In with the new

What will the humanities look like in 1997 and who will be the people to watch? Simon Midgley spots the trends and the stars in the first of a two-part series.

Critical theoretical practices, long established in English, are infiltrating sociology and history. In the process, they are blurring boundaries so that the most avant-garde history reads like fiction, while the study of English literature involves a trawl through the history and politics of the period in which the work was written. Sociology, meanwhile, is becoming a fragmented chaos of relativistic perspectives.

History

The marked shift from the study of social history to the study of cultural history is likely to gather pace next year as historians continue to turn their backs on grand sociological theories such as Marxism and modernisation theory. Instead, many will focus on small-scale reconstructions of the past and on questions of identity - be it of individuals, groups or nation states.

Richard Evans of Birkbeck College says that microhistory is the key word here - seeing, as it were, eternity in a grain of sand. The interest in number-crunching, quantitative sociological approaches and sociological theory that characterised the 1970s and '80s, he says, has been succeeded by a concern to put ordinary individuals back into history.

One example, Evans says, is Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy - a new history of the Russian revolution that tries to combine broad narrative with recounting the fates of individuals. In some ways history is becoming more readable and subjective. There is a certain kind of rapprochement, he says, between history and literature in the best work that is being produced. Indeed, in a book to be published next year, Virtual Histories, some will feel the boundary is completely crossed, as well-known historians speculate how key historical events might have turned out if only ...

Another example is David Blackbourn's The Apparitions at Marpingen, where the Harvard-based author looks at Catholicism in Bismarckian Germany by examining the stories of village girls claiming to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary.

Kathleen Burk at University College London says that Bosnia and the breakdown of the Soviet Union have reminded people that the state is indeed important. There is a resurgence of interest in the more traditional kinds of military, international and diplomatic history and in questions of individual citizenship.

Sociology

Since the realisation that concepts such as class, race and gender are much more problematic than once thought, there has been a debate about the nature of cultural differences within categories that were previously looked upon as fairly coherent.

Carol Smart, professor of sociology at Leeds University, says we can no longer cross-cut gender, race and class and assume we are getting somewhere. "It's more complex than that." The discipline, she says, is struggling with how it can speak generally about the social world while recognising its diversity, complexity and the fact there are multiple voices that need to be taken into account.

Alan Warde, professor of sociology at Lancaster University, says that sociological research is much more fragmented than in the past and that people are using a wider range of methods to interpret social change. At one end of the spectrum is complex statistical modelling, at the other the semiotic interpretation of advertising.

Increasingly multidisciplinary teams are looking at interests beyond the core concerns of class and gender inequalities - popular culture, consumption, cultural production, the environment and the nature of science and the risks associated with scientific discovery and its application as technology.

Study of the increasingly important issue of sexuality continues at Essex University alongside historical sociology. Warwick is examining the former Soviet Union and Leicester is doing important work on migration in Europe. Leeds is known for its work on the reconceptualising of family life and on disability. Brunel and Southampton are exploring the impact and public understanding of science.

A. H. Halsey, emeritus professor of sociology at Oxford, is fearful British sociology could become dominated by relativistic, qualitative approaches that could threaten the empiricist tradition of quantitative sociological approaches followed at Oxford, the London School of Economics, Surrey and Edinburgh.

English

Two fashionable critical movements - cultural materialism and new historicism - will continue to sway the way English literature is studied in the coming year.

Closely related, both seek to end the analysis of literature in isolation from the social, historical, political, even technological circumstances in which specific works were produced. As their names suggest, both are approaches that blur the boundaries between the study of English literature and that of history or cultural studies.

Terence Hawkes of University College Cardiff, a leading exponent of cultural materialism, says that it is no longer possible to think of the literature of the past as a collection of masterpieces that somehow magically float free of their own history and culture. English scholars, he adds, are also becoming increasingly aware of the processing effect of the academy - the institutionalisation, if you like - of the study of literature.

While exponents of cultural materialism and new historicism question historical orthodoxies, they also accept that any perspective is necessarily subjective - which may explain why American new historicists often describe texts as portraying conservative ideological positions, while British cultural materialists sometimes analyse them as trying to subvert authority.

The contemporary interest in postcolonial approaches to literature will also gather pace next year. In this field two scholars to watch are Ania Loomba in New Delhi and Gayatri Spivak at Columbia University in the United States.

Other key areas of continuing interest will be gender and sexuality. The work of Dympna Callaghan, a Sussex University graduate now at the University of Syracuse, on feminism and Shakespeare is attracting considerable attention.

Marilyn Butler, rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and formerly King Edward VII professor of English at Cambridge, identifies the history of the book - how books are made, paid for and costed - as one very fashionable area of advanced English scholarship. An academic collective will shortly start work on a history of the book centred on the new British Library.

The divide in English studies between theorists and old-style textual believers still exists but there is less rancour than there was. In the middle, Butler says, a new consensus is emerging where English literature is being studied in the context of social history.

An MA in European intellectual and cultural history at Queen Mary College in London next year exemplifies this new approach. One of the courses is "History, civilisation and barbarism", introducing students to a series of key historiographical debates about history and barbarism, madness and civilisation and the civilising process. The texts will range from Burke to Marx and from Freud to Foucault.

Psychoanalytic approaches are increasingly being deployed in the study of literature as well as in other arts such as painting, film and photography.

Sasha Roseneil

Sasha Roseneil, 30, a feminist sociologist, is the author of Disarming Patriarchy: Feminism and Political Action at Greenham, a self-explanatory title. Another book coming out next year written for a rather more popular audience, Common Women, Uncommon Practices, will look at the impact Greenham had on feminism and cultural change more generally. "There is a big tension in sociology over how much emphasis you give to people's free will, to people's ability to create their own conditions of existence and change them and how much you give to social structures like class, race, ethnicity, gender and social institutions," she says.

A research fellow at Leeds University, Roseneil is also revising and updating Anthony Giddens's book, Sociology. A Brief But Critical Introduction, a key sociology introductory text. She has put together a proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council to investigate queer economies - the way Soho and parts of Manchester have become lesbian and gay enclaves and what this has meant to the local economies.

Rachel Bowlby

Rachel Bowlby, 39, professor of English at the University of Sussex, is a cultural critic interested in different models of the consumer (from the mindless 1960s housewife to the rational 1980s citizen). Her work explores the connections between literature and consumer culture and how notions of consumer choice are related to feminist ideas of choice. She also works on the relationship between broad psychoanalytical questions and the use of psychology to persuade consumers to buy things.

"I am interested in how ideas of choosing in literary and other cultural texts are often derived from models of consumer choice in advertising and marketing,'' she says.

Her books include Just Looking, an examination of turn of the century novels about department stores, the femininity of consumption and the beginnings of what we now call consumer culture. Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis came out in 1992 and Shopping With Freud a year later.

Bowlby was a graduate student at Yale in the heyday of deconstruction and an undergraduate at Oxford before that; she is now working on a history of shopping and ideas of consumption.

Orlando Figes

A People's Tragedy, The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, by Orlando Figes is an example of how the literary approach to history has undergone a renaissance in the 1990s. Eschewing the neutral, theory-laden social scientific approach to history of the 1970s and '80s, it uses novelistic techniques to engage the attention of the reader. The central themes of the narrative are seen from the perspectives of factual characters running through the book.

Figes, a lecturer in Russian history and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, says he stresses the chaos of the revolutionary years by emphasising how in a Tolstoyian sense individuals on the stage of history are not aware of the bigger picture or of it being a revolution.

"They experience revolutionary change in terms of chaos. Social scientists would see large patterns and a march of ideology or class forces there and in fact from the perspective of the people who actually lived through it, it comes across without any such meanings."

His earlier published work was a monograph about the peasantry, Peasant Russia, Civil War. Figes, aged 37, was a student at Gonville and Caius before becoming a research fellow and then fellow of Trinity College.

His next book with a colleague is a more purely academic book, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, essays on language, rituals and symbols of 1917. After that will come another big book on the cultural history of Russia.

Tia De Nora

Tia De Nora, 38, specialises in the sociology of culture and of music in particular.

Late last year she published her first book, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, which looked at how the composer came to be recognised as superior to his colleagues in the musical world of Vienna in 1790-1803. The book drew on her doctoral thesis at the University of California San Diego. A senior lecturer in sociology at Exeter University, she has done a lot of work on patronage structure, music technology and music criticism - much of it on music in Vienna in the late 18th century and early 19th century.

She is now working on a new book, provisionally entitled Music and Social Agency, which looks at the sociology of music generally and how music plays an active role in structuring societies, social identities and specific occasions.

She is particularly interested in how people use background and mood music, the role of music and memory, and why late 18th century women did not play Beethoven's concertos in public and men did.

While teaching at University College Cardiff she won a prize from the International Sociological Association for her work on the history of contraceptive technology. Her work on contraception and Beethoven are linked by a concern with reputation - how is one thing constructed as being successful and another as unsuccessful.

Joanna Burke

Joanna Burke's work exemplifies the way women's history has moved from the history of feminism through women's social history to the history of gender and masculinity. Her latest book, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War, asks to what extent the war was crucial in disrupting the former expectations and expressions of men's masculinity. Burke, 33, a senior lecturer in modern social and economic history at Birkbeck College, believes that masculinity underwent dramatic changes in the 20th century, particularly around the period of the first world war.

Her first book, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland 1880-1914, was a women's history about the construction of housewifery and full-time housework. It did not look at the role of men.

Her second, Working-Class Cultures in Britain: Gender Class and Ethnicity, 1850-1950, looked equally at men and women. It is from that point that she became much more concerned with questions of masculinity.

Burke, a former research fellow at Cambridge and lecturer before that at the National Australian University, is now working on a "big" book on the history of face-to-face killing in 20th-century warfare. In this she will try to demolish two myths: that modern warfare is anonymous; and that killing brutalises people.

Parveen Adams

Parveen Adams, a pioneer in psychoanalytic studies in Britain, applies psychoanalytic ideas to art and film. A senior lecturer in the human sciences at Brunel University - where she has been for 30 years - and convener of the university's MA in psychoanalytic studies, she jointly edited the feminist psychoanalytical journal M/S from 1978-86 with Elizabeth Cowie.

Some of the theoretical essays in her latest collection, The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference argue that the phallus is an important concept for feminism. The book includes work on Francis Bacon, Della Grace, the US photographer of perverse sexualities, Michael Powell's film Peeping Tom and Orlan, the French artist who uses cosmetic surgery as an art form. Adams says that her work has progressed from psychoanalysis and feminism into the analysis of the image while retaining her interest in sexual division. "I hope I am doing something really new,'' she says.

Next week The THES previews the sciences in 1997.