A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

end.” 44 Postcolonialism is often similarly defined, for example by John McLeod, as
representations, reading practices, and values that “circulate across the barrier between
colonial rule and national indepencence.” 45 Terry Eagleton defined the prefix in a
different context in an illuminating way: “‘post’ here means rather ‘product of’ than
‘confidently posterior.’” 46 Hence, both will be written without hyphenation, which is
supposed to indicate that the ‘post’ is not taken as a temporal marker. 47
My work often tries to capture some sense of the various cultural influences which affect
individuals’ lives. I belive in the function that poetry performs in reflecting and shaping the people and
culture which give it life, which sustain it. I believe that this social function of poetry is part of the give and
take between life and art which ideally makes the two indistinguishable, exciting, and mutually beneficial.
2.1 Cultural Studies
And I believe that this process is inevitable.
Eric Chock – commenting on his writing 48
In general, the neo-Marxist discipline of cultural studies consolidated itself in England in
the 1970s as engaged scholarship combining sociological, economic, political and literary
starting-points: “Cultural studies is a set of writing practices; it is a discursive, analytic,
interpretive tradition.” 49 Its followers take texts as raw material, studying the production,
reception, and varied use of texts along with their internal characteristics. Their ultimate
object is defined as “the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their
circulation, including their textual embodiment.” 50 Culture in their view is a whole way of
life, the sum of social practices, and it is conceived relationally. It is also the site of
struggles over meaning and of the negotiation of divisions, for “meaning is a social
production, the world has to be made to mean.” 51 Turning to embodiments of ‘everyday
44 Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester 1999: 3.
45 McLeod 2000: 5.
46 Quoted by Helen Tiffin, “Plato’s Cave: Educational and Critical Practices,” in Bruce King (ed.), New
National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction, Oxford 1996: 143-163, here 144.
47 See McLeod 2000: 5 for the according practice.
48 Quoted in Joseph Stanton/Darrell Lum/Estelle Enoki (eds.) The Quietest Singing, Honolulu 2000: 215.
49 John Storey, What Is Cultural Studies, London 1996: 278.
50 Storey 1996: 2.
51 Ibid.: 4.
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