A: Cultural History (Convenor: Prof Mark Darlow)

 

The purpose of this seminar is to sample a range of different approaches to the burgeoning field of cultural history. The interdisciplinary 'foundations' of cultural history will be sampled, including the work of Foucault, microhistory (Ginzburg) and ethnography (Geertz), and the so-called 'linguistic turn' which reconfigured the relation between literature and history in the 1980s. Sessions will then focus upon the 'social history of ideas' (Darnton), the question of the everyday, including the theoretical and cultural writings of Michel de Certeau and his concepts of 'strategies' and 'tactics', and finally a range of more contemporary concerns, from the rapidly-growing field of cultural memory studies, to material culture, and histories of the emotions. Seminars will focus on key readings from the field and will comprise informal student presentations.

NB All readings will be made available in pdf form.

 

1. Foundations

Essential reading

Clifford Geertz: 'Thick description: towards an interpretive theory of culture', in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), chapter 1.

Carlo Ginzburg: The Cheese and the worms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 1980 [orig. Italian 1976]), prefaces (p.xi-xxvi).

Carlo Ginzburg: 'Clues: roots of an evidential paradigm', in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), chapter 5.

Patrick Hutton, 'The history of mentalities: The new map of cultural history', History and Theory, 20.3 (October 1981), 237-59.

Lynn Hunt, The New Cultural History (Oakland: University of California Press, 1989), Introduction: 'History, Culture, and Text'.

Background/supplementary

Philip Stewart: 'This is not a book review: On historical uses of literature'; and Lynn Hunt: 'The objects of history: A Reply to Philip Stewart' (Journal of Modern History, 66, 1994, p. 521-38 and 539-46).

Robert Darnton, 'Workers revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin', in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in Cultural History (Penguin: 1984), chapter 2.

 

2. The Social History of Ideas

In contrast to the type of the intellectual history of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ (Skinner; Pocock), the distinguished American historian of the eighteenth century, Robert Darnton, called for a ‘social history of ideas’ that sought to locate ideas within their social context by asking different questions in relation to texts, such as the social status of authors and readers and the socio-economics of the book trade.  This seminar will explore Darnton’s approach to the history of ideas in tandem with that of his French colleague, Roger Chartier and the latter’s contribution to the history of ‘mentalités’ that had been developed earlier in the twentieth century by the so-called ‘Annales’ group of French historians.  We shall consider the points in which their ‘new cultural history’ both converges and also diverges from the objectives and methods associated more traditionally with literary studies and literary history.  

Essential reading

Robert Darnton, ‘The social history of ideas’ in The Kiss of Lamourette. Reflections in Cultural History, pp.218-252.

Robert Darnton, ‘Two paths through the social history of ideas’ in The Darnton Debate: books and revolution in the eighteenth century, ed. Haydn T. Mason, (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 1999), pp.251-204.

Robert Darnton, ‘Do books cause revolutions?’ in The Forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France (Norton, New York, 1996), pp.169-246.

Roger Chartier, ‘Intellectual history and the history of mentalités’ in Cultural History (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988), pp.20-51.

Roger Chartier, ‘Do books make revolutions?’ in The cultural origins of the French Revolution, trans Lydia G Cochrane (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1991), pp.67-91

 

3. The 'everyday'

If the new historicists all, in their own manner, broke down the distinction between 'author' and 'work' and interrogated the role of the historian's own period in his/her construction of the past, what has been labelled 'linguistic constructivism' has been fruitfully employed in order to move away from the assumption of an objective historical reality, and towards an emphasis on the means by which historians and social scientists construct their objects of study. Conversely, Certeau's concepts of agency and tactics and the idea of the 'everyday' will also be examined. What use can be made of 'constructivist' theories of language in the examination of culture, early-modern and modern alike? What is at stake in the examination of literary texts alongside other cultural artifacts, and why study the 'everyday'?

Essential reading

The Writing of history: chapter 2 ('The historiographical operation')

Culture in the plural: chapter 7 ('The social architecture of knowledge')

The Practice of Everyday Life: introduction, chapters 3 ('Making do: uses and tactics') and 12 ('Reading as poaching')

On signs: 'Walking in the city' [reproduced from The Certeau Reader]

For background

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and its other (Polity, 1995)

Ian Buchanan, Michel de Certeau, cultural theorist (Sage, 2000)

Buchanan (ed.), Michel de Certeau in the plural, special number of The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.2 (Spring 2001) [online via UL-ejournals]

François Dosse, Michel de Certeau, le marcheur blessé (La Découverte, 1995) [for those who read French]

Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing culture (Continuum, 2006)

Michael Sheringham, Everyday life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (O.U.P., 2009) [esp. chapter 6, concerning Certeau]

Konraad Geldof, 'The dialectic of modernity and beyond: Adorno, Foucault, Certeau and Greenblatt in comparison', in Jürgen Pieters (ed.), Critical self-fashioning (Peter Lang, 1999), p.196-219

 

4. Contemporary approaches

The final session will consider more contemporary approaches that fall under the very broad umbrella of 'cultural history', comprising memory studies, testimonials and oral history, histories of the emotions, and material culture.

 

Essential reading

Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton UP, 2015), Introduction and chapter 3 (‘The cultural work of the dead’).

James Wertsch (ed.), Voices of collective remembering (CUP, 2002), chapter 4: ‘State production of official historical narratives’.

Miranda Stanyon, ‘Sublime Rauschen: Enlightening sound from Locke to Klopstock’ Modern Philology, 2017.

Thomas Dixon, From passions to emotions: The creation of a secular psychological category (CUP, 2003), Introduction and chapters 7 and 8.

Colin Jones, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (OUP, 2014), Introduction and chapter 1.

 

Background reading

Sasha Handley and Rohan McWilliam, New Directions in Social and Cultural History (Bloomsbury, 2018)

John Neubauer, Cultural History after Foucault (Routledge, 2018)