Video Player

Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures

Moderator: David Thorburn
Thomas Pettitt Lewis Hyde S. Craig Watkins: April 27, 2007; Running Time: 1:53:22

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

This panel demonstrates provocatively how literary criticism and cultural history have come to accommodate and embrace contemporary media. Says David Thorburn, the session’s moderator, “The founding texts of Western civilization belong to a textual category or engage in textual behavior that make it resemble something much closer to an ongoing, unfinished TV series...” Indeed, says Thorburn, “In his own day, Shakespeare was the equivalent of what TV is in our society, or what the movies had been in the studio era.” A new idea of the text is emerging, one that undergoes constant revision, in diverse media, and which never achieves a finished state. Consequently, notions of authorship, and ownership, are under siege.

Thomas Pettitt offers the Gutenberg parenthesis, brackets around historical periods of artistic achievement. Before the parenthesis lie such glories as Elizabethan theatre and traveling players, where “the distinction between author and performer is problematic.” The text is neither fixed, nor authoritative, says Pettitt. Within the center of his parenthesis sit “original compositions, to passive reproductions.” As the digital age proceeds, Pettit observes culture “paradoxically advancing into the past,” our own a mirror age of Elizabethan times, with rock, rap, reggae and other vernacular traditions that emphasize performance coming to the fore.

In Lewis Hyde’s telling, Benjamin Franklin operated as “the first intellectual property pirate in this country,” perhaps a hero to the open access movement. Franklin was instrumental in spiriting out of England printing technology that was in the 18th century subject to laws forbidding the export of skilled labor and machinery. “Franklin is essentially supporting free movement of labor and ideas,” says Hyde, opposing tyrannical law and “underwriting the liberty of ideas and citizens.” Behind his actions lay the belief that the “true and good were best discovered collectively,” and that sacrifice of individual interest was essential in a republic concerned with the progress of knowledge and “public virtue in politics.”

A dialogue with the past and communal ownership of art (the latter vilified by corporate interests), serve as the foundations of African American cultural practice, says Craig Watkins. He traces the origins of rap music to slave songs and narratives, and black preachers and protest politics. This “oral culture created a space in which people could engage in dialog with each other that allowed them to survive horrific conditions.” The idea of sampling in music is consistent with African-America oral tradition and participatory culture, says Watkins. It’s central to art creation, building new kinds of musical experiences and “paying homage to the past -- an act of respect, inserting the past into present.”

Lecture Details

Location: E25-111

“Central figures in the high culture museum, the most revered and central figures in fact, folks like Shakespeare and Homer, actually in their own time belonged to what we must call something like the popular culture”

David Thorburn

About the Speakers

Moderator: David Thorburn

MIT Professor of Literature
MacVicar Faculty Fellow Director, MIT Communications Forum

David Thorburn has published widely on literary and cultural subjects and is currently completing a cultural history of American television, called Story Machine. He received his A.B. degree from Princeton, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford and taught at Yale for 10 years before joining MIT in 1976. He has edited collections of essays on romanticism, and on John Updike, as well as a widely used anthology of fiction, Initiation. He is a former Director of the Film and Media Studies Program and of the Cultural Studies Project.

Thomas Pettitt

Associate Professor of English, University of Southern Denmark

Thomas Pettitt teaches English literary and cultural history in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. He received his Ph.d. from Odense University in 1996. His research focuses on tradition-borne texts and performances such as ballads, folksongs, legends, customs and folk drama.

He has published in such academic journals as Folklore, Journal of American Folklore, Renaissance Drama, and European Medieval Theatre.

Lewis Hyde

Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing, Kenyon College
Fellow, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School, Harvard University

Lewis Hyde's interests center on the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, is an inquiry into the situation of creative artists in a commercial society. Trickster Makes This World (1998) is a portrait of the the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and alive.

Hyde has also published a book of poems, This Error is the Sign of Love, and edited a number of volumes, including he Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, a book of responses to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and selected poems of the Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard, Vicente Aleixandre.

Hyde received an M.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.A. from the University of Minnesota.

S. Craig Watkins

Associate Professor, Department of Radio, Television and Film, University of Texas, Austin

S. Craig Watkins focuses on race, media, youth culture, and hip-hop studies. His latest book, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Beacon Press 2005), takes readers inside the world of hip-hop. Watkins is also the author of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema(The University of Chicago Press 1998).

In 2006 Watkins was selected to join the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning a collection of scholars, visionaries, thought leaders, and practitioners from across the world to explore the intersection of digital media, everyday life, and learning.

S. Craig Watkins received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.