Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture

Introduction: The Problem of Culture

Introduction: The Problem of Culture In their recent survey of the state of literary studies, William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin argue that the time has come—as their title proclaims—for “stopping cultural studies.”1 For Warner and Siskin, the reason is straightforward: “culture is the problem with cultural studies” (104, emphasis in original). Before cultural studies, they claim, literary studystruggledunderthelimitationsof “literaryhistory,author-centered study and various species of formalism (genre theory, close reading, rhetorical analysis)” (94). With the rise and triumph of cultural studies from the 1980s through the early twenty-first century, however, literary critics learned to “inscribe literature into the amorphous but expansive term ‘culture.’” Embedding works of literature within “discourses of knowledge ” and “the effects of power,” cultural studies made literature (and therefore literary studies) politically relevant (94). But while they admit this movement gave literary critics valuable new ways of looking at literature through the lenses of gender, race, and class, Warner and Siskin argue that “the strategic vagueness of the term and concept of ‘culture’” is the problem (95): it is a “Teflon category” in which we “totalize” all the activities of every people, period, and group, and this “totalizing indifference ” leaves us “floundering” (104). If, as they claim, culture is equally and indifferently everything, then it tells us nothing. In lamenting the problem of culture, Warner and Siskin engage in what has become a ritual jeremiad from within anthropology as well as within literary studies in the past twenty years, as culture has become ubiquitous in both literary studies and everyday language. On the one 2 / COMPOSING CULTURES hand, culture is everywhere, used to explain what people do or do not do, or what they can or cannot do. “Corporate culture” gets the credit for success or is the culprit for misbehavior.2 Culture is the prize in the “war” between red states and blue states and has been used to frame real war between the United States and Muslim groups in the Middle East as a “clash of civilizations.” “Culture wars” and debates over multiculturalism make clear the stakes in the competition over what counts as culture: culture marks who belongs in what group, and how. In the wake of the 9/11 attack and the war on terrorism, some lamented the supposedly postmodern emphasis on multiculturalism in the 1990s, and in turn renewed calls to define a shared American culture—even while those proclaiming “we are all Americans” were hard pressed to define what exactly that shared American culture might be.3 And if culture is used to imagine what counts as American identity, it is also central to traditional definitions of “the human” itself—definitions that have been challenged by recent claims by biologists that nonhuman primates and dolphins have culture.4 What it means to “have (a) culture” is likewise hard to define. Culture includes everything a designated group does; everyone is part of “a culture.” But that omnipresence is coupled with fragility, as groups are said to “lose their culture” in the face of assimilation or the forces of globalization. At the same time, culture remains closely associated with particular kinds of artistic and intellectual activities (the New York Times, for example, features a series called the “Cultured Traveler”). Thus everyone possesses (or is possessed by) a culture; at the same time, some groups or individuals seem to possess (or be possessed by) culture more than others. Simultaneously, despite (or perhaps because of) its ubiquity, attempts to define culture founder on several overlapping, contesting, and contradictory traditions of thinking about what counts as culture. As Warner and Siskin note, cultural studies scholars themselves have difficulty in trying to—and indeed seem to see no urgency to—identify their object of analysis: as one landmark anthology in the field put it, “Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counterdisciplinary field” that simultaneously works between “both a broad, anthropological and a more narrowly humanist conception of culture.”5 The construction is telling, suggesting that there are two distinct conceptions of culture—the “humanist” and the “anthropological”—and that these two conceptions might be separated (if cultural studies theorists wanted to). Opening themselves to Warner and Siskin’s charge of totalization, INTRODUCTION / 3 they go on to assert their “commit[ment] to the study of the entire range of a society’s arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices.”6 Interestingly, while literary critics like Siskin and Warner...