Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Cultural Studies Perspective

• What is the difference between high and low forms of culture?

What is the literary canon?  How have cultural critics revised the notion of what constitutes the canon?

Explain:  "They seem to be more descriptive and less evaluative, more interested in relating than in rating" (398).

Explain:  "Rather than being static or monolithic, culture is really a set of interactive cultures, alive and changing, and cultural critics should be present- and even future-oriented" (398).

• Explain:  "The object of cultural study . . . . should be the human consciousness, and the goal of that critical analysis should be to understand and show how that consciousness is itself forged and formed, to a great extent, by cultural forces" (400).
• What is semiology?
• Explain: "Lacan also argued that the ego, subject, or self that we think of as being natural (our individual human nature) is in fact a product of the social order and its symbolic systems (especially, but not exclusively, language) (400).

• Explain:  "There is nothing outside the text" (Qtd. in Murfin 401).
• What is deconstruction?
• How is Foucault different from the Marxists?
• What are discourses?

• What are "radically organic" intellectuals (404)?
• How does Gramsci define ideologies? How does this conception differ from Williams's?
• Explain:  "The main function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relations of production, and that . . . function is even carried out in literary texts" (404).
• Explain:  "Popular fictions . . . were mere packhorses designed (however unconsciously) to carry the baggage of a culture's ideology, or mere brood mares destined to reproduce it" (404).

• Explain: "By maintaining artificial boundaries, universities have tended to reassert the high/low culture distinction, implying that all the latter subjects are best left to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and communication theorists" (399).
• What does Murfin mean by "true culture" (399)?

• How does Williams define ideologies?

• What are "dialogues between discourses" (403)?
• What are "polyphonic" novels (403)?

• Why, according to Murfin, will the future of literary criticism "owe a great deal indeed" to early cultural critics?

• Explain the concepts of the "given"and the "produced" (see also "the raw and the cooked").