John Simons

The Golden Age of Cricket

The aim of this essay is to look at some features of the game of cricket as it has been mediated to us through popular books dealing specifically with aspects of its history and through the popular imagination. My concern, however, will not be to analyse specific items — often such projects in the realm of popular cultural studies become too descriptive — rather I shall be looking at the game of cricket itself as a popular cultural form. I particularly intend to argue that, in the context of popular cricket history, the ideological load which cricket has been asked to carry may be shown, surprisingly perhaps, to constitute a consistent and deliberate set of values which appear oppositional to much contemporary social and political thought. The effect of this approach is that I will not be dealing with such well-known items as cigarette cards, though these are an undoubted proof of the popularity of the game, nor will I be dealing with the fictionalisation of cricket in such famous organs as The Boy’s Own Paper or the Magnet. It is tempting to open up this area but the ethos of the school story is well understood and an analysis would do little except reinforce the themes which I will be exploring by reference to less familiar material.

The Longest Revolution: Cultural Studies after Speciesism

This article is a provisional exploration of the field of cultural studies from a committed animal rights perspective. It argues that cultural studies will need to be reformed in response to increasing public concern about animal welfare issues and the growth of environmental consciousness. A number of critical readings of literary texts are employed to exemplify how this reformation might manifest itself in practice. It includes a review and critique of some current work in the field and suggests that cultural theory is presently unable to respond fully to the place of animals in cultural production.

The Animal as Symbol

Throughout recorded history humans have watched Non–Humans and lived in close proximity with them. This observation has been the root on which the cultural reproduction of animals has been grafted and without this no Non–Human would have become the subject or object of any aesthetic representation. The methods by which Non–Humans have become the material of cultural reproduction are manifold and the following chapters will explore three of them: the use of animals as symbols; anthropomorphism; and narratives of transformation. All other modes of representation are variants on these three main techniques. The three categories are by no means hermetically sealed and it may well be that readers will think that some of the examples I give do not fit into the category in which I wish to place them particularly well. This does not worry me as what I am attempting to do here is not to produce a rigorously worked out poetics or narratology of the nonhuman. I want instead to provide examples of the ways in which animals are depicted in western culture and to comment on the significance of this depiction for the human relationship with the nonhuman. In fact, I would be very pleased if what I have to say engages any reader sufficiently to make him or her wish to contest and reorganise my arguments.

The Animal in Some Contemporary Thought

This is not a philosophical study, nor is it a work of political science. My aim throughout will be to keep in view the ways in which our reading and appreciation of cultural text are determined and conditioned by our attitude towards animals and the question of their rights. However, in order to contextualise my later analyses and to give the reader who may not be familiar with the wider debates some material on which to base his or her judgements, it will be helpful here to review at moderate length the chief theories upon which the proposition that animals have rights has been based. In addition, there will be some consideration of work that is positively hostile to the idea.

A Chapter of Vulgar Errors

This chapter is an attempt to put some of the readings that follow into some kind of theoretical perspective just as the previous chapters have attempted to give an historical overview. As this book is not an attempt to produce any kind of consistent theoretical statement about the nature of the Non–Human experience this chapter is more of a critique of a range of positions and an investigation of the limits of certain ways of thinking (including my own). The reader who is simply interested in seeing how Non–Humans are dealt with in a range of texts may safely skip it.

Animal Rights in History

In this chapter I shall be reviewing the work of some of the more important thinkers who contributed to the development of an animal rights consciousness in the past. I shall also be examining a small group of historical works that, over the last 35 years or so, have helped to create a climate in which speculation on the relationship between humans and Non–Humans is a respectable, if not mainstream, activity within the academic world. It is, of course, the case that a concern for animals is by no means limited to philosophers and critics. Indeed, one of the chief things that motivated me to write this book now was precisely what seemed to me to be the discrepancy between the huge public interest in animal matters and the relative lack of a corresponding discourse in academia.

Towards a Conclusion and a Way Forward

In Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds there is at one point a long list of the creatures which make up the chorus. One of the birds on this list is called a phlexis. No one now knows exactly what a phlexis is or was. Is it a bird that is still with us but has a different name? Is it a bird that is now extinct? Is it just one of Aristophanes’s made-up words? The probability is that it is either extinct or that we still see it but call it something else. It is unlikely that we will ever know the answer to this minor but engaging conundrum. Whatever the truth of the matter the phlexis does still have an existence of a kind in Aristophanes’s play and thus, if only as a textual mark or as an exotic costume in performance, we are still able to contemplate the phlexis.

Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground

This essay is a reading which articulates two texts: a record, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and a body of images produced by Andy Warhol. It is a critical analysis of two unwritten (i.e. not written) texts and a demonstration of the mechanisms by which they come to stand for a still unwritten text: New York City in the late 1960s. Let’s go back to Roland Barthes. In ‘Myth Today’, an essay which inhabits very much the same cultural environment as the texts under discussion here, he produced the following diagram:1 Open image in new window To use this ancient rebus marks me out, I suppose, as a fellow-traveller from an antique land but what I want to say about the Velvet Underground, Warhol’s art and New York City will, to some extent, disclose the avant-garde’s necessary dependence on tradition, within the economic processes of the art world. In this case an elementary semiotic model which permits a generalisation of the particular operations of the text may not be out of place.

Citytext: A Theoretical Introduction

New York City has long faced both towards America and towards Europe. This provides it with an ambiguous status, so that New York can represent both a spiritual antithesis to the middle America that would repudiate it and an American epitome to the rest of the world that would embrace or repudiate it. In the nineteenth century, New York served as a port of entry to millions of immigrants; in the twentieth century, New York serves as a point of entry to many areas of American cultural, social, political, intellectual and sexual life. The issues of both American culture and American studies can be problematised by study of the city precisely because it remains the fact that in terms of American Studies, the wealth of material and diversity of sources make New York simultaneously a problem and a solution. The deafening rush of new subject-matter demands integration into the culture study while it points to its limitation.