer equality);

b) the kind of reaction that the author wants to elicit from the addressee (Churchill's aim was to raise the British people's morale, foster their sense of national pride, gain public consent).

  • TEXTUAL level: the level of formal construction (rhetorical devices of internal cohesion):

a) lexical cohesion: repetition of actual words or grammatically-related items; synonymy; antonymy (opposition); comprehensive semantic field;

b) grammatical cohesion: reference (i.e. use of pronouns); ellipsis; conjunction.

To sum up:

CS is a recent field of study

Multidisciplinary

Theory vs. practice = unity vs. plurality ( dogma vs. relativism)

Based on the study of texts  all the products of culture  intended as social practice

‘Signifying’ process  meaning construction

‘Reading’ process  interpretation of reality

Aim: disclose the artificiality of culture as the expression of ideology