Literary Theory
Key Terms
Transdisciplinary- relating to more than one branch of knowledge; interdisciplinary.
Mass Culture - the culture that is widely disseminated via the mass media culture - the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group
Heteronormative- denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.
Key People
Roland Barthes
Walter Benjamin
Susan Bordo
Michel Foucault
Stuart Hall
Edward Said
Raymond Williams
Antonio Gramsci
Judith Halberstam
Donna Haraway
Slavoj Zizek
Key Works
The Cultural Studies Reader by
The Cultural Studies Reader is the ideal introduction for students. A revised introduction explaining the history and key concerns of cultural studies brings together important articles by leading thinkers to provide an essential guide to the development, key issues and future directions of cultural studies. This fully updated third edition includes: 36 essays including 21 new articles An editor's preface succinctly introducing each article with suggestions for further reading Comprehensive coverage of every major cultural studies method and theory An updated account of recent developments in the field Articles on new areas such as culture and nature and the cultures of globalization New key thinkers such as CLR James, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri and Edward Said, included for the first time The Cultural Studies Reader is designed to be read around the world and deals with issues relevant to each continent
ISBN: 9780415374132Publication Date: 2007-04-19
The Making of the English Working Class by
A seminal text on the history of the working class by one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. During the formative years of the Industrial Revolution, English workers and artisans claimed a place in society that would shape the following centuries. But the capitalist elite did not form the working class--the workers shaped their own creations, developing a shared identity in the process. Despite their lack of power and the indignity forced upon them by the upper classes, the working class emerged as England's greatest cultural and political force. Crucial to contemporary trends in all aspects of society, at the turn of the nineteenth century, these workers united into the class that we recognize all across the Western world today. E.P. Thompson's magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class defined early twentieth-century English social and economic history, leading many to consider him Britain's greatest postwar historian. Its publication in 1963 was highly controversial in academia, but the work has become one of the most influential social commentaries every written.
ISBN: 9780394703220Publication Date: 1966-02-12
The Uses of Literacy by
This pioneering work examines changes in the life and values of the English working class in response to mass media. First published in 1957, it mapped out a new methodology in cultural studies based around interdisciplinarity and a concern with how texts-in this case, mass publications-are stitched into the patterns of lived experience. Mixing personal memoir with social history and cultural critique, The Uses of Literacy anticipates recent interest in modes of cultural analysis that refuse to hide the author behind the mask of objective social scientific technique. In its method and in its rich accumulation of the detail of working-class life, this volume remains useful and absorbing. Hoggart's analysis achieves much of its power through a careful delineation of the complexities of working-class attitudes and its sensitivity to the physical and environmental facts of working-class life. The people he portrays are neither the sentimentalized victims of a culture of deference nor neo-fascist hooligans. Hoggart sees beyond habits to what habits stand for and sees through statements to what the statements really mean. He thus detects the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances. Through close observation and an emotional empathy deriving, in part, from his own working-class background, Hoggart defines a fairly homogeneous and representative group of working-class people. Against this background may be seen how the various appeals of mass publications and other artifacts of popular culture connect with traditional and commonly accepted attitudes, how they are altering those attitudes, and how they are meeting resistance. Hoggart argues that the appeals made by mass publicists-more insistent, effective, and pervasive than in the past-are moving toward the creation of an undifferentiated mass culture and that the remnants of an authentic urban culture are being destroyed. In his introduction to this new edition, Andrew Goodwin, professor of broadcast communications arts at San Francisco State University, defines Hoggart's place among contending schools of English cultural criticism and points out the prescience of his analysis for developments in England over the past thirty years. He notes as well the fruitful links to be made between Hoggart's method and findings and aspects of popular culture in the United States.
ISBN: 9780765804211Publication Date: 1998-02-28
Culture and Society, 1780-1950 by
Acknowledged as perhaps the masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this omnibus ranges over British literary history from George Eliot to George Orwell to inquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination.
ISBN: 0231057016Publication Date: 1983-08-01
Cultural Studies
Overview
Cultural Studies has been influenced by many of the other theories found on this guide. It arose as an effort to apply literary theory to new forms of entertainment, media and cultural expression that emerged from the 1980s, in particular, those texts associated with mass culture such as advertising, publishing, television, film, computers and the internet. Cultural Studies defies a traditionalist approach to criticism and can be seen as transdisciplinary, bringing together a range of critical thought to a range of different cultural forms. Moreover, Cultural Studies may explore examples of hegemony, and look at the ‘whole’ text, such as its publications (including relations to profits), its reviewers, its academic field of criticism, the politics of awards and the hype of publicity machinery that sells the text. Texts therefore can be explored as part of a discourse that reinforces certain ideological values and identities, which may conceal oppressive conditions of heteronormative, capitalist, and patriarchal ideas of the nation, nationalism, and national identity. As such Cultural Studies is often focused on how texts can be understood in relation to the politics and ideology that define contemporary culture.
What Cultural Studies Critiques do
They examine reality as a social construction, exploring ways in which assumptions about the world are built through consensus, conventions and expected norms.
They also look at identity as a social construction, exploring how historical and political process have come to influence the development of various cultural identities, including those of gender, race, sexuality, nationhood, and ethnicity.
They connect assumptions about reality and identity to different ways texts can be interpreted.
The highlight the ways in which marginalised and subaltern identities may perceive various texts, often placing these perspectives in opposition to hegemonic or dominant readings of texts.
They challenge the literary canon by privileging cultural forms and expressions that may not be considered ‘worth’ analysing by other theorists.
What Questions to Cultural Studies Critiques ask
What kinds of behaviour, what models of practice, does this work seem to reinforce?
Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
Upon what social understanding does the work depend?
Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained implicitly or explicitly by this work?
What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected?
General Web Links
- Cultural Studies Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history/ criticism etc. to study cultural phenomena in various societies.