The academic discipline of cultural studies has its origins in journalism, and specifically in George Orwell’s classic 1940 essay “Boys Weeklies.” Orwell’s innovation was to take popular culture seriously, reading what would now be called “young adult” fiction set in English public schools for what it had to say about English attitudes towards politics and history. The investigation led him to conclude that such stories were “censored in the interests of the ruling class” and “sodden in the worst illusions of 1910.”
The extraction of deeper significance from an element of pop culture was a clever trick that, in Orwell’s hands, produced a brilliant essay. As a scholarly method, however, meant for application on an industrial scale by less-than-brilliant writers hidden away in colleges across the land, it is doubtful. This is principally because so much must be assumed by the practitioner. There was no burden on Orwell to re-litigate his assumptions for why the illusions of 1910 were bad or why the British Empire was, at core, an exploitative enterprise. As an essayist, he could just take a certain interpretation of history and politics as given. There is an implicit generalism and partisanship in the approach that is no problem for a journalist, but which ought to be concerning to a scholar.
Read Full Article »