Cultural Work, Culture
Culture comprises ways of thinking, feeling, and acting shared by a group which help them define
- who they are;
- what is natural, real, and legitimate to them in their social existence
- what their place is in that society.
Cultural work is the process by which texts enable those who share a culture
- to reinforce current structures of feeling, thinking or acting (sometimes in resistance to potential change)
OR - to rehearse new patterns of feeling/thinking/acting which history has made necessary.
Jane Tompkins coined the phrase "cultural work" in her book Sensational Designs.
Tompkins sees "the plots and characters" of novels, for example, "as providing society with a means of thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions" (200).
See the many versions of this image, inspired by the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).
