so on, as well as gender. Third, cultural studies has tried to theorise subjectivity as a
socio-cultural construction. Some theorists, under the influence of poststructuralist
psychoanalytical thinking and Althusserian notions of ideology, replace the idea of the
individual by the concept of the ‘subject’. The ‘subject’ and his or her ‘subjectivity’ is a
social construction: ‘Thus a biological female can have a masculine subjectivity (that is,
she can make sense of the world and of her self and her place in that world through
patriarchal ideology). Similarly, a black can have a white subjectivity’ (Fiske 1987:258).
But, because subjectivity is a social construction, it is always open to change. All
cultural systems, including language, literature and the products of mass
communication, play a part in the construction and reconstruction of the subject. It is
in this way, according to the Althusserian wing of cultural studies, that ideology is
constantly reproduced in people.
This notion can be seen perhaps more clearly in the fourth characteristic of cultural
studies—the way it views acts of communication, including the ‘reading process’. As one
theorist puts it when talking about the ‘reading’ of a television programme as cultural
text: ‘Reading becomes a negotiation between the social sense inscribed in the program
and the meanings of social experience made by its wide variety of viewers: this
negotiation is a discursive one’ (Fiske 1987:268). The relevance of this notion to children’s
literature is not difficult to perceive.
The fifth characteristic is that cultural studies is not exclusively concerned with
popular culture to the exclusion of ‘high’ culture, or vice versa: ‘Cultural studies does
not require us to repudiate elite cultural forms...rather cultural studies requires us to
identify the operation of specific practices, of how they continuously reinscribe the line
between legitimate and popular culture, and of what they accomplish in specific
contexts’ (Grossberg et al. 1992:13). As a result, cultural studies does interest itself in
the formation, continuation and changes in literary canons, including those of children’s
literature. For example, books originally denied inclusion in the canon of children’s
literature, such as Baum’s Oz books, have later received recognition and have been
included. Other books traditionally included in the canon of children’s literature, such
as Lewis’s Narnia series, Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and Kipling’s Jungle Book have been
criticised on the grounds that the values they contain are too exclusively male and white.
The sixth characteristic is the use of ideology as a central concept, either as a ‘critical’
concept or as a neutral concept. Materialist, political approaches deriving from Marxism
and feminism obviously stress power as the major component of cultural text, power
which is often hidden or rendered apparently ‘natural’ through the process of ideology.
These approaches use what has been called the ‘critical’ concept of ideology which is
‘essentially linked to the process of sustaining asymmetrical relations of power—that is,
to the process of maintaining domination’ (Thompson 1984:4). If ideology is embodied in
cultural text, the major task of the cultural critic is not only understanding the meaning
of the text but also unmasking what appears as natural as a social construction which
favours a particular class or group in society. This process of ‘ideology critique’ or
ideological deconstruction is often carried out in literary studies using an approach,
derived from Williams, involving a combination of textual analysis, theoretical method,
study of historical context, and a political commitment to socialism and feminism.
THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES 35