Cultural Studies

Definitions of Cultural Studies

First, cultural studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.

Critical Inquiry, one of the most influential journals about cultural studies.

Cultural studies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text and drawing conclusions about the changes in textual phenomena over time.

Boundary 2

Second, cultural studies is politically engaged. Cultural critics see themselves as “oppositional,” not only within their own disciplines but to many of the power structures of society at large.

The picture of the online journal Representations

Third, cultural studies denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular (mass) culture.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the theorists who explores how “good taste” often reflects social, economic, and political power bases.

Rather than determining which are the “best” works produced, cultural critics describe what is produced and how various productions relate to one another.

Drawing upon the ideas of Michel de Certeau, cultural critics examine the “practice of everyday life.”

Cultural critics aim to reveal the political, economic reasons why a certain cultural product is more baled at certain times than others.

Finally, cultural studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

The book cover of Janice Radway’s Reading Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.

Cultural studies joins subjectivity– that is, culture in relation to individual lives– with engagement, a direct approach to attacking social ills.

Five Types of Cultural Studies

British Cultural Materialism

New Historicism American

Multiculturalism Postmodernism

and Popular Culture

Postcolonial Studies

Poster for The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), directed by James Whale.

British Cultural MaterialismCultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R. Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analyses of bourgeois culture.

Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice by Scott Wilson. Cultural Studies is referred to as “Cultural Materialism” in Britain.

New Historicism

As a return to historical scholarship, new historicism concerns itself with extraliterary matters– letters, diaries, films, paintings, medical treatises– looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text.

Frederic Jameson insisted, “Always historicize!”

New historicists seek “surprising coincidences” that may cross generic, historical, and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony, or popular culture.

From Hayden White, cultural studies practitioners learned how figurative relationships between present and past tropes are shaped by historical discourses.

The new historicism rejects the periodization of history in favor of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.

For Michel Foucault, history was not the

working out of “universal” ideas.

American Multiculturalism1. African American Writers2. Latina/o Writers3. American Indian Literatures4. Asian American Writers

Henry Louis Gates uses the word “race” only in quotation marks.

Postmodernism and Popular Culture

Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true.

Jean-François Lyotard argues that stability is maintained through “grand narratives.”

Postmodernism argues that it is all contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of “others.”

Jean Baudrillard describes the “simulacra” of postmodern life which have taken the place of “real” objects.

Popular culture: there are four main types of popular culture analysis: production analysis, textual analysis, audience analysis, and historical analysis.

These analyses seek to get beneath the surface (denotative) meanings and examine more implicit (connotation) social meanings

Postcolonial Studies

Postcolonialism refers to a historical phase undergone by the Third World countries after the decline of colonialism.

Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism was an important touchstone to postcolonial studies.

Many Third World writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created in a postcolonial culture.

Frantz Fanon drew upon his own horrific experiences in French Algeria to deconstruct emerging national regimes.

Works Cited Munns, Jessica and Gita, Rajan. Eds. A Cultural St

udies Reader: History, Theory, Practice. London :Longman, 1995.

Ono A. Kent. Ed. A Companion to Asian American Studies. Malden: Blackwell Press, 2005.

Schwarz, Henry and Sangeeta, Ray. Eds. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Malden, MA :Blackwell Press, 2000.

Power, Dominic and Scott, Allen J. Eds. Cultural Industries and the Production of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Representations. http://www.representations.org/

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