Culture as Text, Text as Culture
Editor: Elodie Lafitte, Christina Wall and Mary Cobb Wittrock
Date Of Publication: Mar 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1848-3
Isbn: 1-4438-1848-8
Culture as Text, Text as Culture represents a novel, interdisciplinary analysis of textuality as it pertains to Cultural Studies. More specifically, the work examines how the analysis of texts has shaped the most vital contemporary debate of Cultural Studies: the recognition that all texts and their contexts are constructs. Building upon a Post-structural/Post-modern understanding of truth as a construct, Cultural Studies has long since acknowledged the ability of texts to express the time and culture of their origin. This work, however, expands this idea, demonstrating not only how a culture is preserved in a text, but how that text can in turn define its culture, even redefine its history.

This compendium is structured around four of the most prominent contemporary topics of Cultural Studies: the relationship between historical and fictional writing, the ability of authors to recreate or redefine history, the relationship between language and image, and the ability for traditionally marginalized groups to reassert their place in history. The book presents articles from a large spectrum of disciplinary fields and civilizations in order to demonstrate how the application of Cultural Studies can unite seemingly disparate disciplines.

Elodie Lafitte received her MA in German Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her master thesis focused on Christa Wolf’s Medea using theories of new historicism and feminism to examine the demystification of the woman and the political discourse. She also holds a Master in European Studies from the Center for European Integration Studies.

Christina Wall is a PhD candidate in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation investigates the influence of African American culture on German conceptualizations of “blackness.”

Mary Cobb Wittrock holds a PhD in Modern French Studies from the University of Maryland and an MS in Physics from Florida State University. Her dissertation examines 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literature through the lens of chaos theory as a new investigation on genre, identity, memory and gender. Her analysis draws from the fictional works of Annie Ernaux, Frankétienne, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

“The essays in Culture and Text represent an exciting and significant contribution to the burgeoning field of cultural studies—by drawing together these seemingly disparate elements not just from a traditional narrative perspective, but from a close examination of textual images, imagery, non-linear, subaltern, and other non-hegemonic approaches, this collection provides a comprehensive study of the realities underlying what Spivak refers to as a ‘space of difference’ that represent the hybridity inherent in any culture, allowing fresh interpretations of old and new texts.”

—Sheila Turek, Assistant Professor of French, Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

“Written in a lucid and extremely engaging style, rich in rare and uniquely interesting archival content, and bringing into light issues that clearly hold an important relevance in the field, this timely edited volume maps out the directions that current scholarship in cultural and global studies can take and promises to open windows to paths of inquiry that favor a richly textured understanding of our human past and present, by promoting the emergence of new and multi-forms of knowledge about them.”

—Safoi Babana-Hampton, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Department of French Classics and Italian, Michigan State University

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