This volume presents an interdisciplinary approach to humanistic
scholarship, one that can be situated somewhere between cultural
studies and cultural history while being more specific than either.
Cultural analysis as a critical practice is based on a keen
awareness of the critic's situatedness in the present--the social
and cultural present from which we look, and look back, at objects
that are already of the past, objects that we take to define our
present culture. Thus it can be summarized by the phrase "cultural
memory in the present." Far from being indifferent to history,
cultural analysis is devoted to understanding the past as "part of"
the present, as what we have around us.
The essays gathered here represent the current state of an emerging
field of inquiry. At the same time, they suggest to the larger
academic world what cultural analysis can and should do, or be, as
an interdisciplinary practice. The challenge for this volume is to
counter the common assumption that interdisciplinarity makes the
object of inquiry vague and the methodology muddled. In meeting
that challenge, it offers close textual and visual readings of
subjects ranging from Vermeer to abstract expressionism, from the
Book of Ruth to Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood," from the history of
cinema to popular culture in Zaire.
The essays in Part I, "Don't Look Now: Visual Memory in the
Present," explore in detailed case studies centered on the theme of
visuality or looking, the tricky consequences of the uncertainties
regarding history that the presentness of the past entails. Part
II, "Close-ups and Mirrors: The Return of Close Reading, with a
Difference," demonstrates and advocates "listening" to the object
without the New Critical naivete that claims the text speaks for
itself. Instead, the essays create the kind of dialogical situation
that is a major characteristic of cultural analysis; the text does
not speak for itself, but it does speak back. The essays in Part
III, "Method Matters: Reflections on the Identity of Cultural
Analysis," do not propose any "directions for use" or authoritative
statements on how to do cultural analysis. Arranged in pairs of
opposites, the essays represent the kind of fruitful tension that
stimulates debate. Though no definite answers are proposed, and
conflicting views are left in conflict, the essays stimulate a
(self-)reflection on cultural analysis, its practices, and its
understandings.
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