Simon During @ UQ

Posted on | July 21, 2005 | No Comments

Thursday, 28 July 2005
4-6pm (participants are requested to be seated by 4.00 pm)
James Birrell Room at the UQ Staff & Graduates Club

‘Socialist ends: The British New Left, cultural studies and the emergence of academic “theory” ’

This paper presents a brief pre-history of academic theory as it developed within anglophone Cultural Studies. It examines a widespread demand for theory among what is often called the ‘first new left’ from the mid-fifties onward. This call for theory is later marked by two important breaks: first the importation of continental Marxism by Perry Anderson’s New Left Review, along with the application of Gramsci to socialist strategy and history by Anderson and Nairn; and second the 1968 student revolts which led even the Birmingham CCCS to a permutation of academic Althusserianism. It ends by presenting two possibilities for cultural studies that I believe were lost in this history.

Simon During joined the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University in 2002 from the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is Cultural Studies: a Critical Introduction (Routledge 2005). He is also author of Modern Enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (Harvard 2002). His previous books include Foucault and Literature (Routledge 1993), and Patrick White (Oxford 1998). He is the editor of the Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge 1993 and 1998) and has also written on postcolonial/globalisation theory and British literature in the period 1760-1900. Currently he is pursuing research projects on the literature of settler colonialism and on the history of literary subjectivity in Britain 1750-1950. In 2003 Simon was awarded a Centenary Medal by the Australian government for Services to the Humanities.

Category: Events, Research

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