CULTURAL SELECTION: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time and Others Don't

by Gary Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1996

Calling the current culture wars a battle over ""the right to rule memory,"" Shakespeare scholar Taylor (Univ. of Alabama; Reinventing Shakespeare, 1989) advances a theory of cultural memory and the ""Greats,"" and of how culture is ""made."" Taylor's effort to take the culture wars onto less shifting ground carries his book back and forth between the humanities and the social and hard sciences as he searches for analogies and methodology. Instead of embracing a particular view of culture, say, the Bloomian (Harold and Allan) Western canon or de Man's deconstructed texts, Taylor's approach is to ask how culture actually originates, solidifies, and recapitulates itself. On the unarguable assumption that codifying certain works also entails forgetting others, he posits a competition, a sort of cultural survival of the fittest, among authors, editors, politicians, and consumers, who make up a society's memory cells and transmitters. But his metaphors of evolutionary theory and memory are too disjointed. His discussion of Elizabethan theater, mingling the Darwinian idea of genre ""niches"" with Stephen Jay Gould's revisionist theory of a ""punctuated equilibrium"" of evolutionary leaps, for example, is offered without consideration of other cultural influences or political and economic factors. Interdisciplinary excursions into movies (Casablanca), painting (Velzquez), or music (Stravinsky) leave many of his questions suspended in mid-air. He is also guilty of rhetorical overload, as when he identifies the Reformation and the Civil War as ""editorial disputes."" Only in the last section, when Taylor concentrates on discrete cases, such as the Vietnam Memorial or Nixon's posthumous reputation, does he truly plumb the rules and risks of a society's memory. By switching gears (and analogies) as he pursues the origins of cultural memory, Taylor fails to make a coherent argument for a collective remembering society.

Pub Date: April 1, 1996

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Basic

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996

Categories: NONFICTION