A Literary Approach to Cultural Studies

It used to be an axiom of interdisciplinary studies that the relation of the literary to the cultural is one of text to context: literature understood in the context of philosophy, theology, psychology, national history, etc. The motive was to loosen, perhaps broaden disciplinary boundaries; but by and large the result has been colonization by context: literature psychologized, philosophized, theologized, nationalized. Cultural studies takes a radically different approach. It claims to make interdisciplinarity an enterprise in its own right—according to one of its leading exponents, a “bricolage of methodologies” (“semiotics, deconstruction…psychoanalysis, and so on” ¹ ) that challenges the very foundations of disciplinarity.