Title: What is culture and what is history? Unit: PAE001-1 Practising Ideas: Approaches to Theory Course: Performing Arts Institution: University of Bedfordshire Tutors: Dr Louise Douse

1. What is culture and what is
history?
Practising Ideas: Approaches to Theory - Seminar
Dr Louise Douse

2. University of Bedfordshire 2
Write down any questions you have from this mornings
lecture
Textwall code: b3ld Number: 07537 402 400

3. Lecture Schedule
Teaching week/
Calendar week/
Date
Theme, content, title
Lecture preparation
(please see BREO for additional subject
specific seminar preparation)
Teaching week 12
Calendar week 3
Week beginning Monday 12th
January
What is culture and what is
history?
Gareth Farmer
Williams, R. (1976) ‘Culture’ and ‘History,’ in
Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society.
London: Fontana, pp. 76-82 and 119-120
respectively.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 13
Calendar week 4
Week beginning Monday 19th
January
The Nineteenth-Century
Giannandrea Poesio
Collingan, C and Linley, M. (eds.) (2011)
‘Introduction: the nineteenth-century invention
of media,’ in Media, technology and literature in
the nineteenth century, Farnham: Ashgate,
pp.1-19.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 14
Calendar week 5
Week beginning Monday 26th
January
What is an individual (1)
Alice Barnaby
Berman, M. (2010) ‘Introduction,’ in All that is
solid melts into air: the experience of modernity.
London: Verso, pp. 15-36.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
University of Bedfordshire 3

4. Lecture Schedule
Teaching week/
Calendar week/
Date
Theme, content, title
Lecture preparation
(please see BREO for additional subject
specific seminar preparation)
Teaching week 15
Calendar week 6
Week beginning Monday 2nd
February
Modernism
Jane Carr
Greenberg, C. (2003) ‘Modernist painting,’ in
Harrision, C. and Wood, P. (eds.) Art in theory,
1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas.
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 773-779.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 16
Calendar week 7
Week beginning Monday 9th
February
Structuralism and semiotics
Gareth Farmer
Tyson, L. (2006) ‘Structuralist criticism,’ in
Critical theory today: a user-friendly guide. New
York: Routledge, pp. 209-247.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 17
Calendar week 8
Week beginning Monday 16th
February
Post-Modernism: Interpretative
Anarchies
Johnmichael Rossi and Amalia
Garcia
Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The death of the author,’ in
Image – music – text. Translated by S. Heath.
London: Fontana, pp. 142-148.
Etchells, T. (1999) ‘On risk and investment,’ in
Certain fragments: contemporary performance
and Forced Entertainment. London: Routledge,
pp.48-50.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
University of Bedfordshire 4

5. Lecture Schedule
Teaching week/
Calendar week/
Date
Theme, content, title
Lecture preparation
(please see BREO for additional subject
specific seminar preparation)
Teaching week 18
Calendar week 9
Week beginning Monday 23rd
February
Post-Colonialism
Victor Ukaegbu
Crow, B. [With Banfield, C.] (1996)
‘Introduction,’ in An Introduction to postcolonial
theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 1-17.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 19
Calendar week 10
Week beginning Monday 2nd
March
Intertextual studies
Giannandrea Poesio
Garraghan, D. (1999) ‘Too many cooks mix the
metaphors: Marin and Spink, and the sandman
link’ in Adshead-Lansdale, J. (ed.) Dancing
texts: intertextuality in interpretation, London:
Dance Books, pp. 148-176.
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 20
Calendar week 11
Week beginning Monday 9th
March
What is an individual (2)
Clare Walsh and Giannandrea
Poesio
Meyer, M. (2001) ‘Acting camp,’ in Counsell, C.
and Wolf, L. (eds.) Performance analysis: an
introductory coursebook. London: Routledge,
pp. 86-92.
University of Bedfordshire 5

6. Lecture Schedule
Teaching week/
Calendar week/
Date
Theme, content, title
Lecture preparation
(please see BREO for additional subject
specific seminar preparation)
Teaching week 21
Calendar week 12
Week beginning Monday 16th
March
Skills session 3: Essay Writing
Nicola Darwood
Professional and Academic Development (no
date) How to – write an essay. Study Hub:
Online
[Available Online – see BREO Guided
Learning]
Teaching week 22
Calendar week 16
Week beginning Monday 13th
April
Assessment 2 due: Friday 17th
April
Teaching week 23
Calendar week 17
Week beginning Monday 20th
April
Skills Session 4: Poster
presentation
Sadie Hunt
Task: Investigate the key features and purpose
of academic posters. Please bring notes with
you to the lecture, including useful sources that
you discovered.
Please remember that you will be creating an
arts/ humanities poster rather than a science
poster.
Teaching week 24
Calendar week 18
Week beginning Monday 27th
April
Assessment 3 due: Friday 1st
May
University of Bedfordshire 6

7. Assessment 2 - Essay
• When
• Friday 17th
April 2015, electronic version through turnitin must
be submitted.
• What
• This assessment requires you to individually produce a
written essay of 1,500 words including quotations. You may
select one of the practitioners/ authors/ playwrights that you
have studied on this unit from your subject area.
• Weighting of the assessment
• This assessment forms 40% of the unit.
University of Bedfordshire 7

8. Assessment 3 – Poster
Presentation
• When
• Friday 1st
May 2015, electronic version through turnitin must be
submitted.
• What
• This assessment requires you to submit a poster
presentation, you will also have the opportunity to deliver
these presentations in groups during seminar time for
feedback before submission. You will be provided with one
texts from a possible four in your particular field.
• Weighting of the assessment
• This assessment forms 30% of the unit.
University of Bedfordshire 8

9. What is history?
If the boundaries between history and fiction are no longer clear or
distinct, if, indeed the argument is that understanding the past is itself
a creative act which can be rendered differently by historians, novelists
and poets, then the place of the imagination in the construction of
historical accounts becomes central.
(Husbands, C. 1996)
January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 9

10. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 10
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
• Culture is “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”
• We need culture “to make reason and the will of God to prevail.”
• Culture can be obtained “by means of reading, observing, and
thinking.”
• It also seeks “to minister to the diseased spirit of our time.”
• Culture is (i) the ability to know what is best
(ii) what is best
(iii) the mental and spiritual application of what is best
(iv) the pursuit of what is best
(Arnold cited in Storey, 2006, p. 14)

11. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 11
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
• The highly instructed few, and not the scantily instructed many, will
ever be the organ to the human race of knowledge and truth.
Knowledge and truth in the full sense of the words, are not attainable
by the great mass of the human race at all.
(Arnold cited in Storey, 2006, p. 17)

12. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 12
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
• Barbarians (aristocracy)
noble savage
• Philistine (middle class)
undervalue art, beauty, intellectual content – materialistic
• Populace (working class)
“a common basis of human nature”

13. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 13
High and Popular Culture
• The six definitions of popular culture:
• Culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people.
• The culture which is left over after we have decided what is high
culture.
• As ‘mass culture’.
• The culture which originates from ‘the people’.
• A political concept – hegemony.
• Post-modern culture – no longer recognises the distinction
between high and popular art.

14. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 14
Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
• ‘The “ideal”, in which culture is a state or process of human perfection in
terms of certain absolute or universal values.’
• The “documentary” record: ‘culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative
work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are
variously recorded.’
• ‘There is the “social” definition of culture, in which culture is a description of a
particular way of life.’
• The ‘anthropological’ position which sees culture as a description of a
particular way of life.
• The proposition that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values.’
• The work of cultural analysis should be the ‘clarification of the
meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a
particular culture.’
(Williams, R. cited in Storey, J. 2006: pg. 34-35)

15. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 15
Raymond Williams (1921-1988)
• “there will always be a tendency for this process of selection to be related
and even governed by the interests of the class that is dominant.”
• “[T]he extremely damaging and quite untrue identification of ‘popular culture’
(commercial newspapers, magazines, entertainments, etc.) with ‘working-
class culture’. In fact the main source of this ‘popular culture’ lies outside the
working class altogether, for it is instituted, financed and operated by the
commercial bourgeoisie, and remains typically capitalist in its methods of
production and distribution. That working-class people form perhaps a
majority of the consumers of this material… does not, as a fact, justify the
facile identification.”
(Williams, R. cited in Storey, J. 2006: pg 36-37)

16. January 12, 2015University of Bedfordshire 16
References
• Husbands, C. (1996) What is History Teaching? Language, Ideas
and Meaning in Learning about the Past, Buckingham: Open
University Press.
• Storey, J. (2006) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An
Introduction. 4th
Edn. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.
• Storey, J. (2006) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. 3rd
Edn. Harlow: Pearson Prentice Hall.
• Strinati, D. (2004) An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. 2nd
Edn. London: Routledge.