A review of two recent books on culture--- Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000) and Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) by Jeffrey J. Williams.

I have little interest in Eagleton---I stopped reading him after his The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), which was a polemical tract. Mulhern'd text, Culture/Metaculture, looks interesting on William's interepretation. William says:

Mulhern's argument turns on an unexpected but forceful reconstruction of the origins of cultural studies. He recasts its starting point from the Birmingham Centre to the longer and wider net of modernist Kulturkritik. The first half of the book surveys a group of modernist European writers who criticized modern society, including a range of writers such as Thomas Mann, Julian Benda, Karl Mannheim, Ortega y Gasset, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Orwell, T.S. Eliot, and Leavis, leading up to the inaugural moment of British cultural studies. What these writers have in common, and what Mulhern recoups, is their critical stance toward modern life under capitalism. What they also have in common, but what Mulhern discards, is their elitist remove from common culture and politics.

Williams says that :

Mulhern fuses this tradition [Kulturkritik] with British cultural studies. Why his account is unexpected is because cultural studies typically casts itself in opposition to Kulturkritik, whereas Mulhern argues that they both participate in the same "metacultural" discursive formation. Kulturkritik privileges an elitist minority culture, that draws upon a high tradition and sets itself against popular culture; cultural studies retains the same coordinates, but inverts Kulturkritik's values, privileging the popular and abnegating tradition, arguing not for a minority culture but for the worth of minority cultures. Both also claim the political authority of the cultural; the mistake is that they overestimate that authority. In Mulhern's narrative, Raymond Williams is a bridge figure, asserting the politics of culture but dispatching the paternalism of Kulturkritik.