practising ideas week 12 seminar

What is culture and what is history?Practising Ideas: Approaches to Theory - Seminar

Dr Louise Douse

University of Bedfordshire 2

Write down any questions you have from this mornings lecture

Textwall code: b3ld Number: 07537 402 400

Lecture Schedule

Teaching week/Calendar week/Date

Theme, content, titleLecture preparation(please see BREO for additional subject specific seminar preparation)

Teaching week 12Calendar week 3Week beginning Monday 12th January

What is culture and what is history?Gareth Farmer

Williams, R. (1976) ‘Culture’ and ‘History,’ in Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society. London: Fontana, pp. 76-82 and 119-120 respectively.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]


The Nineteenth-CenturyGiannandrea Poesio

Collingan, C and Linley, M. (eds.) (2011) ‘Introduction: the nineteenth-century invention of media,’ in Media, technology and literature in the nineteenth century, Farnham: Ashgate, pp.1-19.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]


What is an individual (1)Alice Barnaby

Berman, M. (2010) ‘Introduction,’ in All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity. London: Verso, pp. 15-36.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]


Lecture Schedule



Teaching week 15Calendar week 6Week beginning Monday 2nd February

ModernismJane Carr

Greenberg, C. (2003) ‘Modernist painting,’ in Harrision, C. and Wood, P. (eds.) Art in theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 773-779.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]

Teaching week 16Calendar week 7Week beginning Monday 9th February

Structuralism and semioticsGareth Farmer

Tyson, L. (2006) ‘Structuralist criticism,’ in Critical theory today: a user-friendly guide. New York: Routledge, pp. 209-247.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]

Teaching week 17Calendar week 8Week beginning Monday 16th February

Post-Modernism: Interpretative AnarchiesJohnmichael Rossi and Amalia Garcia

Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The death of the author,’ in Image – music – text. Translated by S. Heath. London: Fontana, pp. 142-148.Etchells, T. (1999) ‘On risk and investment,’ in Certain fragments: contemporary performance and Forced Entertainment. London: Routledge, pp.48-50.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]


Lecture Schedule



Teaching week 18Calendar week 9Week beginning Monday 23rd February

Post-ColonialismVictor Ukaegbu

Crow, B. [With Banfield, C.] (1996) ‘Introduction,’ in An Introduction to postcolonial theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-17.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]

Teaching week 19Calendar week 10Week beginning Monday 2nd March

Intertextual studiesGiannandrea Poesio

Garraghan, D. (1999) ‘Too many cooks mix the metaphors: Marin and Spink, and the sandman link’ in Adshead-Lansdale, J. (ed.) Dancing texts: intertextuality in interpretation, London: Dance Books, pp. 148-176.[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]

Teaching week 20Calendar week 11Week beginning Monday 9th March

What is an individual (2)Clare Walsh and Giannandrea Poesio

Meyer, M. (2001) ‘Acting camp,’ in Counsell, C. and Wolf, L. (eds.) Performance analysis: an introductory coursebook. London: Routledge, pp. 86-92.


Lecture Schedule



Teaching week 21Calendar week 12Week beginning Monday 16th March

Skills session 3: Essay WritingNicola Darwood

Professional and Academic Development (no date) How to – write an essay. Study Hub: Online[Available Online – see BREO Guided Learning]

Teaching week 22

Calendar week 16

Week beginning Monday 13th April

Assessment 2 due: Friday 17th April

Teaching week 23

Calendar week 17


Skills Session 4: Poster presentation

Sadie Hunt

Task: Investigate the key features and purpose of academic posters. Please bring notes with you to the lecture, including useful sources that you discovered.

Please remember that you will be creating an arts/ humanities poster rather than a science poster.

Teaching week 24

Calendar week 18


Assessment 3 due: Friday 1st May


Assessment 2 - Essay

• When

•Friday 17th April 2015, electronic version through turnitin must be submitted.

• What

•This assessment requires you to individually produce a written essay of 1,500 words including quotations. You may select one of the practitioners/ authors/ playwrights that you have studied on this unit from your subject area.

• Weighting of the assessment

•This assessment forms 40% of the unit.


Assessment 3 – Poster Presentation

• When

•Friday 1st May 2015, electronic version through turnitin must be submitted.

• What

•This assessment requires you to submit a poster presentation, you will also have the opportunity to deliver these presentations in groups during seminar time for feedback before submission. You will be provided with one texts from a possible four in your particular field.

• Weighting of the assessment

•This assessment forms 30% of the unit.


What is history?

If the boundaries between history and fiction are no longer clear or distinct, if, indeed the argument is that understanding the past is itself a creative act which can be rendered differently by historians, novelists and poets, then the place of the imagination in the construction of historical accounts becomes central.

(Husbands, C. 1996)

15 April 2023University of Bedfordshire 9


Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

• Culture is “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

• We need culture “to make reason and the will of God to prevail.”

• Culture can be obtained “by means of reading, observing, and thinking.”

• It also seeks “to minister to the diseased spirit of our time.”

• Culture is (i) the ability to know what is best

(ii) what is best

(iii) the mental and spiritual application of what is best

(iv) the pursuit of what is best

(Arnold cited in Storey, 2006, p. 14)



• The highly instructed few, and not the scantily instructed many, will ever be the organ to the human race of knowledge and truth. Knowledge and truth in the full sense of the words, are not attainable by the great mass of the human race at all.

(Arnold cited in Storey, 2006, p. 17)



• Barbarians (aristocracy)

noble savage

• Philistine (middle class)

undervalue art, beauty, intellectual content – materialistic

• Populace (working class)

“a common basis of human nature”


High and Popular Culture

• The six definitions of popular culture:

•Culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people.

•The culture which is left over after we have decided what is high culture.

•As ‘mass culture’.

•The culture which originates from ‘the people’.

•A political concept – hegemony.

•Post-modern culture – no longer recognises the distinction between high and popular art.


Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

• ‘The “ideal”, in which culture is a state or process of human perfection in terms of certain absolute or universal values.’

• The “documentary” record: ‘culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded.’

• ‘There is the “social” definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a particular way of life.’

• The ‘anthropological’ position which sees culture as a description of a particular way of life.

• The proposition that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values.’

• The work of cultural analysis should be the ‘clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture.’

(Williams, R. cited in Storey, J. 2006: pg. 34-35)


Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

• “there will always be a tendency for this process of selection to be related and even governed by the interests of the class that is dominant.”

• “[T]he extremely damaging and quite untrue identification of ‘popular culture’ (commercial newspapers, magazines, entertainments, etc.) with ‘working-class culture’. In fact the main source of this ‘popular culture’ lies outside the working class altogether, for it is instituted, financed and operated by the commercial bourgeoisie, and remains typically capitalist in its methods of production and distribution. That working-class people form perhaps a majority of the consumers of this material… does not, as a fact, justify the facile identification.”

(Williams, R. cited in Storey, J. 2006: pg 36-37)


References

• Husbands, C. (1996) What is History Teaching? Language, Ideas and Meaning in Learning about the Past, Buckingham: Open University Press.

• Storey, J. (2006) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 4th Edn. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.

• Storey, J. (2006) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 3rd Edn. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.

• Strinati, D. (2004) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. 2nd Edn. London: Routledge.

practising ideas week 12 seminar

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