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A couple of weeks ago, I told some colleagues at work that I was writing an article about fanzines. They replied, partly amused, slightly patronizing: “It reminds me of being fifteen, and learning of what band I was supposed to like or not.” In a sense, they were right. Music zines are probably the most common and certainly the easiest to get hold of, and yes, they are often written by teenagers for teenagers. But there is no reason to reduce fanzines to this subject and age group (and fanzines certainly cannot be dismissed as a trend) other than a common discrediting of works that don’t belong to high culture and my colleagues’ obvious lack of information (sorry, guys!). Indeed, fanzines are so much more, in their content, aim, and form: personal zines, DIY reports on local happenings, anarchist zines, animal rights zines, sports zines, cooking zines (the best vegan recipes are to be found in zines), alternative medicine zines, sex zines, postcolonial zines, eco zines, art zines…. No matter the ...

This article links class analysis and institutionalism through a case study of late‐19th‐century employers. Class analysis extends institutionalism by highlighting an additional source of cultural transposition—a generalized identity summarized here as “business citizenship.” Institutionalism, in turn, shows how civic associations worked to unify employers and foster an overarching class consciousness. The case study provides an overview of class formation among Cincinnati employers and illustrates how business citizenship carried over from the realms of political reform and high culture to personnel management and industrial training. Some comparative observations suggest this pattern of class formation and cultural transposition was typical.

There is increasing evidence that in Classic Maya society some of the finest objects were produced by artists who were elites. Excavations at the rapidly abandoned center of Aguateca, Guatemala, in particular, have provided clear archaeological evidence of craft production by elites. These data present a unique test case for refining the archaeological theory of craft specialization. For the Classic Maya, the manufacture of art objects was an act of creation loaded with symbolic meaning. Skilled crafting, along with the privileged knowledge encoded in the products, formed an important part of the high culture that served to distinguish the elite from the rest of society. The cultural and symbolic capital resulting from artistic creation also had critical meaning and consequences for competition among elites. Such a system of craft specialization needs to be understood in its social and cultural contexts, with particular emphasis on the power relations and ideologies surrounding production.

The art world may be said to have adopted some of the ideas suggested by the phrase "French theory," while leaving alone those elements in it that might interfere with the collective pursuit of business as usual. In a manner perhaps reminiscent of de Certeau's theory that the working class takes only what it can use from high culture and leaves the rest, the ways in which the art world uses French ideas have less to do with not under

Generally speaking, books about art and artists tend to fall into a genre we might call “heroic”; they celebrate human creativity and accentuate the novel achievements of a particular generation or individual. Books about science and scientists frequently also conform to this heroic model, despite the best efforts of resolutely historicist historians of science. Books about Nazis, in contrast, with the exception of the apologist eulogies of David Irving, tend to the antiheroic; they condemn the political innovations of the Third Reich and dissect with evident antipathy the “civilization” that brought about the Holocaust. What do you get when you cross these two genres? Can a coherent story be told about the cultural world of midtwentieth-century Germany? That is the historiographical question that modern German cultural historians now face, and it is important to recognize it as a subspecies of one of our century’s great moral dilemmas: what has high culture contributed to barbarism? This, of course, is not a new set of self-torturing ruminations; one should probably put its origins in the Great War. For if the war reshaped British literature, in the words of Paul Fussell, according to a “dynamics of hope abridged,” for German intellectuals in particular the war raised the terrifying question of civilization’s contribution to technological dehumanization. (That many of the latter identified the destructive facets of civilization with French and English culture and exempted German Kultur from blame was, of course, an important exculpatory feature of this strain of thought.) Some aspects of postwar British irony and German anti-Western biliousness have been reshaped by subsequent disasters and crusades—World War II, colonial wars, antinuclear campaigns, environmental movements. But a fundamen

AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL ISSUES in the history of black American art have often been difficult to disentangle from one another. Such confusion is encountered in all art, of course, but it has been a particular burden for black Americans. Art represents and sanctifies what is valued in a society; the ability to create and appreciate art implies heightened human sensibility and confers social status and prestige. A people said to be without art, or with a degraded form of it, reputedly show themselves lacking in the qualities that dignify human experience and social interaction. They are said to be "uncultured," "primitive," unable to participate in refined society. Definitions of art are therefore highly political. They are major battlegrounds on which the struggle for human and social recognition is waged. A people can ill afford to let others control the definitions by which their arts are classified and evaluated. The history of black American art demonstrates the social consequences of such aesthetic control. During the first centuries of black experience in America, partly to support a social system grounded on the denial of the humanity of black people, whites generally refused to admit that blacks could make art at all. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, enough black artists had mastered the white Europeanized aesthetic tradition to argue that blacks had proved their civility and should be allowed the benefits of American democracy. No "people that has ever produced great literature and art," said James Weldon Johnson, "has ever been looked on by the world as distinctly inferior."' Yet to gain a measure of acceptance from the white art world and white society, black fine artists have often been forced to conform to artistic traditions and forms that denied their unique cultural heritage and the reality of their American experience. This was not true for all black artists, however. From the earliest years of their American captivity, blacks had practiced aspects of the traditional arts of Africa. Although these activities did not conform to white artistic definitions and so were not dignified with the name art, they did provide their makers and communities a sense of historical continuity, a method to help merge conflicting cultural forces into intelligible social patterns, and important support for human value in the face of a slave system bent on denying it. Long before black Americans learned European fine arts and were taught to be ashamed of their folk practices as evidence of slavery and barbarism, they had mastered these African-derived traditional art forms, the practice of which would continue to the present as a vibrant force in black American society. Despite the significance of folk art in black American culture, virtually no general studies of the history of American art take seriously black American contributions. In the rare instances when they are mentioned, it is usually only the works that have met the aesthetic standards of academic taste and "high culture." The few specialized exhibitions and books that have focused entirely on the work of black American artists have also generally adopted a high-cultural bias.2 A noEugene W. Metcalf is associate professor at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. The author appreciates the comments of Judith Fryer, Curtis Ellison, Leonard Hochberg, John Vlach, Kenneth Ames, John Frase, and especially Alan Axelrod on earlier versions and dedicates this paper to Peter Clecak, with long-overdue thanks. 1 James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; 2d ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 9. 2 An important exception to this is an exhibition, organized for the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978 by John Michael Vlach, and its catalogue, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. It emphasizes the folk traditions in black American culture and art. o 1983 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. All rights reserved. oo84-0416/83/1804-ooo3$o2.oo

What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more clearly-in a sense, even more crudelythan any other major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of modern high culture by Proust's time, persists, I believe, in our own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged experience has, furthermore, been served by psychoanalysis -more specifically, by a certain view of sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes normative-both for an individual and for a culture-the mortuary aesthetic of A la recherche du temps perdu. As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the Proustian narrator's discovery of his vocation as a writer. Let's begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre, the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the "resurrection" of Marcel's grandmother on the first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le Temps retrouve will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence of art on death. This dependence is obliquely defined in two very different ways, and the difference is first pointed to by what the narrator describes as

Maurice Bowra in his memoirs recalls a course given by one of his Oxford teachers: "One term he lectured on 'What do we see?' He began hopefully with the idea that we see colors, but he abandoned it in the third week, and argued that we saw things. But that would not do either, and by the end of term he admitted ruefully, 'I'm damned if I know what we do see.' 1 The question is more difficult than appears at first glance. Besides the purely epistemological problem, culture itself is involved. When we experience, for example, a mimetic work of art, like a play or novel, our decoding may entail such culturally influenced givens as our sense of time, our notion of what sorts of social order are just, and our expectations regarding proper and acceptable human behavior. Such givens obviously vary from class to class and from nation to nation as well. The nineteenth-century Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky went so far as to argue that -this way of seeing actually defines nationality: ". . . the secret of nationality in every nation lies not in its dress and cuisine but in its manner of perceiving."' Theatre was one of the arts that flourished in Russia's Silver Age, that efflorescence in high culture that graced the last two decades of Imperial Russia. The Moscow Art Theatre's innovations are well known. And the Art Theatre was just one of several catering to the cultivated and presenting to them plays vetted by a special censorship more concerned with matters like preventing the depicting of clergy on stage than with protecting this "adult" audience from dangerous ideas. A sophisticated theatre-going public in the capitals had access to the best of the European dramatic literature as well as contemporary plays that entertained by their sharp, witty dialogue and their treatment of provocative themes. The experimental

With reference to medieval England M. T. Clanchy argues that "the growth in the uses of literacy [between 1066 and 1307] is indicated by, and was perhaps primarily a consequence of, the production and retention of records on an unprecedented scale."' That is, rather than view literacy as a step on the road to literature, to learning and high culture, Clanchy stresses the interrelationship between literacy and administrative practice. Writing creates the possibility of documentation; documentation brings more people into contact with the written word (whether or not they themselves possess literate skills); and, in time, as documentation becomes accepted as necessary, as mental habits adjust to it, as reliance upon it increases, so it in turn stimulates further expansion in the uses of literacy. There is, of course, no single model, no blueprint for the growth and uses of medieval literacy. Nevertheless, Clanchy's account of the transition "from memory to written record" in England can be immensely helpful to historians of other societies, for it provides a carefully and subtly constructed framework for discussion, as well as a rich store of suggestive analogy. The present study is concerned with "Kievan" Russia, c. 1050-1200. Before the mid-eleventh century direct evidence for literacy in Russia is extremely sparse, and its interpretation is hotly controversial. Some knowledge of writing doubtless existed in the tenth century, a knowledge fostered both by international trade and by the Christian church, whose presence was gradually established over many decades prior to Russia's "official" conversion in the late 980s. But the sources, fragmentary and ambiguous, provide no indication of the extent of this literacy, nor of the language or languages in which it was applied. The regular native use of Slavonic writing is attested only after Russia's official conversion, with the training of clergy and copyists.2 Even then, however, for over half a century we have to rely mainly on occasional statements in later narrative sources, to which may be added a

So angry at the blatant sexism of the mass media as to be blinded, students of the media's presentation of women have been more politically sophisticated than theoretically sound. In part, their research has been crippled by dependence upon the academic study of mass communications, a field hardly known for its intellectual vigor, but one whose problems must be understood in order to see why research on women and the media is theoretically stalled. The American Study of the Mass Media In the years following World War II, the media grew exponentially. So did study of the media. Perhaps because the media associated with the "mass" were insistently differentiated from high culture and intellectual substance, no academic field was willing to give such study a home. Instead, just as interdisciplinary teams of social scientists had cooperated during the war to study propaganda, they now cooperated to study the mass media. Perhaps defensively, the field became ponderously "scientific." To demonstrate that the media constituted an intellectually valid subject, researchers embraced the sophisticated techniques of modern social science and simultaneously hired themselves out as media consultants. Working for both Madison Avenue and the media conglomerates, they were asked to supply practical answers to seemingly

Government-sponsored occupations are major outlets for women professionals in France, although women are underrepresented at higher levels. Under French traditions, teaching and public administration are highly professionalized, offering distinctive opportunities for women. Access for women to higher education in France compares favorably with other Western societies, but it is patterned by class inequalities that have the effect of diminishing the role of higher education as a path to the professions for women. The contrast between potential and actual professional achievement has not led to "feminist" counter-ideologies. This situation is analyzed in terms of national and class values defining the nature of women, of high culture, and the relationship between government and society. The professional achievements of French women, although comparatively substantial, are interpreted as constrained and ambiguous.