SELECCIÓN DE LA MUESTRA

As will be amply evident by now, no single theory or perspective is able to articulate or access the “truth” of a text; there is “no magical formula or

hermeneutic key to unlock the hidden secrets of cultural meaning and effects” (Durham and Kellner 4). Rather, each theory elaborates on and prioritises particular views; critics therefore select a theory that will allow them to access predetermined critical or ideological perspectives to which the theory itself is suited. So theorists wishing to examine the portrayal of gender use one of the feminist theories, just as the critic interested in class issues will employ one of the many strains of Marxism. The aim of this thesis is to examine the various uses of heroic fantasy – individual, nationalistic and commercial – and it follows that none of the preceding interpretive theories alone can fulfil this analytical intention. Structuralism falls short on social analysis, as do Liberal Humanism and the psychoanalytic theories. Ideological theories, on the other hand, reveal social and economic factors but frequently neglect the reader-text relationship. To anticipate analysing heroic fantasy “from ideology to

industry” is to require a “meta-theory”, but one does not exist. However, as an interdisciplinary programme capable of investigating both production and consumption of a text or social practice, cultural studies best suits my interpretive purposes.

The four men primarily responsible for the emergence of British cultural studies, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and Edward

Thompson, “developed Leavis’s thought for what they wanted to do, and broke with it, as new generations must always do, at the points at which it hemmed them in” (Inglis, Cultural Studies 47). The breaks generated by this group of intellectuals included resistance to their predecessor’s moral condescension toward popular culture. For this group, to examine the cultural sphere, to study everyday practices, the structures and rituals that produce meaning and

subjectivity, is to adopt a thoroughly political position. Tracing political effects within the cultural sphere may have initially derived from Hoggart and

Williams’ teaching of popular culture to mature students, but it was also a rejection of the liberal humanist refusal to engage in explicit political analysis (39).

Further, in moving beyond élitist critiques, cultural studies investigated to what extent the specific cultural form either sustained social control or enabled resistance. But the nascent cultural studies not only intended critique; social transformation was also on the political agenda. In 1981 Stuart Hall described popular culture as being, “one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged” (qtd. in Grossberg, “Does Cultural Studies” 10). He asserts that popular culture “is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture – already fully formed – might be simply ‘expressed’. But it is one of

the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it” (10).

The University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, led and inaugurated by Richard Hoggart in 1964, became the focal point of this developing strain of criticism. Three foundational texts of British cultural studies precede the Centre’s opening; Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), Williams’s Culture and Society (1958) and Thompson’s The Making of the English

Working Class (1963). These works are marked by their original use of now

common cultural studies terms such as “agency”, “intervention”, “effect” and reflect each author’s working class activism. “Class,” Roger Bromley writes, “was the primary analytical resource; education, at all levels, seen as the principal medium of empowerment and change” (“Cultural Studies” 151). After the Second World War, this group wanted to ensure that the “hard-won literacy of the working class” (151) was employed constructively, for the citizen to consciously engage in democracy, rather than become the pawn of the

culture industries, as per the Frankfurt School of thought.

From 1968 when he replaced Hoggart as director of the Birmingham Centre, Stuart Hall played a key role in developing the direction of British cultural studies, being instrumental in incorporating the various critical perspectives conducive to a deep analysis of cultural artefacts. Cultural

theories respond to the socio-historical moment – conjunctures26 _{- and during} the 1960s and 1970s British cultural studies worked with and incorporated the theories of the movements that mark that era: class, gender, race, ethnicity and nationality. Consequently, cultural studies is an eclectic mix of theories, brought together as analysis requires.

Through the 1970s and 1980s cultural studies continued to assimilate topical politics, both developing and appropriating the most recent theoretical work on sexuality, gender, and race. Theories available to the cultural studies critic therefore proliferated, but critique continued to identify hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces in popular culture. That is, how social relations enabled the contrary forces of oppression and resistance. To facilitate this political intention, much research was redirected from the text to the audience, allowing for focused study upon the subjects of the power relations under scrutiny.

As globalisation has extended its pace and reach throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century it is increasingly untenable to posit cultural studies

without regard for political economy. Adherents of the political economy perspective claim that the political economy shapes the end product – the types

26 _{Lawrence Grossberg defines a “conjuncture” as “a description of a social formation as} fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle and negotiation” (“Does Cultural Studies” 4).

of cultural artefacts available for consumption are delimited by the dominant mode of production. Therefore, research considers the specific economic and political systems that influence the network of relations between the state, social institutions, the economy and organisations that contribute to the cultural

sphere, so as to determine to what extent political economy is implicated in culture. In particular, “political economy highlights that capitalist societies are organized according to a dominant mode of production that structures

institutions and practices according to the logic of commodification and capital accumulation” (Durham and Kellner 18). The cultural sphere within capitalism is therefore organised to a significant extent by the requirement to fulfil a profit imperative, with marketing and distribution of cultural goods equally profit- oriented. As an example, the massive budgets for production, marketing and distribution means that the Hollywood film industry looks to minimise risk by employing stars and following successful narrative formulas (During 92-3).

Given the “theoretical explosion” since the 1960s, cultural studies’ inclination toward incorporation of new and salient thought, its

institutionalisation and its global reach continuing since the 1990s, it is not surprising that there is difference and vocal dissent amongst cultural studies practitioners. Just as there is not one but many feminist theories, cultural studies has numerous strains which have developed through conflicting values or opinions. Thus, Jim McGuigan has complained about the “cultural

populism” he associates with John Fiske and the Popular Culture Association, and Tony Bennett has expressed dissatisfaction with cultural studies’ profession of political intervention but lack of specific engagement with government and social institutions that exert direct influence over cultural policy.

The intention behind Bennett’s cultural policy approach is to focus upon policy formulation and implementation by the institutions that administer the cultural products. Cultural studies is biased toward understanding human consciousness through ideological critique, Bennett argues, when it would be more productive to turn to materialist politics by “modifying the functioning of culture by means of technical adjustments to its governmental deployment” (T. Bennett, “Useful” 406). Because “the relations of culture and power which most typically characterize modern societies are . . . now increasingly governmentally organized and constructed” (T. Bennett, Culture 61), Bennett urges cultural studies practitioners to become involved in the policy-making process. His concept of “governmentality” refers to the “broad processes of regulation throughout the social order by which a population becomes subject to

bureaucratic regimes and modes of discipline” (Barker, Making Sense 189). That is, the “cultural technologies” are not oppressive organisations that install individuals into pre-ordained subject positions, but rather they enable self- reflection on modes of conduct and social values. Better to be involved and moderate policy than merely proffer enlightenment via critique.

Nicholas Garnham, too, has “call[ed] for a major revision within cultural theory” (225). Drawing on the intellectual weight of Raymond Williams, Garnham argues that the neglect of political economy that he perceives within much cultural studies serves as ideological resistance to genuine critique and understanding of the relationship that exists between the culture industries and the state. The trend within cultural studies to focus upon various forms of identity (gender, ethnicity, nationalism), Garnham contends, diverts attention away from the crux of social formation under capitalism; the economic deserves especial attention at this particular conjuncture “because capitalism is a mode of social organization characterized by the domination of an abstract system of exchange relations” (227).

Agitation by scholars such as Bennett and Garnham since the 1980s has contributed to an increased interest in political economy within cultural studies. Yet Simon During observes, “not all forms of oppression and subordination are economic,” meaning that for cultural studies “the pleasures and uses of cultural production and reception need not be translated back into political-economic terms” (43). Rather, the economic and cultural domains can be more

productively viewed as exerting “dynamic interrelations with one another, and not that the first simply determines the second” (44). Given that cultural

spheres each influence the cultural text or practice under consideration, a thorough analysis would need to acknowledge their compounding influences.

Ideally, cultural studies examines a text or practice from a number of perspectives, and the influence of cultural studies over fantasy literature is evident in recent books on The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, revealing that this methodology is increasingly applied to the genre.27 _{In this thesis I employ} textual analysis, ideological critique, audience response and a political economy approach to analyse the various ways in which heroic fantasy, and The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter in particular, is utilised to construct individual and national subjectivities. Utilising a diverse range of theories enables me to

develop a picture of the heroic fantasy as publishing phenomenon and favourite book, a marketing franchise and ideological instrument. The structure of this thesis looks at both sides of an argument: to assess the social structure

applauded in the genre and how this is received or manipulated within capitalism; to explore the heroic subjectivities described in the genre and investigate the implications of this persona for male and female readers; to consider the types of nationalism conveyed by the genre and to critique the use of the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings to strengthen New Zealand’s vulnerable agrarian economy within the globalising market.

27 _{See, for example, Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic (2005), The}

Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context (2006), The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon (2003) and The Irresistible Rise of Harry Potter (2002).