Definition of Cultural Materialism

From Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare

 

 

                Cultural materialism:

 

            vii      “a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment and textual analysis offers the strongest challenge [in the field of literary criticism] and has already contributed substantial work. 

- Historical context undermines the transcendent significance traditionally accorded to the literary text and allows us to recover its histories; 

- theoretical method detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeks only to reproduce it in its own terms; 

- socialist and feminist commitment confronts the conservative categories in which most criticism has hitherto been conducted; 

- textual analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored. 

We call this ‘cultural materialism’.

             

                ‘Culture’ is to be taken in the wider sociological sense, not the narrower evaluative one, which is just “one set of signifying practices among others”.

     

            ‘Materialism’ “insists that culture does not (canot transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it. Cultural materialism therefore situates the implication of literary texts in history. 

A play by Shakespeare is related to the contexts of its production—to the economic and political system of Elizabethan and Jacobean England and to the particular institutions of cultural production (the court, patronage, theatre, education, the church). 

Moreover, the relevant history is not just that of four hundred years ago, for culture is made continuously and Shakespeare’s text is reconstructed, reappraised, reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts. 

What the plays signify, how they signify, depends on the cultural field in which they are situated. That is why this book discusses also the institutions through which Shakespeare is reproduced and through which interventions may be made in the present.”

            Finally, cultural materialism is not politically neutral—any cultural practice has a political significance, and cultural materialism is commited to the transformation of the social order.

 

 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. 2nd ed. (Cornell Paperbacks). Ithaca (NY): Cornell UP, 1994.

 

 

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