Trends in Cultural History

Seminar description

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‘Cultural history is a very broad and eclectic field, in terms of both subject matter and of theoretical perspectives,’ writes Anna Green in her preface to Cultural History (Palgrave, 2008): ‘It covers a great variety of topics, it does not revolve around one particular theory, and different national and cultural contexts have generated diverse historiographies.’

Cultural history has its origins in the 19th century, but during the 1980s it gathered renewed force in part as a development of social history and in part from the influence of other disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology and literary theory. Yet instead of developing into a new historical orthodoxy, cultural history remains a wide-ranging method or, more simply, an attitude that aims to decipher meaning in the past and focuses on experience, behaviour and perception. It also challenges fixed or ‘grand’ narratives of human development and places much less emphasis on the need for causal explanation.

Rather than attempting to survey the whole of this vast and diverse terrain, this course will explore some of the major theories and concepts deployed within cultural history, and consider some of the big questions that have preoccupied cultural historians from the 19th century to the present. Within this capacious embrace, we will analyse several key texts that illustrate the nature and reach of cultural history. In so doing, we hope also to identify some of the problems that students may encounter and look to the future of this still vibrant and productive field of study.

  

Provisional Programme

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15 January 2013 -  Foundations of Cultural History (1)  (Prof. Lucy Riall)

Burckhardt

• J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Parts 1, ‘The State as a Work of Art’ and 2: ‘The Development of the Individual’
• H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Jacob Burckhardt,’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 70 (1984), 359-78, also in his History and the Enlightenment (New Haven and London, 2010), 246-65
  L. Gossman, ‘Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal,’ Journal of Modern History, 74 (2002), 538-72

Huizinga

• J. Huizinga, ‘The Heroic Dream' in idem, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996), 61-125
• R. L. Colie, ‘Johan Huizinga and the Task of Cultural History,’ American Historical Review, 69/3 (1964), 607-630

 

22 January 2013 - Foundations of Cultural History (2) (Prof. Laura Lee Downs)

Foucault

• M. Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, and “Preface to the History of Sexuality, Volume Two”, in  The Essential Foucault: selections from essential works of Foucault, 1954-1984, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose,  New York, 2003, 126-144; 58-63.
• Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault; A User’s Manual”, in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 2nd edition, Cambridge, 2006, 1-28.

Williams

• R. Williams, “Culture is Ordinary”, in Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope; Culture, Democracy, Socialism, London, 1989, 3-14
• R. Williams, Keywords, pages on culture
• R. Williams, Marxism and Literature, selection TBA

 

29 January 2013 - Cultural History and Semiotics (Prof. Mark Gamsa)

• U. Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (Phoenix, 2004), chs. 5, 8. and two additional pages
• R. Chartier, Cultural History: between practices and representations (1988), ch. 8.
• R. Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff (1997), ch.1.
• C. Ginzburg, ‘“Your country needs you”: a case study in political iconography,’ History Workshop Journal, 52 (2001), 1-22

 

5 February 2013 - Cultural History and the Analysis of Discourse (Prof. Mark Gamsa)

• A. Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), chs. 1 and 2.
• K. M. F. Platt and B. Nathans, ‘Socialist in form: indeterminate in content: the ins and outs of late Soviet culture,’ Ab Imperio 2 (2011), 301-23
• L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1993), chs. 1 and 3
• P. Steward, ‘This is not a book review: on historical uses of literature,’ Journal of Modern History, 66/3 (1994), 521-38

 

12 February 2013 -  Cultural History and Anthropology  (Prof. Mark Gamsa)

• K. Thomas, ‘History and Anthropology,’ Past and Present 24 (1963), 3-24
• C. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), pp 119-179 (“Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the 13th Century”” and “’And Woman his Humanity’: Female Imagery in the religious Writing of the Late Middle Ages””)

 

19 February 2013 - Symbols, Identities and politics (Prof. Lucy Riall)

• E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), ch.7 (‘Government as a ritual process’)
• G. Mosse, ‘Nationalism and respectability: normal and abnormal sexuality,’ Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982), 221-46
• L. Riall, Garibaldi. Invention of a Hero (New Haven and London, 2007), chs.1, 3 and 12
• R. Brubaker, ‘Beyond Identity,’ in idem, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, MA, 2004)

 

26 February 2013 - Memory (Prof. Lucy Riall)

• L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experiences of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge, 1987), chs. 2 and 5
• M. Vincent, ‘Breaking the silence? Memory and oblivion since the Spanish Civil War,’ in E. Ben-Seev, R. Ginio, J. Winter (eds), Shadows of War. A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010), 47-67
• J. Porter, ‘“The past is present”: the construction of Macao’s historical legacy,’ History and Memory 21/1 (2009), 63-100
• A. Confino, ‘History and Memory,’ in A. Schneider and D. Woolf (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 5: Historical Writing since 1945 (Oxford, 2011), 36-51

 

27 February 2013 -  Emotions and Psychoanalysis (Prof. Laura Lee Downs) - sala Europa

• L. Davidoff, Thicker than Water. Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920 (Oxford, 2012), Introduction, ch 2, ch 5-6 & ch 10. You might also want to have a look at ch 4, on the decline of the “long family” structure
• B. Taylor and S. Alexander, History and Psyche. Psychoanalysis and the Past (London, 2012), short selection TBA
• M. Roper, ‘Re-Remembering the Soldier Hero: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War,’ History Workshop Journal, 50 (2000), 181-204
• W. Reddy, ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,’ Current Anthropology, vol. 38 (1997), pp. 327-51

For those of you interested in the history of the senses, you could have a look at:

• AHR Forum, ‘The Senses in History,’ American Historical Review 116/2 (2011)

 

12 March 2013 -  History and Material Culture (Prof. Laura Lee Downs)

• C. Steedman, Labour’s Lost (Cambridge, 2009), Ch. 1, 4, 6, 8 (optional: ch 2 and interstitial text “Servant stories”’)
• Karen Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London and New York, 2009), chs. 6, 9.

See also websites: Material Culture Review (MCR), Material World, Centre for Material and Culture Studies, Commodities and Culture 

 

22 March 2013 -  Borderlands (Profs. Laura Lee Downs, Mark Gamsa and Lucy Riall) - Canteen room

• E. Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven and London, 2003), Ch 1, 6-7, 9 (optional: ch 8)
• K. Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge MA, 2003), Introduction and ch. 1.
• Max Egremont, Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia (New York, 2011), Introduction and ch. 1.