ENGL2101 Culture and Society

Instructor: Dr Q.S. Tong

1st semester 
6 credits
Form of assessment: 100% coursework
3 contact hours/week
Prerequisite: Grade C or above in ENGL1009

What is literature? What is culture? Why should literature be considered in a broader social context and understood as part of human culture? With close reference to the cultural critic Raymond Williams (1921 -1988) and his work on literature, this course discusses the emergence of cultural studies and the need of an interdisciplinary approach to literature in the changing landscape of literary studies. Starting from Williams’ proposition that “concentrated in the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes,” the courses introduces students to a cultural historiography of literature. The course is also concerned with the institutional history of English literary studies as a discipline. We will discuss the historical transformation of literary studies from a text-based practice into a broad critical engagement with human experience and examine the critical energies within literary studies that have brought about such transformation. Students in this course will read a selection of seminal writings by Williams with reference to literary examples he cites from prose fiction, poetry, and drama.

In this course we will consider the significance of the expansion of literary studies into a critical practice that situates literary work in their historical and social contexts. Topics to be discussed in the course include: culture and the humanities, the structure of feeling, cultural materialism, canon formation, politics of literary studies, and critical commitment.

This course will establish a close relationship among literature, criticism, culture and society in specific contexts. The main purposes of the course are to introduce students to the importance of Raymond Williams' work and to provide them with a theoretical language in which to engage with literary, cultural, and social texts.

We will meet once a week for two hours. Weekly sessions will be a combination of lectures and group discussions. Students will have about half an hour in each session to work, in groups, on an assigned task, and will present, through email, a report on their discussion to the whole class. There will be an email-list for the course that enables students to share thoughts on issues arising from or related to the course material and to raise questions for discussion among themselves.

One essay 35%
One in-class exercise 35%
In-class work and participation 30%

A course reader will be provided including extracts from the following works by Raymond Williams:

Culture and Society (1958)
The Country and the City (1973)
Marxism and Literature (1977)
Writing in Society (1983)

Two novels will be frequently referred to in the course:

Further readings:

Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 1961.
Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 1970.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1970.
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, 1980.
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 2003.

Edward Said, “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Culture and Imperialism, 1993.
Edward Said, Representation of the Intellectual, 1994
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 1973.
Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, 1974.
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1973.

Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, 1976.
Terry Eagleton, Function of Criticism, 1984.
Terry Eagleton, ed. Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, 1989.
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1996.
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: two paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society 2, no.1 (January 1980).
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in L. Crossberg et al., eds., Cultural Studies, 1990.
Arnold Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel, 1953.

John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: An Exploration in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan, 1977.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, 1993.
Peter Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism, 1982.
F. Lentricchia & T. McLaughlin, eds., Critical Terms for Literary Study, 1995.
Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains: A Study in Education, 1937.
M. Seidl, R. Horak, and L. Grossberg, eds. About Raymond Williams, 2010.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Muse Unchained: An Intimate Account of the Revolution in English Studies at Cambridge, 1958.
Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, 1996.