123046 PS PS Literary Studies (2025W)

The term ‘culture industry’ did not exist until the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Before that time, the world of culture was thought to differ so dramatically from the sphere of industry that their combination would have seemed to many a contradiction in terms. For while ‘culture’ called up images of individual expression and collective improvement, ‘industry’ was linked to the work of standardization and exploitation instead. But once changes in twentieth-century society saw culture transformed into big business, and the market increasingly overwhelmed the arts, the traditional opposition between culture and commerce disappeared, and the era of the culture industry was born.

In this course, we will explore the culture industry’s historical and continuing effects on literary production and literary study. Pairing the work of selected Anglophone literary authors with reflections on literature’s relationship to politics, economics and technology, students will gain a better understanding of how writers’ responses to the culture industry have shaped contemporary literature.

From the enemy of industriousness symbolized by Herman Melville’s Bartleby to the dystopian pleasures of Aldous Huxley’s fiction, and from the critique of colonial languages in Ngugi wa Thiong'o to the literary experiments of Eliot Weinberger, Eimear McBride and John D’Agata, literature’s struggle against the culture industry is also the story of literature’s new and contested place in contemporary society.

Alongside close readings of the above-mentioned authors, students will learn to position literature within the framework of larger cultural models: from the idea of superstructure (Marx) to cultural hegemony (Gramsci); from committed literature (Sartre) to the culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, Postman); and from the society of the spectacle (Debord) to cultural imperialism (Bourdieu) and too late capitalism (Kornbluh).

In the process, we will come to see that the work of exploring the culture industry’s relationship to literature opens up entirely new perspectives in literary studies.