Name : Pina Gondaliya
Semester : 3
Assignment Paper No. 10 : Cultural studies
Topic : Four Goals of Cultural Studies
Submitted to: Department of English M.K.Bhavnager
What is Cultural Studies?
Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways in which "culture" creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power Research and teaching in the field explores the relations between culture understood as human expressive and symbolic activities, and cultures understood as distinctive ways of life. Combining the strengths of the social sciences and the humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies, sociology. communications studies, history, cultural anthropology, and economics. By working across the boundaries among these fields, cultural studies addresses new questions and problems of today's world. Rather than seeking answers that will hold for all time, cultural studies develops flexible tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.
Cultural life is not only concerned with symbolic communication, it is also the domain in which we set collective tasks for ourselves and begin to grapple with them as changing communities. Cultural studies are devoted to understanding the processes through which societies and the diverse groups within them come to terms with history, community life, and the challenges of the future.
Cultural studies are one of the more controversial intellectual formations of the 1990s and the first decade of the third millennium. It has experienced a period of rapid growth in the academy, appearing at many universities in a variety of forms and locations (although rarely as degree-granting departments). At the same time, it has been broadly attacked both from inside the university and outside academia.
Definitions
The word "culture" itself is so difficult to pin down, "cultural studies" is hard to define. As was also the case in chapter 8 with Elaine Showalter's "cultural" model of feminine difference, "cultural studies" is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. As Patrick Brantiinger has pointed out,
cultural studies is not "a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda," but a "loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions''.
Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of Marxism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation, For example, drawing from Roland Barthes on the nature of literary language and Claude Lévi-Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced by structuralism and poststructuralism. Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction" of the world/text distinction, like all his deconstructions of hierarchical oppositions, has urged-or enabled--cultural critics ``to erase the boundaries between high and low culture, classic and popular literary texts, and literature and other cultural discourses that, following Derrida, may be seen as manifestations of the same textuality."
The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. From Michel Foucault came the notion that power is a whole complex of forces; it is that which produces what happens.
Four Goals of Cultural Studies
Cultural studies approaches generally share four goals.
First Goal of Cultural Studies.
First, cultural studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history.
Practiced in such journals as Critical Inquiry, Representations, and boundary 2, cultural studies involves scrutinizing the cultural phenomenon of a text-for example, Italian opera, a Latino telenovela, the architectural styles of prisons, body piercing-and drawing conclusions about the changes in textual phenomena over time.
Cultural studies is not necessarily about literature in the traditional sense or even about "art." In their introduction to Cultural Studies, editors Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler emphasize that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to "cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene" (1-3).
Intellectual works are not limited by their own "borders" as single texts, historical problems, or disciplines, and the critic's own personal connections to what is being analyzed may also be described. Henry Giroux and others write in their Dalhousie Review manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are "resisting intellectuals" who see what they do as "an emancipatory project" because it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher education (478-80). For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or her own political views part of the instruction, which, of course, can lead to problems. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity.
2 Second Goal of Cultural Studies.
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. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships among dominant and "minority" or "subaltern" discourses Because meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed.
Such a notion, taken to a philosophical extreme, denies the autonomy of the individual, whether an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic "Great Man" or "Great Book" theory, and a relocation of aesthetics and culture from the ideal realms of taste and sensibility, into the arena of a whole soci ety's everyday life as it is constructed.
3. Third Goal of Cultural Studies
Third, cultural studies denies the separation of "high" and "low" or elite and popular culture.
You might hear someone remark at the symphony or at an art museum: "I came here to get a little culture." Being a "cultured" person used to mean being acquainted with "highbrow" art and intellectual pursuits. But isn't culture also to be found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert?
Cultural critics today work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture, whether popular, folk, or urban. Following theorists Jean Baudrillard and Andreas Huyssen, cultural critics argue that after World War II the distinctions among high, low, and mass culture collapsed, and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how "good taste" often only reflects prevailing social, economic, and political power bases. For example, the images of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of the British raj by writers like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal an entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other races, especially Asians. But race alone was not the issue for the British raj: money was also a deciding factor. Thus, drawing also upon the ideas of French historian Michel de Certeau, cultural critics examine "the practice of everyday life," studying literature as an anthropologist would, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture's economy. Rather than determining which are the "best" works produced, cultural critics describe what is produced and how various productions relate to one another. They aim to reveal the political, economic reasons why a certain cultural product is more valued at certain times than others.
Transgressing boundaries among disciplines high and low can make cultural studies just plain fun. Think, for example, of a possible cultural studies research paper with the following title: "The Birth of Captain Jack Sparrow: An Analysis." For sources of Johnny Depp's funky performance in Dis ney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). you could research cultural topics ranging from the trade economies of the sea two hundred years ago, to real pirates of the Caribbean such as Blackbeard and Henry Morgan, then on to Robert Louis Stevenson's Lorg John Silver in Treasure Island (1881), Errol Flynn's and Robert Morgan's memorable screen pirates, John Cleese's rendition of Long john Silver on Monty Python's Flying Circus, and, of course, Keith Richards's eye makeup. You'd read interviews with Depp on his view of the character and, of course, check out the extra features on the DVD for background (did you know Depp is a book collector?). And you wouldn't want to neglect the galaxy of web sites devoted to the movie and to all topics Pirate.
4 Fourth Goal of Cultural Studies
Finally, cultural studies analyzes not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.
Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such paraliterary questions as these: Who supports a given artist? Who publishes his or her books, and how are these books distributed? Who buys books? For that matter, who is literate and who is not? A well-known analysis of literary production is Janice Radway's study of the American romance novel and its readers, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, which demonstrates the textual effects of the publishing industry's decisions about books that will minimize its financial risks. Another contribution is the collection Reading in America, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, which includes essays on literacy and gender in colonial New England; urban magazine audiences in eighteenth-century New York City; the impact upon reading of such technical innovations as cheaper eyeglasses, electric lights, and trains; the Book-of-the-Month Club; and how writers and texts go through fluctuations of popularity and canonicity. These studies help us recognize that literature does not occur in a space separate from other concerns of our lives.
Cultural studies thus joins subjectivity, that is, culture in relation to individual lives-with engagement, a direct approach to attacking social ills. Though cultural studies practitioners deny "humanism" or "the humanities'' as universal categories, they strive for what they might call "social reason," which often (closely) resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.
What difference does a cultural studies approach make for the student?
First of all, it is increasingly clear that by the year 2050 the United States will be what demographers call a "majority-minority" population; that is, the present numerical majority of "white," "Caucasian," and "Anglo-Americans will be the minority, particularly with the dramatically increasing numbers of Latina/o residents, mostly Mexican Americans.
As Gerald Graff and James Phelan observe, "It is a common prediction that the culture of the next century will put a premium on people's ability to deal productively with conflict and cultural difference. Learning by controversy is sound training for citizenship in that future".
To the question "Why teach the controversy?"
they note that today a student can go from one class in which the values of Western culture are never questioned to the next class where Western culture is portrayed as hopelessly compromised by racism, sexism, and homophobia: profes can acknowledge these differences and encourage students to construct a conversation for themselves as "the most exciting part of education ".
Citation :
Bertend, Hans. “Cultural Materialism .” Cultural Materialism - Literary and Critical Theory - Oxford Bibliographies, 26 Feb. 2020, www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0091.xml.
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