Summer 1996
Volume 22, Number 4

The term culture wars has become increasingly visible in recent years as a designation for the conflicts dividing contemporary American society. It has been used in a variety of ways, at times to refer to contention exclusively cultural in its origin, such as the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy, at others to designate the upheaval generated by issues as unrelated to culture as the battle over abortion rights.4 My definition of culture wars falls in the middle, largely because it skirts the question of origin. I consider the problem of whether anxiety over societal change preceded or even gave birth to anxiety over intellectual change, or whether the opposite is true, to be less important than the fact that, during culture wars, these two anxieties become grafted onto each other--to such an extent that it is, in general, impossible to define the point where one type of anxiety ends and another begins.

Culture is as appropriate an essential as war to designate the controversies that can be included in this category. The conflict is far more bitterly divisive and is waged on a far broader scale than is otherwise the case with controversies over cultural matters. However, in times of culture wars--in France at the seventeenth century's end as much as in America today--intellectual matters acquire a momentousness unheard of in less anxious periods. In these instances, traditionalists and progressives square off as Ancients and Moderns and do battle over such issues as the appropriate subject matter for great literature and the literary curriculum best suited to the needs of contemporary students. The resulting conflict becomes swept up in contemporary controversy over societal problems from the rights and the status of women to the threat of addictive behavior (whether produced by today's drugs or, in the seventeenth century, tobacco and chocolate).

1. One extreme in the usage of culture wars is represented by Richard Bolton, who uses the term to refer exclusively to the public outcry that has surrounded the sponsorship of artists such as Mapplethorpe; see Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, ed. Richard Bolton (New York, 1992). James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991), on the other hand, is interested solely in the conflict inspired by issues such as abortion and homosexuality and feels that controversy over artistic or cultural issues such as education is not an essential part of today's crisis.

Joan DeJean, Trustee Professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of several books, including Fictions of Sappho (1989) and Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (1991). This essay is part of Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle; (forthcoming).