Literature, Theory and Democratic Criticism in British Cultural Studies—Richard Hoggart: Anti-theoretical or Atheoretical?

Richard Hoggart is generally regarded as a representative of the pre-theoretical era in the history of British Cultural Studies, a literary empiricist and culturalist. He is further dismissed as anti-theoretical or atheoretical. This paper, however, argues that Hoggart's cultural criticism is anything but this. It involves the question of what theory is and does and how literary writing activates democratic criticism, in which lies the use of Cultural Study. The first part proposes that contemporary theory replicates Matthew Arnold. It is followed by a discussion about Hoggart's uncommonly ordinary language he carefully adopts for the purpose of promoting democratic criticism. The case analysis in the third part examines how this language and Hoggart's literary writing enables him to reach out and speak to the other.