Art needs the avant garde to lead it to new movements, but what I ran into was the NEW-OLD with little real movement forward. At the end of my search, I found a built in devisiveness that cannot be dismissed. I did not expect my discovery. I will relay my findings to the reader as succinctly as possible. I do have an opinion but I will leave it to you to form yours.
The movements after Post-structural are summed up in Patrick Bratlinger's 1992 treatise entitled CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE NEW HISTORICISM presented in Montreal. The titles of these movements seem benign but Bratlinger who defines their origins appears apprehensive at best. He begins his presentation:
"In his 1986 essay "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Richard Johnson
suggested that it might be a "post-post-structuralist" movement, and the same
could be said of the New Historicism. [1] In a self-evident way,
anything that comes after poststructuralism is either part of that phenomenon,
from which it only slightly departs, or a new post-something, though it remains
to ask whether this new post-something delivers the mail in such a completely
new way as to displace, deconstruct, or even just somewhat disrupt the previous
delivery system?[2] The "New" Historicism clearly promises novelty, though not
in relation to poststructuralism -- perhaps only in relation to an old historicism
which, in most of its variants, equals Hegelian idealism, Whig liberalism, or
Marxist materialism. Cultural Studies, too, does not always seem especially
new or novel: it often blends Marxist ideological critique, of either an
Althusserian or a Gramscian sort, with an ethnography of everyday life under
capitalism, and it sometimes appears to be completely innocent of poststructuralism.
Rather than advances beyond poststructuralism, the New Historicism and
Cultural Studies movement is best seen either as adaptations of it or escapes from its
more radical implications. They also share many of the same assumptions and
some of the same practitioners. "
--Patrick Bratlinger
Link to the entire paper: http://bit.ly/R4H1kG
Bratlinger's paper clearly delineates the objectives of the New Historicism and Cultural Studies movement. I found further explanation of the less-than-avant-garde movement in a Power Point presentation that I discovered in my research online. It is entitled Cultural Studies : http://hakka.nctu.edu.tw/Hakka-I-facultywebs/iristuan/course/1002%20Critical%20Approaches%20to%20Literature%5CTeaching%20Metarils%5CWeek10/W10-Cultural%20Studies.ppt
I read devisive words in this presentation. You will find the descriptions of the Cultural Studies movement within the presentation at the link above. The presentation's passages lead toward contention between races, genders, classes, and regions of the world. In its bitterness, it offers no solutions or hope.
All peoples and individuals suffer--they rise and they fall and most get back on their knees, rise, and walk again. Freedom and a better way of life should be goals for all who breathe air on this planet. Opportunities to achieve should be available for individuals and nations. At the same time, the fact that not everyone can or wants to succeed should be acknowledged.
The arts also need freedom, not dictates, to exist. What do we do as writers and poets about this philosophy of destruction and centuries of millennial old bitterness--ignore it, deny it exists, or see to it that it doesn't last? I would like to see something new and positive out there on the horizon after Post-structuralism.
--e. smith sleigh
bene