Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture: critical investigations

The first part of this thesis is concerned with the exegesis of Bourdieu's theory and the second part with critical investigations of his cultural analysis. In the interpretative analysis, I shall show that it is only through an understanding of his work as a whole that it is possible to grasp his now famous work on cultural reception. In our societies, the certified knowledge of professors and the consecrated representations of Tate Gallery artists serve to underpin the world through convincing the dominated of the intellectual poverty of their challenges. Moreover, I shall show that there is a stimulating and rich tension in Bourdieu's sociology, particularly in his explorations of how economic interests are culturally legitimated. Bourdieu is a classic historical materialist, yet one who denies some of the abstractions of sate orthodoxies. This means that - in the interests of truth - his theory forces the squabbling protagonists of different traditions to live together.Bourdieu has an impressive reassessment of the logic of a minortty elite culture in which art is hijacked to fit purposes often remote from the internal meanings of the texts themselves. In the second part of the thesis, it is argued that Bourdieu's sociology of culture has not entirely extricated itself from these same ideological tentacles. Firstly, in the case of Impressionism he overemphasises its character as a rupture in techniques and has not been sufficiently attuned to its dependence on popular subjects and popular sources. Secondly in the case of middlebrow and popular literature, it is suggested that he has failed to describe adequately the nature of the popular cultural field and has also neglected the character of the cultural marginalisation of women. Finally, a study of literary consumption in Scotland challenges Bourdieu's conclusions at some points. By considering these specific substantive areas, I hope to stimulate a Bourdieusian approach

The artist as a multifarious agent: an artist's theory of the origin of meaning

This thesis is presented as a written text and an exhibition [Note that this Abstract pertains to both parts. Material relating to the latter can be found In the volume that accompanies this.] Both parts result from interdisciplinary research in writing and visual art. Its problematic is the origin of meaning as addressed by recent textual theory, and how that represents an artist's experience of this Here, 'recent theory' designates 'postmodernism', which includes 'poststructuralism' and refers, too, to 'modernism'. This is reviewed and compared to an artist's experience, using my empirical encounter with art, as an artist, as a possible example. As the comparison occurs in writing and visual art, the latter is, at once, the research data, and a site of its investigation. And writing is a site for exploring art practice (via a case study), and the source for further art. Finding that an artist experiences the origin of meaning as far more multifarious than it appears in recent theory, the comparison additionally proposes a role for the expressive self in art's meaning, in contradistinction to much of postmodernist theory. The typicality of an artist is discussed via a deconstructive notion of exemplarity. And Derrida's deconstruction, which explores diverse features of the textual process, informs the theoretical method throughout. However, it is not just an artist's experience that proposes a critique of postmodernism's version of the origin of meaning. This is proposed, too, via Richard Rorty's pragmatism, when that opposes 'realism' (which includes empiricism) and idealism (which includes deconstruction). This thesis concludes that it is useful (in Rorty's sense) for the artist to believe in a multifarious agency including the expressive self - experience notwithstanding In moving from postmodernism's notion of the origin of meaning to the artist's, and beyond, to pragmatism's, this thesis attempts to recognise its reflexive dimension. So its voice (as the ambiguous index of its origins) diversifies postmodernism's voice, tending towards a cacophony, without abandoning a conclusion

Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov's neo-primitivist depictions of social outcasts in their thematic series of 1907-14

This study addresses the contemporary political and social issues raised by the subject matter of Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova (1881-1962) and Mikhail Fedorovich Larionov's (1881-1964) Neo-primitivist series of 1907-14. The ideological implications of the themes are explored, and it is argued that their development of anti-heroes challenged the mores celebrated by the status quo within Tsarist Russia. Chapter I investigates the prevailing ideological climate and provides a cultural and political contextual framework for the development of Neo-primitivism and the choice of subject matter. The subsequent chapters focus upon specific thematic cycles. Chapter II argues that Larionov and Goncharova's paintings on low-life and hooligan subject matter are anti-social works that undermine the affectations of the civilized behaviour advanced by polite, urban society. Chapter III examines Larionov's prostitute paintings and argues that the artist's unorthodox treatment of the nude challenged the viewer's conception of the classical nude, prostitution and sexuality, as well as the role of women within the Russian patriarchy. Chapter IV argues that the cycle of paintings Goncharova devoted to labouring peasants highlights the traditional way of rural life as a call for the regeneration of contemporary society. Chapter V explores Larionov's soldier series and argues that the artist debased traditionally revered sources to produce coarse paintings that mock the soldier as a symbol of patriotism, thereby satirizing the Tsarist regime. Chapter VI argues that Goncharova's body of work on Jewish themes incorporate both anti-establishment and anti-assimilation statements. This choice of themes countered established values, and this was enhanced by their Neo-primitivist style. The artists confronted the viewer with images grounded upon various contradictions that call the seemingly disparate subject matter, the means of representation and the symbolism into question. The anti-establishment ethos that underpins these works is central to the understanding of Goncharova and Larionov's series of 1907-14."Research in Russia would not have been possible without three awards from the University of St. Andrews: the first from the Russell Trust, issued by the Post-Graduate Office; the second and third from the Gapper Trust, issued by the School of Art History. " -- Acknowledgement

Surface attraction: hyphological encounters with the films of David Lynch.

How does one turn a cinematic passion into an academic thesis? This is the question that runs through my work, which is both a labour of love and a series of love letters. Does one, can one, tell the truth about one's love object? Written in solitude about the darkened passions of the cinema, and the commodified reenactment via DVD and video, it seeks to locate this body of work, organized under the signifier David Lynch, within a broader cultural history of film and art, rather than, as so many chronologically based studies have done, to assess the individual films and then collectively to remark upon the auteur's signature. Instead, it seeks to experience again, or anew, the ontological strangeness of film within the saturated market place, and observe how, in this body of work, the normative framework of the North American film industry is disturbed from inside by a practice which explores and critically examines the creative potential of the medium within the constraints of the capitalist mode of production and consumption. Taking Roland Barthes' neologism of the theory of the text as a hyphology as its means of organization, the thesis presents a series of chapters which consider separate concepts or ideas about these films which, although appearing freestanding, come together in the final chapter in this web of engagement with Lynch's cinema and critical theory. In the final analysis, the work reflects upon a range of approaches to its subject to conclude that the solitary, or seemingly isolated, experience of film is itself socially, culturally and politically important and tells us a great deal about contemporary subjectivity

Overlapping montage: a comparative study of mainstream film and moving-image installations

This dissertation develops a discussion on the need for a comparative approach to the study of film and moving- image installations. It addresses the lack of critical attention given to moving-image installations within film studies generally and academic teaching programmes in particular. The development of a comparative approach requires researching a number of interlinking and independent fields of study such as film studies, art history/criticism, photography, literary theory, critical theory, anthropology and philosophy. While arguing against traditional disciplinary boundaries, the discussion critiques the accepted articulations of current interdisciplinary approaches. The dissertation discusses how an expanded field of comparative film studies needs to concern itself with both diachronic and synchronic axes, requiring a longer historical framework to analyse shifts in technologies of representation and related theories of subjectivity within particular capitalist formations. It is argued that this type of comparative model elaborates a more critically productive and conceptually expansive discussion of cultural products, whether they are mainstream film or moving-image installations. As such it aligns itself with an awareness of the political importance of history, memory and personal experience. The theoretical ground for a comparative approach is developed through exploring montage and fragmentation. While articulating the significance of theories of fragmentation to discussions of modernity and modernism, the thesis foregrounds the significance of understanding all cultural production as ‘montages’ - as elaborations of a number of competing discourses, both when they are made and when they are read. A reconceptualization of montage as a dominant component in cultural meaning making moves away from montage as an aesthetics of form. Rather than understanding film and moving-image installations as rigidly delineated objects, they are explored through hybridity and overlap, for example through the multiple scopic regimes, which shape and form them. In this enterprise, the significance of an anthropological materialist’ approach to cinema and moving-image installations is articulated as a means of developing a critical cognitive engagement with our varied cultural and ever changing social environment

Beyond McPoetry: Contemporary American Poetry in the Institutionalized Creative Writing Program Era

This dissertation examines the rise of the creative writing program in American higher education and considers its influence on contemporary American poetry. I investigate how the patronage of the university has impacted American poetry and reconfigured the contemporary literary landscape. Using Mark McGurl's (2009) groundbreaking research on post-World War II fiction and the rise of the creative writing program as a launching point, I consider the following questions: (1) How might contemporary American poetry be understood in relation to the rise of mass higher education and the creative writing program? (2) How and why has the creative writing program reorganized U.S. poetry production in the postwar period?, and (3) How can the rise of the creative writing program be brought to bear on a reading of contemporary poetry itself? Investigating beyond the well-worn claim that institutionalized creative writing programs produce McPoetry, this humanities-based research examines the ascents of three of America's most celebrated living poets. First, I investigate Kay Ryan's rise as an "outsider" poet happily unaffiliated with creative writing programs. Through close readings, I consider how the most dominant and idiosyncratic craft elements in her writing are a partial result of her avoidance of the homogenizing forces of the creative writing workshop. I then examine Jorie Graham's influence as a former faculty member at Iowa Writers Workshop, the most prestigious and indisputably powerful M.F.A. program in the nation, and as a current professor at Harvard University. I examine distinguishing features of Graham's work and trace threads of connection in the poetry of other Elliptical poets who have been heavily influenced by her. I consider how Graham's work necessitates literary scholarship and how those granted power by their institution in turn bolster Graham's body of work. In particular, I examine Helen Vendler's role, as our nation's most powerful poetry critic, in promoting Graham's poetry and popularizing a set of aesthetic values modeled largely after Graham's. Next, I consider Billy Collins' aggressive courting of the general reader of poetry as an antidote to academe's exclusion of non-specialist readers. I argue that Collins' impressive popularity and subversive tendencies serve as a counterweight to the literary authority of "official verse" culture. The examination of Billy Collins, Jorie Graham, and Kay Ryan aims to illuminate higher education's role in bestowing cultural authority on particular poets and kinds of poetry

The myth and its registration

As consumerism expands and narrative becomes an increasingly valuable commodity, this study asks: what are the consequences for creativity? Does commodification provide creative writers expanding opportunities for content creation? Or are creative practices restricted by the structural elements of enclosed markets that merely purport to be free? By focussing on trade marks as icons for narratives, this enquiry into the fields of creative writing and intellectual property places the writer’s belief in freedom of expression under scrutiny; first by analysing the nature of trade marks and their relationship with creative writing and the politics and philosophy of our times [part1], and secondly through a fictional narrative, in which emerging themes concerning identity, truth and the nature of belief are explored [part 2]

Bowdoin College Catalogue (2007-2008)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/course-catalogues/1288/thumbnail.jp

Race - femininity - representation: women, culture and the orientalized other in the work of Henriette Browne and George Eliot, 1855-1880.

This thesis examines the paintings of Henriette Browne and George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda in order to explore the ways in which European women contributed to imperial cultures of the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast to many cultural histories of imperialism which analyse Orientalist images of women rather than images by women, the thesis argues, first, that women did produce imperialist images and, second, that an analysis of the production and reception of images by women will develop an understanding of the interdependence of ideologies of race and gender in the colonial discourse of the period. To this end, the representations selected for study are read largely through their reception in the British and French critical press in order to assess the ways in which the gender-specific and author-centred criticism of the time produced a range of (often contradictory) meanings for women's texts and identities for their authors. It is argued that women's differential, gendered access to the positionalities of imperial discourse produced a gaze on the orient and the Orientalized 'Other' that registered difference less pejoratively and less absolutely than is implied by Said's original formulation (Said, 1978). Thus, the thesis contributes to critical debates about imperial subjectivities; argues for a more complex understanding of women's role in imperial culture and discourse; intervenes in George Eliot scholarship; and provides the first detailed analysis of Browne's work. As an initial exploration of women's involvement in Orientalist art, the thesis also aims to indicate the existence of a larger, as yet unexplored, field of women's visual Orientalism and demonstrate the benefits of taking an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of women's interaction with and contribution to colonial and imperial cultures