Reading with Cultural Materialism: An illustrative Exercise with Textual Corridors

Abstract

The most prominent commonality between cultural materialism and new historicism is the understanding that a literary work should be read, understood and evaluated politically also, without neglecting the other alternative appraisals. The common fallacies of most of the 20th century critical endeavors, like their inherent obscurity, notional heterogeneity, and flexibility, have affected cultural materialism also. The deconstructive strategy of exclusion of the outside, thus making the textual world a sovereign of its own too, is sharply criticized by the practitioners of cultural poetics, because the techniques of cultural materialism are employed very effectively to reveal how aesthetic value, far from being timeless and universal, is contingent on historical change. In a cultural materialist reading, contextualization of a text is carried out from a politically charged perspective. To the cultural materialists, an inbuilt confession of the critic’s or reader’s political commitment can be traced from the method of their literary intervention. Pure independent existence of any discipline is rejected, as they argue that any text is a discourse, which is to be read, appreciated, and interpreted along with other existing or extinct discourse in a society.