The Practice of Cultural Analysis - Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation

This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic scholarship, one that can be situated somewhere between cultural studies and cultural history while being more specific than either. Cultural analysis as a critical practice is based on a keen awareness of the critic's situatedness in the present--the social and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at objects that are already of the past, objects that we take to define our present culture. Thus it can be summarized by the phrase "cultural memory in the present." Far from being indifferent to history, cultural analysis is devoted to understanding the past as part of the present, as what we have around us.
The essays gathered here represent the current state of an emerging field of inquiry. At the same time, they suggest to the larger academic world what cultural analysis can and should do, or be, as an interdisciplinary practice. The challenge for this volume is to counter the common assumption that interdisciplinarity makes the object of inquiry vague and the methodology muddled. In meeting that challenge, it offers close textual and visual readings of subjects ranging from Vermeer to abstract expressionism, from the Book of Ruth to Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, from the history of cinema to popular culture in Zaire.
The essays in Part I, "Don't Look Now: Visual Memory in the Present," explore in detailed case studies centered on the theme of visuality or looking, the tricky consequences of the uncertainties regarding history that the presentness of the past entails. Part II, "Close-ups and Mirrors: The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference," demonstrates and advocates "listening" to the object without the New Critical naïveté that claims the text speaks for itself. Instead, the essays create the kind of dialogical situation that is a major characteristic of cultural analysis; the text does not speak for itself, but it does speak back. The essays in Part III, "Method Matters: Reflections on the Identity of Cultural Analysis," do not propose any "directions for use" or authoritative statements on how to do cultural analysis. Arranged in pairs of opposites, the essays represent the kind of fruitful tension that stimulates debate. Though no definite answers are proposed, and conflicting views are left in conflict, the essays stimulate a (self-)reflection on cultural analysis, its practices, and its understandings.

List of contents

Introduction Mieke Bal; Prelude: dia-logic - a dialogue in images between Edwin Janssen and Janneke Lam Janneke Lam; Part I. Don't Look Now: Visual Memory in the Present: 1. The finishing touch Evelyn Fox Keller; 2. Vermeer's women: shifting paradigms in mid career Nanette Salomon; 3. 'Le cinema d'apres Lumiere: rereading the 'origins' of the filmic image Thomas Elsaesser; 4. Killing men and dying women: gesture and sexual difference Griselda Pollock; 5. Imagining the 'Shtetl': visual theories of nationhood Carol Zemel; 6. The veils of time: on the historical dimensions in cultural analysis Stephen Bann; Part II. Close-ups and Mirrors: The Return of Close Reading, with a Difference: 7. Venice and the violence of location Helga Geyer-Ryan; 8. Affective reading: loss of self in Djuna Barnes's 'nightwood' Ernst van Alphen; 9. History and/as cultural analysis: Gibbon and Ovid Frank R. Ankersmit; 10. 'Is this Naomi?': misreading, gender blurring and the biblical story of Ruth J. Cheryl Exum; 11. Three local cases of cross-Atlantic reading: a discussion on space and identity Isabel Hoving; 12. Variety and standard Siegfried Zielinski; Part III. Method Matters: Reflections on the Identity of Cultural Analysis: 13. Culture and critique Johannes Fabian; 14. Cultural variety and metaphysical unity Louis Depre; 14. Desire, distance and insight Theo de Boer; 15. Cultural analysis and the ghost of 'Geistesgeschichte' John Neubauer; 16. The techno-university and the future of knowledge: thoughts after Lyotard Jon Cook; Double afterwords: Why interdisciplinarity isn't enough William P. Germano; What is cultural studies? Jonathan Culler; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

About the author

Mieke Bal is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and Interpretation. The most recent of her many books is The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford, 1997).

Summary

This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic scholarship, one that can be situated somewhere between cultural studies and cultural history while being aiming to be more specific than either.

Product details

• Authors: Bryan Gonzales
• Assisted by: Mieke Bal (Editor), Bal Mieke (Editor)
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.05.1999
• EAN: 9780804730679
• ISBN: 978-0-8047-3067-9
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 24 mm
• Weight: 572 g
• Series: Cultural Memory in the Present; Cultural Memory in the Present
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Social sciences, law, business > Ethnology > Ethnology