Assignment p.8

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Name    :- Bambha Kajal A.

Sem      :- 2

Roll no   :-17

Batch     :- 2017-2019

Paper no :- Cultural studies

   

Sem      :- 2

Batch     :- 2017-2019

Enrollment no :- 2069108420180002

Email id :-kajalbambha16@gmail.com

Submitted to  :-

                            Department of English,MKBU

  Topic :-  What is Cultural Studies?  Which are the features of     Cultural Studies?

Introduction :- 

 

 

            Cultural Studies first we discussed about the word  Culture. Culture has meant before that  Culture derives from cultura and colere  meaning ‘to cultivate. It also meant ‘to honour’ and protect. By the nineteenth century in Europe it meant the habits customs and tastes of the upper classes. At the present time it is define in Cultural Studies as ‘Culture’ is the mode of generating meanings and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Meanings are governed bydi power relations. Elite culture controls meanings because it control the terms of the debate. Nonelite  views on life and art are rejected as ‘tastless useless or even stupid by the elite. What this implies is that certain components of culture get more visibility and significance.This is an introductory level course in cultural studies. Generally considered, cultural studies refers to the notion that the study of cultural processes (the production, circulation, and use of cultural artifacts), especially  though not exclusively, in the context of what is referred to as "popular culture," is theoretically and politically important to an active and productive understanding of the ways in which "power" and influence manifest themselves in a social and/or political order. That said, the phrase "cultural studies" is an extremely contested one in contemporary public and academic discourse, and our primary goal in this course will be to examine the range of ways in which we might understand its meaning and attendant implications for how we theorize, interpret, and critique cultural practices. The course will be organized into three primary sections. In the first section we will examine some of the historical roots of cultural studies, primarily in the American and British contexts, with an eye to developing what Foucault might call an "intellectual genealogy" for its practice. In the second section of the course we will examine a number of theoretical and methodological problems and issues that have occupied the concerns of those working in the area of cultural studies over the past twenty-five years. In the final section of the course we will examine four representative, full-length cultural studies as a means of evaluating and assessing how such theoretical and methodological problems are negotiated.

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.
  
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. A tyrannical aristocrat does not just independently wield power but is empowered by ‘‘discourses’’- accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking- and practices that embody exercise, and amount to power. From punishment to sexual mores, Foucault’s genealogyof topics includes many things excluded by traditional historians, from architectural blueprints for prisons to memoirs of deviants. Psychoanalytic, structuralist, and poststructuralist approaches are treated elsewhere in this Handbook; in the present chapter, we review cultural studies’ connections with Marxism, the new historicism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, popular culture, and postcolonial studies. 

 Feature of Cultural studies :- 


          Cultural studies is not simply the study of cultural as though it was a discrete entity divorced from its social and  political. Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to analyze the social and political context within which it manifests itself. Culture in cultural studies always performs two functions it is both the object of study and the location of Cultural studies aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise.  Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit and objective  forms of knowledge  The tradition of cultural studies is not one of value-free scholarship but one committed to social reconstruction by critical political involvement. 


Features of cultural studies is that  four goals :-

literary criticism or history :-

 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. Intellectual works are not limited by their own "borders" as single texts, historical problems or even disciplines, and the critic's own personal connections to what is being analysed may also be described. Henry Giroux and others write in their Dalhousie Review manifesto that cultural studies practitioner 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. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity.

2) 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 the 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, thus they can 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 test and sensibility into the arena of a whole society's everyday life as it is constructed.

3) "High" and "low" or elite or popular culture. 

  Being a cultured person means acquainted with highbrow art and intellectual pursuits. Cultural critics work to transfer the term to include mass structure, whether popular, folk, or urban. Following theorists Jean Baudrillard and Andreas Huygens, cultural critics argue that after World War 2 the distinctions among, high, low and mass culture collapsed, and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bordeaux or Dick Hebdige on how good taste often only reflects prevailing social, economic, and political power bases. Drawing 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. "The Birth of Captain Jack Sparrow: An Analysis" and " Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl  are some famous works and movies.

4)  means of production :-

 Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such para literary questions as these: who supports a given artist? 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. Reading in America, edited by Cathy N. Davidson, which includes essay on literacy and gender in Colonial New England; urban magazine audiences in Eighteenth Century New York city; the impact upon reading of 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 recognise 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.

           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.

          The next class where Western culture is portrayed as hopelessly compromised by racism, sexism and homophobia: professors can acknowledge these differences and encourage students to construct a conversation for themselves as the most exciting part of  education.

Conclution :-

       We can say that as we discussed the characteristics of cultural studies it also have some own limitations. The weaknesses of cultural studies lie in its very strengths, particularly its emphasis upon diversity of approach and subject matter. Cultural Studies can at times seem merely an intellectual smorgasbord in which the critic blithely combines artful helpings of texts and objects and then ‘‘finds’’ deep connections between them, without adequately researching what a culture means or how cultures have interacted.

                                 
workcited :-

  http://culturalstudies.web.unc.edu/resources-2/what-is-cultural-studies/
http://culturalstudies.web.unc.edu/resources-2/what-is-cultural-studies/