Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies

This page intentionally left blank

Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies Edited by Sue Owen University of Sheffield, UK

Introduction, selection and editorial matter Sue Owen 2008 Individual chapters contributors 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-54545-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-36095-6 ISBN 978-0-230-58331-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230583313 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richard Hoggart and cultural studies / [edited by] Sue Owen. p. cm. Includes index. 1. Hoggart, Richard, 1918 Influence. 2. Culture Philosophy. 3. Great Britain Intellectual life 20th century. 4. Criticism Great Britain History 20th century. I. Owen, Susan J. PR55.H6R52 2009 306.092 dc22 2008025818 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

To John

This page intentionally left blank

Contents Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Sue Owen 1 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy and The Cultural Turn 20 Stuart Hall 2 Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth-Century Britain 33 Stefan Collini 3 Richard Hoggart, Cultural Studies and the Demands of the Present 57 Lawrence Grossberg 4 Richard Hoggart and the Way We Live Now 75 Jim McGuigan 5 Richard Hoggart and the Epistemological Impact of Cultural Studies 88 Richard E. Lee 6 From the Juke Box Boys to Revolting Students: Richard Hoggart and the Study of British Youth Culture 105 David Fowler 7 Them and Us 123 Robert J.C. Young 8 Repurposing Literacy: The Uses of Richard Hoggart for Creative Education 137 John Hartley 9 Critical Literacy, Cultural Literacy, and the English School Curriculum in Australia 158 Graeme Turner vii

viii Contents 10 The Importance of Being Ordinary 171 Melissa Gregg 11 The Antipodean Uses of Literacy 187 Mark Gibson 12 Relativism and Reaction: Richard Hoggart and Conservatism 198 Charlie Ellis 13 The Uses and Values of Literacy: Richard Hoggart, Aesthetic Standards, and the Commodification of Working-Class Culture 213 Bill Hughes 14 Hoggart and Women 227 Sue Owen Index 243

Notes on Contributors Stefan Collini is Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University and is Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. His publications include Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850 1930 (OUP, 1991); Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (OUP, 1994); English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (OUP, 1999); and Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006). In progress: Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2008). Charlie Ellis recently completed a PhD on conservatism and the spirit of the market in post-sixties Britain at the Department of Politics, University of Sheffield. He is currently engaged in research at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. David Fowler teaches Modern British History and Economic History at The University of Cambridge and is Senior Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is preparing a full-scale biography of Rolf Gardiner, a Cambridge graduate of the 1920s, a pioneer of Anglo-German youth and student movements and a supposed British Fascist of the 1930s. He is the author of Youth Culture in the Twentieth Century (Macmillan, forthcoming) and The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (Frank Cass, London, 1995), along with several articles on Modern British youth culture and British social history. Mark Gibson is Chair of the Graduate Communications and Media Studies Program in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. He is the editor of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies and the author of Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Melissa Gregg is ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. She is the author of Cultural Studies Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006) as well as a number of articles on cultural studies, new media, feminism, and queer theory. Lawrence Grossberg is Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He ix

x Notes on Contributors is the co-editor of the journal Cultural Studies. His recent books include Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America s Future (Paradigm, 2005); New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (with Tony Bennett and Meaghan Morris (Blackwell, 2005)); and MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture (with Ellen Wartella, D. Charles Whitney, and MacGregor Wise (Sage, 2005)). He has recently published essays on the state and futures of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart, James Carey, Stuart Hall, theory at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), and the possibility of other modernities. In progress: Cultural Studies and the Challenge of the Contemporary. Stuart Hall is Professor Emeritus at the Open University. He was Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and Professor of Sociology at the Open University, from where he retired in 1997. He currently chairs the boards of two cultural diversity visual arts organisations. He is the (co-)author of many works including The Popular Arts (1964); Policing the Crisis (1978); New Ethnicities (1988); The Hard Road to Renewal (1988); Resistance Through Rituals (1989); Modernity and Its Future (1992); What is Black in Popular Culture? (1992); Cultural Identity and Diaspora (1994); Questions of Cultural Identity (1996); Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996); Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997); and Visual Culture (1999). He was the founding editor of New Left Review. John Hartley is Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and Research Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Recent books include Television Truths (Blackwell, 2008); Creative Industries (Blackwell, 2005); A Short History of Cultural Studies (Sage, 2003); The Indigenous Public Sphere (W.A. McKee, Oxford, 2000); Uses of Television (Routledge, 1999); and Popular Reality (Arnold, 1996). He is the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Sage). Bill Hughes is completing his PhD on communicative rationality and the Enlightenment dialogue in relation to the development of the novel at the Department of English Literature in the University of Sheffield, UK. He is currently teaching in the Department. His research interests are in eighteenth-century literature, cultural and literary theory, particularly the Bakhtin circle and the Frankfurt school, and aesthetics. He has also published and is preparing articles on the dialogic aspect of eighteenthcentury theories of language, the eroticism of knowledge in Fontenelle, and the proto-feminism of Bernard Mandeville.

Notes on Contributors xi Richard E. Lee is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University. His research is focused on long-term, large-scale social change from the world-systems perspective, concentrating especially on the intellectual and disciplinary structures of knowledge, in writings that range across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Recent publications include Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2003), and the collections World-Systems Analysis: Contemporary Research and Directions (edited with Gerhard Preyer, Protosociology 20, 2004) and Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities in the Modern World-System (edited with Immanuel Wallerstein, Paradigm, 2004). Jim McGuigan is Professor of Cultural Analysis in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. His books include Writers and the Arts Council (Arts Council, 1981); Cultural Populism (Routledge, 1992); Culture and the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1996); Modernity and Postmodern Culture (Open University Press, 1999, 2nd edn. 2006); and Rethinking Cultural Policy (Open University Press, 2004). He is the co-editor of Technocities (Sage, 1999) with John Downie. In progress: Cool Capitalism for Pluto and Cultural Analysis for Sage. Sue Owen is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Analysis at the University of Sheffield. Her books include Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford, 1996) and Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester, 2002); and, as editor, A Babel of Bottles: Drink, Drinkers and Drinking Places in Literature (Sheffield, 2000) and The Blackwell Companion to Restoration Drama (Oxford, 2001). As well as numerous articles on a range of subjects (Restoration Drama, Aphra Behn, Andrew Marvell, drink, chaos theory, and Marxism), she has published The Abuse of Literacy and The Feeling Heart: The Trials of Richard Hoggart, Cambridge Quarterly (2005); and Richard Hoggart as Literary Critic, International Journal of Cultural Studies (2007). She organized The Uses of Richard Hoggart, an international, cross-disciplinary conference on Richard Hoggart at Sheffield in April 2006 and co-edited with John Hartley the special Hoggart issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (2007). In progress: a book-length critical study of Richard Hoggart and, as editor, Re-Reading Richard Hoggart for Cambridge Scholars Press. Graeme Turner is ARC Federation Fellow and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. One of the pioneers of cultural studies in Australia, his most

xii Notes on Contributors recent publications include Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2004), and Ending the Affair: The Decline of Television News and Current Affairs in Australia (University of New South Wales Press, 2005). His current research project is a large international study of post-broadcast television. Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University. He was formerly Professor of English and Critical Theory at Oxford University. His books include White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge, 1990, new edition 2004), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), and The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2007). His edited books include Untying the Text (Routledge, 1981), and Poststructuralism and the Question of History (with Derek Attridge and Geoffrey Bennington (Cambridge, 1987)). He is also General Editor of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Routledge), and was a founding editor of the Oxford Literary Review. His work has been translated into 16 languages.