The Philistine Controversy

In this fascinating study, Dave Beech and John Roberts develop what theycall a ‘counter-intuitive’ notion of the philistine, claiming that what thephilistine tells us about cultural division and exclusion is more persuasivethan the theories of the popular and the ‘otherly-cultured’ in cultural studiesand postmodernism. The ‘counter-intuitive’ philistine, they contest, returnsthe cultural debate to the problems of the persistence of power, privilege andsymbolic violence. Asserting that the relations between power and art have beenuntheorized in recent studies, Beech and Roberts find their critical resourcesin the least likely not in the ‘best of things’, but in that which has’no proper place’.

The book also includes several in-depth responses to the Beech and Robertsthesis by leading scholars in the field of cultural theory, together with theauthors’ replies to their critics.