How to Write a Cultural Studies paper

Posted byGlen Fuller 2 Comments on How to Write a Cultural Studies paper

Perfect timing for everyone writing their CSAA papers, here is How to Write a Cultural Studies Paper (via Az). Those funny Norwegians. He even thanks Keith Windschuttle…

What a crack up! Yes, I do mean that in the technical Deleuzian sense. Phoarrrrr! Cultural Studies is a drug; one must write with an ethics of sobriety.

…but, dang! This guy missed the boat on the ‘Italian turn’. Why doesn’t he realise that the turn away from proto-Marxist conceptions of class was not because of the seductions of the ‘cultural turn’, but because in some circumstances the very mechanisms through which class stratifications were reproduced were being called into question?

I am up far too early. I hate it when you write an abstract drawing on the work of some dude who has got some other dude totally wrong but you don’t know that. Fuck. Fuck the ’70s.

2 replies on “How to Write a Cultural Studies paper”

  1. I hate it when you write an abstract drawing on the work of some dude who has got some other dude totally wrong but you don’t know that. Fuck. Fuck the ’70s.

    Glen, isn’t that all part of the game? I read a book yesterday that launched an at times vitriolic attack on Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities argument, the thrust of which seemed to boil down to an assertion Anderson misread Walter Benjamin in the first place (or took as an assertion of reality what was a figurative, warning gesture about the practice of history writing). Which is fine, I suppose. Except that Anderson’s arguments have been terribly influential for a whole bunch of people because, despite the fact that they may misinterpret Benjamin and oversimplify the rise of nationhood, proposing it as an the effect of a broader ‘background’ causal dynamic (print captialism) and ignoring the thrust of imperialism to create communities based on relationships with the “mother land” and the effects of post-colonialism, Anderson’s arguments have allowed nation formation to be understood and examined beyond the spectre of anthropolgoy, ethnography and decolonization, even if the flow-on debates have, at times, suffered from a “fetishisation of identity” they may not help historians. So I say, embrace the mis-reading, acknowledge it and explore its potential. And don’t write exhaustingly long sentences like the one above.

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