Cultural Studies in Practice

A. Two Characters in Hamlet: Marginalization with a Vengeance

In several instances earlier in this chapter we noted the cultural and new historical emphases on power relationships. Now, let us approach Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a view to seeing power in its cultural context.

To say that the mighty struggle between powerful antagonists is the stuff of this play is hardly original. But our emphasis in the present reading is that one can gain a further insight into the play.

Two marginalized characters in Hamlet: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Rosencrantz and GuildensternBoth are distinctly plot-driven: empty of personality, sycophantic in a sniveling way, eager to curry favor with power even if it means spying on their erstwhile friend.

Marginalized Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

The meanings of their names hardly match what seems to be the essence of their characters. Obviously too is the fact that the two would not fit the social level.

Hamlet, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are

depicted in the center window of the group

called Hamlet Greets The Players.

In the 20th century the dead, or never-living, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were resuscitated by Tom Stoppard in a fascinating re-seeing of their existence, or its lack.

Poster of the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1991)

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard has given the audience a play that examines existential questions in the context of a whole world that may have no meaning at all.

Whether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “are” at all may be the ultimate question of this modern play.

Suffice it to say that the essence of marginalization is here: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are archetypal human being caught up on a ship that leads to nowhere, except to death, a death for persons who are already dead.

B. “To His Coy Mistress”: Implied Versus Historical Fact

• Jules Brody posits the “implied reader”- as distinct from the fictive lady- who would “be able to summon up a certain number of earlier or contemporaneous examples of this kind of love poem and who could be counted on, in short, to supply the models which Marvell may variously have been evoking, imitating, distorting, subverting or transcending.”

B. “To His Coy Mistress”: Implied Versus Historical Fact

• The speaker knows all of these things well enough to parody at least to echo them, for in making his position to the coy lady, he hardly expects to be taken seriously in his detailing.

• He knows that he is echoing the conventions only in order to satirize them to make light of the real proposal at hand.

• Beyond what we know of the speaker-like-Marvell-is a highly educated person, one whose natural flow of associated images moves lightly over details and allusions that reflect who he is, and he expects his reader or hearer to respond in a kind of harmonic vibration.

B. “To His Coy Mistress”: Implied Versus Historical Fact

• We are justified in speculating that his coy lady is like the implied reader, equally well educated, and therefore knowledgeable of the conventions he uses in parody.

• Wealth and leisure and sexual activity are his currency, his coin for present bliss. Worms and marble vaults and ashes are not present, hence not yet real.

B. “To His Coy Mistress”: Implied Versus Historical Fact

• Consider disease – real and present disease – what has been called the “chronic morbidity” of the population.

• So disease was real in the middle of 17th century. There needed no ghost to come from the world of the dead to tell Marvell’s speaker about the real world. Perhaps the speaker-and his lady.

B. “To His Coy Mistress”: Implied Versus Historical Fact

The Black Death lasted from 1348-1350 AD The Black Death had a great effect on the population of Europe.

C. From Paradise Lost to Frank-N-Further: The Creature Lives!

• Mary Shelly’s Creature in Frankenstein is paradoxical. On the one hand, they transgress against “the establishment.” On the other hand, we are reassured when we see that society can capture and destroy monsters. •Shelly’s creation teaches us not to underestimate the power of youth culture.

Creature is a political and moral paradox, both an innocent and cold-blood murderer.

1. Revolutionary Births

• Hardly a day goes by without our seeing an image or illusion to Frankenstein, from CNN descriptions of Saddam Hussein as an American-created Frankenstein.

a. The creature as Proletarian

• Shelly also met many others such as Thomas Paine and William Blake.

• Mary Shelly’s Creature and moral paradox, both an innocent and cold-blooded murderer.

• Not only are the eternal questions about the ways of God and man in Paradise Lost relevant to the Creature’s predicament, but in Milton’s epic poem, as Timothy Morton puts it, as a “seminal work of republicanism and sublime that inspired many of the Romantics.”

b. A Race of “Devils”

Frankenstein may be analyzed in its portrayal of different “races.” antislavery discourse had a powerful effect on the depiction of Africans in Shelly’s day.

c. From Natural Philosophy to Cyborg

Has science gone too far? According to cultural critic Laura Kranzler, Victor’s creation of life and modern sperm banks and artificial wombs show a “masculine desire to claim female (re)productivity” (Kranzler 45).

Luigi Galvani's frog leg experiments.

2. The Frankenstein in Popular Culture: Fiction, Drama, Film, Television

In the Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Frankenstein, Timothy Morton uses the term Frankenphemes, drawn from phonemes and graphemes, as “elements of culture that are derived from Frankenstein.”

a. “The Greatest Horror Story Novel Ever Written”:

• Peter Haining, editor of the indispensable Frankenstein Omnibus, has called Frankenstein ” the single greatest horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in its genre.”

b. Frankenstein on Stage

Many stage and screen versions are quite melodramatic. Tending to eliminate minor characters and the entire frame structure in order to focus upon murder and mayhem.

Presumption, or, The Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake is the first theatrical presentation based on Frankenstein,

c. Film adaptation

• In the Frankenstein Omnibus, readers can study the screenplay for the 1931 James Whale film Frankenstein. The most famous of all adaptations.

c. Film adaptation

• The first film version of Frankenstein was produced by Thomas Edison in 1910, a one-reel tinted silent.

• Early German films that were heavily influenced by this Frankenstein were The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem(1920) and Metropolis(1927).

c. Film adaptation

• Young Frankenstein. U.S.A., directed by Mel Brooks. 1974 playfully invokes the Frankenstein/Freudian opposition between the conscious and unconscious.

d. Television Adaptation

• Frankenstein has surfaced in hundreds of televisions adaptations, including Night Gallery, The Addams Family, The Musters, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Scooby-Doo, Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Simpsons, Wishbone and so on

Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein (1999)

D. “The Lore of Fiends”: Hawthorne and His Market

1) Hawthorne was able to translate his fear of failure and his own unconscious demons into a classic story of good and evil, of hypocrisy in society and in the church.

Hawthorne

2) He found the publication market difficult. Because there were no international copyrights, publishers in American would pirate works by British and sell them cheaply, which made it hard for American writers to compete.

Hawthorne

F. Cultures in Conflict: Alice Walker’s Everyday Use

“Everyday Use” represents a variety of cultures and subcultures, in varying degrees of tension among them. Let us reflect on a couple of items in Dee’s words in new historical terms.

One item is names. Particularly since the 1960s this country has seen a phenomenon that clearly Alice Walker has woven into her story– the adoption of names from Africa by some African Americans to replace their given names.

Another item to be noted in Dee’s rejoinder to her mother is the oppressiveness of the socioeconomics of their world. “Oppression” is the operative concept that tied the name Dee to her past.

“Everyday Use” raises the question of how one finds one’s roots.

IV. Limitations of cultural studies

• The weakness of cultural studies lie in its very strengths, particularly its emphasis upon diversity of approach and subject matter.

• David Richter describes cultural studies as “about whatever is happening at the moment, rather than about a body of texts created in the past.”

• Defenders of tradition and advocates of cultural studies are waging what is sometimes called the “culture wars” of academia.

• Whatever the emphasis, cultural studies makes available one more approach – and several methodologies – to address these questions.

Related Sources and Works Cited

• Kranzler, Laura. “Frankenstein and the Technological Future.” Foundation 44 (Winter 1988-89): 42-49.

• Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. (With a new Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, written in May 2003.)

• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. London: Chatto, 1958.

---. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.