Cultural materialism is related to new historicism except the latter concentrates on those at top while cultural materialists concentrate on those at bottom of economic and social ladder. Focus is on class (proletariat, aristocracy, bourgeoisie), economics (feudalism, capitalism, socialism), commodification (private and public realms are subordinated to logic of capitalism, or things like friendship, knowledge, women, etc. seen only in terms of commodities). Such critics are interested in how things that we think are “above” the marketplace, e.g., literature/art, are actually shaped often by values of that very marketplace. Today, take publishing books as an example. No longer are great publishing houses headed by people (a.k.a. white men) who know and value books as such but by people like Rupert Murdock, rank capitalists who expect titles to bring in huge profits. This means many kinds of books and kinds of authors cannot be published by such places. Or take independent bookstores like Orr or Amazon in Mpls. Even people who inveigh against places like Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com buy books there because they are cheaper and easier/quicker to acquire.

 

Cultural materialist critics/theorists reject single narratives of history in favor of multiple historical narratives. They are not enthusiastic about political history, the traditional organizational principle in teaching history.  They are interested in points of rupture in the grand narratives of Western history. So traditional American history is a matter of manifest destiny, that is whites were ordained to become dominant and to conquer everything between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Cultural materialists would focus on the stories told by Native Americans or slaves or women on the prairie, not those of robber barons or plantation owners. Documents consulted differ from traditional historical evidence in that cultural materialists look at things like individual journals or autobiographies. They want to find moments in a culture’s history where dissension or transgression or uncertainty exist so that social upheaval is possible. The 1960s are  a major example here along with the Beatles in England or the publication of Columbus’ own words about how he “saw” the indigenous people he found, or right this minute the growing immigration protest movement.

 

Texts MUST be studied in context; texts are not autonomous units examined without bringing in what has been labeled “intentional fallacy” by new critics and post-modernists. So the life and times of the author are central to understanding how to read a text.

 

Questions a cultural materialist might ask: