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To Relish the Sublime?: Culture and Self-Realization in Postmodern Times
More than 130 years from Matthew Arnold’s pronouncement that human beings ‘must be compelled to relish the sublime’, education in the humanities still relies on the ideal of culture as the means of intellectual development. In this distinctive and original work, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper explore the growing tensions and contradictions between this and the contemporary world of work, pleasure, and consumption. While critical of the hypocrisies and elitism that can attach to notions of cultural self-realization, the authors nonetheless defend its overall educational and social value. Their wide-ranging discussion takes in critiques of philosophers from Kant and Schiller to Nietzsche and Marx, and includes historically contextualized readings of novels by Wollstonecraft, Hardy, Gissing, London, and Woolf. In their sustained defense of a conception of personal worth and self-fulfillment for its own sake, Ryle and Soper not only offer a powerful critique of the continuing dominance of work in contemporary society, but also provide a compelling alternative to the standard postmodern skepticism about the relevance of high culture.
272 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2002
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June 3, 2010
This is an academic text in an area of study (Cultural Theory) that I am just getting my bearings on. I learned of it because I heard one of the authors, Kate Soper, on a podcast talking about Marxism and her provocative concept called Alternative Hedonism. This book could be said to be somewhat related to that concept.
What the authors are endeavoring to show is how the pursuit of culture (mostly literature in this book) is an extremely beneficial one as it relates to the notion of self realization. Culture not only teaches us who we are but also shows the structure of our society and our place withing that society. By attempting to put ourselves in the place of the author we endeavor to learn similarities and differences with that perspective. They also show how a historical dialectic is at work in culture that participates in political and social change. For instance, they show how Jane Austen's somewhat conservative views were both steeped in her time but at the same time they contributed to the budding proto-feminism of the age. In this sense, Austen was having a conversation with the culture of the past and present as well as putting forth an argument for future conversation.
Implicit to the authors' views is an Enlightenment notion of the self, albeit a modernized one, and they take to task the postmodernism for its denial of the self and the ambiguity of values that it often claims. They also defend the cannon of Western literature against claims that it is a tool of oppression. This is the philosophical underpinning of the book and as an enthusiast of philosophy it is the part I found the most interesting. They support their claims on culture and self-realization by exploring various literary works. Although I did not have much familiarity with many of those works, the authors did a good job of making them understandable.
They finish the book by making an appeal to the teaching of culture in postmodern society as an antidote to consumerist alienation. They see the increasing use of education as a mechanism by which people are simply turned into mechanisms for the means of production and consumption as a pernicious force in today's world. They make the claim that culture can make better people and better societies. This is an important argument that we cannot take lightly and this book goes a long way in its defense. Let's hope that more like it come to the fore in coming years.
What the authors are endeavoring to show is how the pursuit of culture (mostly literature in this book) is an extremely beneficial one as it relates to the notion of self realization. Culture not only teaches us who we are but also shows the structure of our society and our place withing that society. By attempting to put ourselves in the place of the author we endeavor to learn similarities and differences with that perspective. They also show how a historical dialectic is at work in culture that participates in political and social change. For instance, they show how Jane Austen's somewhat conservative views were both steeped in her time but at the same time they contributed to the budding proto-feminism of the age. In this sense, Austen was having a conversation with the culture of the past and present as well as putting forth an argument for future conversation.
Implicit to the authors' views is an Enlightenment notion of the self, albeit a modernized one, and they take to task the postmodernism for its denial of the self and the ambiguity of values that it often claims. They also defend the cannon of Western literature against claims that it is a tool of oppression. This is the philosophical underpinning of the book and as an enthusiast of philosophy it is the part I found the most interesting. They support their claims on culture and self-realization by exploring various literary works. Although I did not have much familiarity with many of those works, the authors did a good job of making them understandable.
They finish the book by making an appeal to the teaching of culture in postmodern society as an antidote to consumerist alienation. They see the increasing use of education as a mechanism by which people are simply turned into mechanisms for the means of production and consumption as a pernicious force in today's world. They make the claim that culture can make better people and better societies. This is an important argument that we cannot take lightly and this book goes a long way in its defense. Let's hope that more like it come to the fore in coming years.
Displaying 1 of 1 review