Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals »

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, where he is a Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change jointly managed by the Open University and the University of Manchester, and a Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Bennett's work encompasses sociology, cultural studies, museum theory, and cultural history.

Critical Trajectories: Culture, Society, Intellectuals brings together for the first time writings from one of the leading figures in cultural studies - Tony Bennett. The selections in the volume span the period from the late 1970s to 2005, representing issues of enduring concern in Bennett's work over this period and throughout his wide-ranging intellectual career. From cultural history to museums and memory, from Bond and popular culture to cultural policy and governance, Critical Trajectories charts the extensive influence of Bennett's thinking across the humanities and social sciences.

Taking up some of the most critically important subjects on the cultural studies map - aesthetics, textuality, the intellectual, and the role of cultural history - Critical Trajectories offers a wonderful guide to the history of the discipline and traces Bennett's impressive intellectual journey. His introductory essay pinpoints his concerns in changing intellectual and political contexts.

List of Illustrations     vii
Acknowledgements     viii
Introduction     1
The Literary, the Aesthetic, and the Popular     17
Severing the Aesthetic Connection     19
Texts, Readers, Reading Formations     40
Figuring Audiences and Readers     54
Culture, Governance, and the Social     69
Culture and Governmentality     71
Acting on the Social: Art, Culture, and Government     86
Museums as Civic Machineries     101
Archaeological Autopsy: Objectifying Time and Cultural Governance     103
Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision     121
Intellectuals, Culture, Politics     139
Intellectuals, Culture, Policy: The Technical, the Practical, and the Critical     141
The Historical Universal: The Role of Cultural Value in the Historical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu     163
Selected Bibliography     183
References     188
Index     202