“有感觉的男性身体”——论霍加特的文化批评

“身体”是英国文化研究的扛鼎之作《识字的用途》中的重要隐喻。理查德·霍加特通过这一隐喻描述了二战后英国社会的文化生活,尤其是大众文化对工人阶级传统文化的腐蚀以及通过奖学金男孩“有感觉的男性身体”所实现的文化反抗。“有感觉的男性身体”,复合了更为古老的“身体”:它扬弃了利维斯文学批评中的“感觉”话语,整合了奥威尔登左派批评传统对“身体”的再现。作为三种身体形态之一,“有感觉的男性身体”囊括并超越了大众文化被性化、支离破碎的女性身体和永恒的母性身体,体现了变化—拒绝变化的二律背反；它既是社会瘀伤的症候,又通过特有的感觉能力为治愈社会提供了药方。

Richard Hoggart's Culture Critique

Body features an important metaphor in Richard Hoggart''s The Uses of Literacy:Aspects of Working-class Life,one of the three founding texts of British Cultural Studies. This metaphor maps the cultural situation in post-war Britain,especially the erosion of traditional working class culture by mass culture and such resistance against it as is demonstrated by the feeling male body of the Scholarship Boy. The feeling male body,as the combination of older body forms,goes beyond the female body sexualized by mass culture and the emotionless,asexualized Mother''s body,functioning both as the symptom of the culturally bruised society and its antidote.