Culture in Action: Another Journal Entry

While Old Historicism considers history a necessary background to literature, it also considers history to be objective and consistent. This belief held through the 1940s and into the 1960s, until Structuralists (1950s-1960s) and Deconstructionists (mid-1960s) began to study our cultural habits and use this material to analyze a text. Hew Historicists (aka Cultural Poetics) took this one step further and, during the 1970s and 1980s, decided that history is both subjective and interrelated. History affects--and effects--art, society, and culture. This group of Poststructuralists questioned the act of reading, the reader, and the definition of a text.

During the February visit of the Visiting Writers Series, I watched Laura McCullough read a "work in progress" off her BlackBerry and was struck by the image. She may have used her smart phone out of necessity; after all, if it's not in print then she can't read it from the anthology to which it belongs, and if she were to print it out on a piece of computer paper (or <gasp> scribbled it on a piece of loose-leaf!) then she risked looking unprofessional. Or maybe she hadn't planned on reading it at all, but the moment felt right and, that being her only copy...

Because culture influences everything, New Historicists believe that culture is an interconnected social creation of art, politics, literature, and anything else that creates a society. Text, therefore, is a "culture in action;" everything is textual, Bressler explains, from Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (an essay I fell in love with in high school, btw! and deserves more study), to a presidential inauguration. This helps Laura's digital reading make sense. She read a graphically disturbing poem, with dark images and serious undertones (I wish I could remember the poem, but all I kept was the image.), yet managed to remove herself from the poem. Modern society's digital dependency desensitizes us; video games like Call of  Duty and Grand Theft Auto have belittled crime, death, and war enough that we can accept it.

The text becomes a social document that reflects and responds to a particular moment. Because text is culture in action, the author, society, customs, and almost anything else you can think of, are sorted and shaped by both the author and the reader. Language, culture, and society shape and interact with each other. The Cultural Poetic might study everything that effects society, but will focus on a certain moment, considering Laura's poem to e one text, her poem and her method of delivery to be another text, and her poem and a future reading as yet another text. And each would be studied in relation to that particular moment in time.

---

Laura's "BlackBerry Reading" might be interpreted as a sign of how our reading process has changed. Because of digital apps, we now have a greater variety of reading material, and easier access to them. My smart phone holds my Kindle, Nook, and Google Books apps, and each app has a different book open. I no longer need to wait until I get home to finish a chapter, or carve out an hour of time in my favorite reading chair. (Although I still do that! That's the best way to read!) I can stand in line at the grocery store, open up my phone, and read a page or, if I'm bored with that text, then I can download a new one. I now take for granted what I once thought unthinkable. My digital library will soon rival my traditional one.

But that's another thought for another time.