The Canon and Cultural Studies: Culture and Anarchy in Gotham City
1997; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 49; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Narrative Theory and Analysis
ResumoFor well over decade, my colleagues and I have faced the challenge of integrating cultural studies into the traditional undergraduate English literature curriculum. We have met, as you might suspect, with varying degrees of success. My situation is not unusual. I am responsible for teaching course, using the Norton Anthology, that surveys nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. While dealing mostly with canonical material, I continue to encourage my students to explore the ideological and historical constructs that underlie various cultural formations, including the canon itself. Although I concentrate mostly on traditional written works, I have found that including media studies at the end of such course is an effective pedagogical instrument for instigating discussion, particularly on the subject of the literary canon. The advantages of this approach are many, not least that students begin to recognize and address the important contribution of popular when it is in dialogue with more traditional material. My chosen film is Batman (1989), which, because of its popularity and multiple associations, gives students perspicuous opportunity to investigate issues in cultural studies in relation to the canon. The Batman narrative seems the obvious choice, since its status as hypertext makes it wonderful teaching moment, particularly to undergraduates. Indeed, as Jim Collins has effectively maintained, popular narratives such as Batman display hyperconsciousness about both the history of popular and the shifting status of popular in the current context (164). And, as I will argue shortly, the film foregrounds contemporary controversial issues of versus low culture, whose historical roots can be traced to nineteenth-century ideologyspecifically Matthew Arnold. Once the film has been analyzed, we might find that our students emerge with different perspective on the canon and the function of in the formation of hierarchical texts. What I am suggesting on more theoretical level, finally, is the exploration of an active textual space between Matthew Arnold on the one hand and Walter Benjamin on the other. In the end, Batman reveals, as David Harvey has phrased it, that the reintroduction of the highbrow/lowbrow disjunction avoids the whole problem of the potential debasement of modern cultural forms by their assimilation to pop through pop art (58). I offer here perspective on the culture wars through close reading of Batman to demonstrate the film's potential richness of meaning and usefulness in the classroom. Arnold in America The criticism on Batman has been prolific.' Although I intend to focus exclusively on Hollywood's representation of the Caped Crusader, my analysis is in line with Tim Blackmore's reading of Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Blackmore links the superhero to earlier ideologies that focus on the disintegration of democracy.2 My contention is that Tim Burton's Batman exploits dichotomy that has its historical roots in nineteenth-century ideology as well. The account of cultural binaries in America is well analyzed in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. There, Lawrence W. Levine accounts for the long-standing sociological bifurcation in America, most clearly voiced by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1868). In this view, generally speaking, the inheritors of Arnold's tradition have been cultural elitists, such as T. S. Eliot, who, halfway into the present century, would posit that a frequent, if not universal feature of the maturing of individuals may be process of selection (not altogether conscious), of the development of some potentialities to the exclusion of others (127). Like Arnold, Eliot links high (in particular, the much-esteemed classics) directly to character formation. The deprivation of culture, then, necessarily leads to anarchy. …
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