Unlike many books in the field, this is not a study of literary texts in cultural contexts but a book about cultural texts of the kind increasingly studied through literary approaches. The chapters analyse a wide range of different texts that are neither poems nor ‘literary’ novels and offer readings of them in the light of issues that arise in literary studies and elsewhere, from considerations of trauma to questions of time, from ethics to spatial dynamics. A number of pre-selected critical and theoretical perspectives are brought to bear, from ecocriticism to performativity theory to postcolonial studies, but these are...

The approaches used by critics to study literary texts, particularly novels, are often equally helpful when considering aspects of film, especially features such as theme, narrative and imagery. There are, of course, significant differences between the two genres: in terms of technology, team production, visual realisation and so forth. A film is the result of multiple efforts from hundreds of individuals, even if they are working towards achieving the vision of one person, a director who may or may not also be the screenwriter.

The film under consideration in this chapter is a key text for a number of reasons....

Since the late 1980s, cultural geographers have been increasingly reading landscape as text, considering and employing linguistic metaphors, semiotic analyses, and poststructuralist terminology. In particular, the tools of literary analysis and theory have been helpfully employed to consider the built environment. Also, Henri Lefebvre’s influential book The Production of Space (1974) introduced the idea of ‘social space’, overturning the traditional understanding of ‘space’ as an empty area and replacing it with the view that space is always both occupied and meaningful: is always socially, politically and ideologically constructed and interpreted. Rather like the Bakhtinian idea of the chronotope in literature,...

John Fiske explains that texts are sometimes considered to be used differently in studies of literature and popular culture:

In popular culture the text is a cultural resource to be plundered or used in ways that are determined by the social interests of the reader/user not by the structure of the text itself, nor by the intentions (however we may discern them) of its author.¹

This is a relative rather than absolute distinction and one that might be thought to rely too heavily on a certain understanding of literary criticism, but Fiske’s distinction between the kinds of texts studied as...

One of Michael Jackson’s hit singles has the consistent line in its chorus, ‘It Don’t Matter If You’re Black Or White’: the statement of an ideal rather than a social fact.³ In Western society, white has been generally portrayed as a norm against which blackness is positioned as aberrant threatening and perhaps even monstrous. As well as telling a mini-story familiar from teen horror, Michael Jackson’s music video for his song ‘Thriller’ invokes a number of discourses about ‘race’ and race relations in the US. Riffing on 1950s horror movies, it divides small-town America between respectable cinemagoers, fascinated and appalled...

In this chapter, I want to consider a public event involving a celebrity in order to discuss the ways in which famous people take on a significant role in the emotional life of others. In particular I want to look at how Diana’s death was received in Britain in terms of a pervasive sense of trauma. Which is to say I want to explore why polls ‘even a year after her death, showed that many still believed themselves and their country to have been significantly changed by the Diana phenomenon’.³

The public grief that followed in the wake of Princess...

In this chapter I will consider the TV programme Big Brother in the context of performative gendered identity. This will involve a consideration of the mediation of gender and sexuality in terms of normativity and transgression, and the complex negotiation of identity between the personal, conceived in terms of intimacy and privacy, and the public, conceived in terms of gossip and surveillance.

Big Brother was the first of the high-profile ‘Reality Television’ shows. Pioneered in Holland, it was imported to Britain by the production company Endemol.³ From the first, the programme was presented as a sociological experiment, in the vein...

The literary, however identified, may be said to include many examples of non-fiction, including works of journalism. Given the reporter’s quasi-objective relationship to history, the journalistic article was in some ways seen as a model for much literature in the 1930s, with a writer such as George Orwell specialising equally in fiction, essay-writing and reportage, and a novelist such as Christopher Isherwood fashioning himself in fiction as a news camera ‘recording, not thinking’.² Newspaper articles are, in fact, defined by their place of publication rather than their content, but there are certain likely formal characteristics or principles of journalistic writing...

Actively reading or analysing images is an uncommon experience even though – or perhaps because – in a visual culture everyone sees thousands of them everyday. Pictures, with or without words, are presented in newspapers, in advertising, on TV and elsewhere, yet when discussing images we have to turn exclusively to words. It is in language that social meaning-making occurs and appraising images is a function of language. However, every seeing child encounters images before learning language and the subject has a complex relationship with the visual field that needs exploring before we consider the meaning of particular images.

The French psychoanalyst...

In this chapter I want to consider the import of a political speech in the context of the relation between the ethical and the political, the spiritual and the material. To do this I want to play off the historical moment and its surrounding contextual discourses with the speech’s invocation of a transhistorical and universal set of values. New Historicism evolved in the 1980s as in some ways a reaction to structuralism and formalism. Indebted to political, poststructuralist and reader-response theory, it has focused on the intertextuality of literary and non-literary texts and the presence of diverse culturally specific discourses...

The text I will look at in this chapter is critical in a number of senses. It is critical in the sense that a critical essay offers a viewpoint on a subject and debates it; it is also critical in the sense that it has been considered deeply, if not uniquely significant; and finally it is critical in the sense that it is an attack, albeit a camouflaged one. In terms of the reading of critical texts, it helps to raise important issues about the production, publication, provenance, partisanship and divided purposes of academic criticism. The approach taken is broadly...

In Chapter 3, I noted John Fiske’s view that the difference between literary and popular texts lies in the latter’s reliance on its contemporary social relevance for its popularity and significance. For Fiske, popular texts are evaluated according to their social values, not their universal or aesthetic ones. This may be true in literature departments in many cases, but it is not necessarily true in the context of wider cultural discussion. In this chapter, I will therefore look at a popular novel in the context of debates over questions of good and evil. These are concerned with readers’ ethical ideals,...

The short story is unfairly named. Shortness is only a quality in relation to something else, and so this epithet ‘short’ epitomises the way in which the novel has been taken as the standard for modern fiction.³ Such bias was long ago lampooned by Ambrose Bierce in his 1911 satirical compendium The Devil’s Dictionary:

Novel: A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama....

Released on 16 September 2002, Eminem’s song ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ signals itself as a child’s rebellion in its title by alluding to the common parental demand to clean up private space in the family home and using this as a metaphor for emotionally and mentally exorcising past traumas inflicted by the parent.¹ Presented as an image of the repository for the clutter and ‘skeletons’ of the past, the closet is also both the psyche of the singer and a representation of the child’s space in relation to the mother, ultimately the womb.²

In Ian McEwan’s Kafkaesque short story ‘Conversations...

The study of autobiography has been resurgent in recent decades, and the genre is now often discussed by historians, literary critics and others alongside biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries and reminiscences – as well as works more conventionally considered ‘history’ or ‘fiction’ – under the banner of life writing (the term ‘self-life-writing’ is Avrom Fleishman’s). One reason for this is the rise of interdisciplinary areas of study that have found autobiography to be a particularly useful form of writing, and so have accorded it a distinctive place in the study of both authenticity and alterity. In the 1970s, women’s studies, American studies, ethnic...

In his 1909 story ‘The Machine Stops’, E. M. Forster imagines a future underground world in which a vast mechanised web connects together all of its isolated, enervated citizens. In this society, all communication is undertaken through the machine, but its vast network can connect two people anywhere around the globe. Forster’s story, though less well-known than the later Dystopian visions of Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, envisions one technological aspect of contemporary life more fully than either.

This is of course the Internet, which has enabled a new and different kind of cultural production to develop over...

According to Iain Sinclair, writing in 1999, the millennium had no future because it had already happened. The millennial moment in Britain and beyond, was not the dawn of the year 2000 but the death of the Princess of Wales – discussed in Chapter 5. Sinclair is here working with the idea of affect and with an emotional moment; one that expresses the finality, transition and mourning that might be associated with an endpoint, even though the media mood for the millennial shift itself was unremittingly celebratory. Yet Sinclair’s view that ‘the millennium’ happened somewhere or sometime else points up many...