[DOWNLOAD] "From Ancient to Victorian Cultural Studies: Assessing Foucault." by Victorian Poetry " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: From Ancient to Victorian Cultural Studies: Assessing Foucault.
- Author : Victorian Poetry
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 195 KB
Description
In 1999 the journal Victorian Literature and Culture devoted a special issue to the subject of "Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies." What is notable about the essays included in this volume is the collective level of skepticism they express about the way cultural studies concepts and practices have recently been applied. (1) Isobel Armstrong, for example, faults "Foucaultian history" for its over-reliance upon limiting notions of "regulation and surveillance.... [so that] [e]very text becomes evidence of a form of regulation, demonstrating a panoptical motivation." Foucauldian readings, Armstrong claims, depend as a result on "a homogenized account of the nineteenth century and of Victorianism in particular." (2) Armstrong is concerned about the way tendentious concepts such as "disciplinary" power are assumed by Foucault's followers prior to any analysis, which crowds out the opportunity for a more open, less predetermined form of historical-critical practice. Armstrong's claims may be said to be symptomatic, for we have reached a point in Victorian studies in which even critics otherwise friendly to cultural studies nevertheless tend to frame their approaches by describing how they differ from Foucauldian methods, not merely how they intersect with them. (3) Armstrong's critique, like those of other recent scholars, (4) announces a concern with the limitations and in particular the excesses of the discourse-based analyses of Victorian sexuality, derived primarily from the first volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality (1978), that prevailed in the late 1980s and 1990s.