From Dollimore
and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare
Cultural
materialism:
vii “a combination of historical context,
theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis offers the
strongest challenge [in the field of literary criticism] and has already
contributed substantial work.
- Historical context undermines the transcendent
significance traditionally accorded to the literary text and allows us to
recover its histories;
- theoretical method detaches the text from immanent
criticism which seeks only to reproduce it in its own terms;
- socialist and
feminist commitment confronts the conservative categories in which most
criticism has hitherto been conducted;
- textual analysis locates the critique of
traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored.
We call this ‘cultural
materialism’.
‘Culture’ is to be taken in the wider sociological
sense, not the narrower evaluative one, which is just “one set of signifying
practices among others”.
‘Materialism’ “insists that culture does
not (canot transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture
is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it
be independent of it. Cultural materialism therefore situates the implication
of literary texts in history.
A play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts
of its production—to the economic and political system of Elizabethan and
Jacobean England and to the particular institutions of cultural production (the
court, patronage, theatre, education, the church).
Moreover, the relevant
history is not just that of four hundred years ago, for culture is made
continuously and Shakespeare’s text is reconstructed, reappraised, reassigned
all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts.
What the plays
signify, how they signify, depends on the cultural field in which they are
situated. That is why this book discusses also the institutions through which
Shakespeare is reproduced and through which interventions may be made in the
present.”
Finally,
cultural materialism is not politically neutral—any cultural practice has a political
significance, and cultural materialism is commited to the transformation of the social order.
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds.
Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural
Materialism. 2nd ed. (Cornell Paperbacks). Ithaca (NY): Cornell UP, 1994.
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