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March 22, 2008
In Teaching Culture Simon During argues that the heyday of English literature as an academic discipline is over. As worldwide enrolments show interest in English is losing ground to a wider spread of contemporary culture forms from advertising and the internet to cartoons and art movies -- what we call cultural studies. He says:
The early twentieth-century avant-garde rejection of traditional humanist cultural values is now being absorbed by the academy, but in a very different form. The academic appropriation of the avant-garde transfiguration of values is happening as what I am calling the departure of English - as the relative decline of literary studies alongside the emergence of cultural studies. I am certainly not claiming a causal relation between modernism circa 1900 and academic cultural studies today. Rather I want to argue that cultural studies has become popular in large part because students' preferences have a growing influence on curriculum. It is student choice which leads to more and more courses on rock culture, television genres like soap opera or talk shows, the theory of popular culture, aboriginality, relations between postcolonialism and postmodernism.
During says that at the level of policy, contemporary educational bureaucracies have moved from idealist and collegial models to market, corporate and student-based ones so that student enrolments are an important source of funding, and student evaluations are an important measure of quality-assessment.
He adds that globalisation also has multiple effects on the humanities: it is a stimulus for the departure of English because it detaches postcolonial nations like ours from the anglocentric, monocultural heritage which has been embodied in academic English. It distances Australia from Europe
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Them's fightin words. It's true that cultural studies is very popular, but it's a mistake to split lit and cs completely. I think it's a big boo boo for CS to forget its roots, which it does when you remove it from its context in humanities tradition.