Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies: Literature, Media

and Popular Culture

http://www.honors.rit.edu/amitraywiki/index.php/Intro_LCS:_Fall_2007

Media

•What are our media habits?

•What is media?

Media

• noun < media, plural of MEDIUM

• Materials that hold data in any form or that allow data to pass through them, including paper, transparencies, multipart forms, hard, floppy and optical disks, magnetic tape, wire, cable and fiber.

• Mass Media--the Institutions that disseminate information on a massive scale

Media forms now

proliferatemedia has developed

rapidly in the last century and a half

Victorian England

England of the 19th C

• industrializing

•urbanizing

• imperial

Literacy

•Education and Reading as a national imperative

•Beginnings of Mass Literacy and Mandatory Education for the populace

Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy(1869)

“Sweetness and Light”

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/nonfiction_u/arnoldm_ca/ca_ch1.html

What is Culture according to Arnold ?

“The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.”From the “Preface” to Culture and Anarchy

“Dover Beach”Matthew Arnold1867The sea is calm to-night.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.Sophocles long agoHeard it on the A gaean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night.