Cultural studies questionnaire

Abstract

The people I find myself going back to are Eric Mottram (Blood on the Nash Ambassador and many other essays), Marshall McLuhan (The Mechanical Bride), Robert Duncan (The HD Book) and ways of working I particularly admire include those of Josefina Ludmer, Yolanda Salas, Julio Ortega, Alberto Flores Galindo and Jesus Martin-Barbero. One of the things that brought me to cultural studies is the necessity of finding out where one is, that that involves investigating a large field of information. The sensation of entering a big process of discovery—I think I first got the sense of that reading Eliot's The Waste Land at school. It wasn't on the syllabus and I don't remember how I heard about it. Pound I first heard of reading the Sunday Times—in around 1960: you won't find major modern poets there now! At school I read Thompson's Aeschylus and Athens and was fascinated by how one could discover a deep relationship between the form of literature (e.g. how many actors there were on the stage in Greek tragedy) and major changes in the society. Over time, Pound's sense of learning how to navigate different cultures (he used the word periplum) became important to me. Teaching in Peru for 2 years in the 1960s was crucial: to understand that environment meant getting hold of new types of explanation (Marxism and also the work of younger Peruvian poets, such as Pablo Guevara and Antonio Cisneros, whom I started to translate). At that time I also began to find out about anthropology—later I studied Andean song and did some fieldwork. Anthropologists in Peru, like Alejandro Ortiz and Juan Ossio, introduced me to new ways of understanding the culture. Back in the UK, I did a PhD on Jose Maria Arguedas, with Jean Franco as my supervisor, so the challenge was always to read literature alongside social and political urgencies! Some classes she gave on Cesar Vallejo affected me a lot: we were discussing those prison poems in Trilce and how they are a type of modern—condensed and fragmented—epic. I have always felt the necessity to work out the relation between forms and history. At first I found it very difficult and did a lot of short-circuiting— collapsing differences (which Pound calls making 'a series of indefinite middles') so as to produce sentences, because it's in the writing that the problem became tangible. I have found Angel Rama, Roberto Schwarz and Julio Ortega very useful for this, all of them in different ways, of course. But I would also say it's the works of literature that often help one most to begin to move through a large and complex field: I am thinking here of say La casa verde or El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. I am giving a paper in Bogota, at the Conference on Cultural Studies in Latin America organized by Carlos Rincon, on the place of the literary work and the problem of intellectual disciplines in cultural studies, because that's one of the issues that most preoccupies me: not