The Cultural Studies

 Name – Parmar Shubhda

Roll no – 30

 Submitted to – S.B Gardi

                                  Department of English

                                   MKBU

                 

 What is cultural studies  ?

                                

                The term “culture” has a long and various history, “Cultural studies” itself rather less so , but both have been closely connected with the history of literature. By “culture studies” I mean , again , a particular academic order , that discourse about” culture”, as different from literature which began to develop during the 1960s , originally on the margins of English literature itself. Where English literature had focused notice on one particular kind of culture, high literature , cultural  studies would be concerned in principle with all kind of culture. Culture, according to Willliams, is ‘ one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’

              Culture is said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, and the word which is sometimes careful to be its opposite - nature - is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all .Yet thought it is fashionable these days to see nature as a original from nature .One of its original meaning is husbandry, or the tending of natural growth. The same is true of our words for law and jusices as well as of terms like capital , stock, pecuniary and genuine . The word coulter , which of culture , means the blade of a ploughshare . We derive our word for the finest of human activities from labour and agriculture, crops and development. Francis Bacon writes of’ the culture and manurance of minds, in a suggestive hesitancy between dung and mental distinction’ . Culture here means an activity and it was a long time before the word came to indicate a thing.

                The Latin origin of the word culture is colere, which can mean anything from cultivating and inhabiting to worshipping and protecting. Its meaning as inhabit has evolved from the Latin colonus to the modern colonialism, so that titles like Culture and Colonialism are, once again , kindly tautological .But colere also ends up via the Latin cultus as the religious term cult , just as the idea of culture itself in the modern age comes to substitute itself for a loss sense of spirituality and transcendence .Cultural truths whether high art or the traditions of a people are sometimes afraid ones, to be protected and revered . Culture, then inherits the impressive layer of religious authority, but also has uneasy affinities with occupation and invasion, and it is between these poles, positive and negative , that the concept is presently pitched .Cultural study has developed into a various and lively international intellectual field .

                                              As Stuart Hall, has put it :

“Today , cultural studies programmes exist everywhere , especially in the United States…………..where they’ve come to provide a focal point for interdisciplinary studies and research , and for the development of critical theory.”

                As a field of study , cultural studies has had central effects on the study of literature. It has challenged the idea of canonical literature and affected the way literary texts are theorized and read .It has also give us with a vocabulary for idea about the world we live in. Cultural is food for our brains , and it determines how they function. Culture regiments and guides, imposes trust and inspires. We see this in great cases such as the hypothetical successful , but always see our own cultural life because we are living it as we think about it .Cultural is land where humans are  creative .

              Cultural Studies primarily developed in Britain as a response against specific corrective and political positions . The most important of these were

1. liberal humanism, specifically the cultural and civilization tradition in literary studies

2. orthodox  Maxism Cultural Studies developed as part of an engagement with the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s

3. the mass society thesis and the related tradition of media effects research in mass communications studies .

Here Cultural studies took problem with an impoverished view of culture and agency.

Birth of Cultural Studies:

                       The Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, by Richard Hoggart and Williams in 1964, was well known techniques apply in institutions of higher education and learning. First , it was going to be central for cultural not cultural studies yet existed with noun culture by trying to study culture through its various signifying elements .Secound , it was going to be a centre where various studies were going to be focused upon of one .Thirdly , market indicated that what constituted the shapeless present knowledge in these various disciplines were similarly if not more chief than the well formed past, and fourthly , the preposition for rather than the genitive of modern Cultural Studies .In other words the Birmingham Center of Cultural Studies indicates that it was  in search of a discussion instead of a discourse  being in search of a centre .

Andrew Milner captures the emergence of this new discipline quite succinctly:

“Contemporary cultural studies had emerged from out of literary studies     essentially by way of a very simple move: by shifting attention from an exclusive focus on the canon of high literary texts to an , in principle, inclusive focus on all cultural text .Williams and Hoggart attempted no more than to expand the subject matter of English literature itself to include popular culture .”

                  In the 1970s more grow ways of theorizing the ideological and political role of Cultural Study .In the Cultural Studies major authority of the work of French structuralist, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and French semiotician Roland  Barthes . Here althusser’s work lay in its concern with developing a Marxist theory of ideology which was not governed by a narrow economic determinism, but gave comparative autonomy of ideology .According to this theory, cultural is one of numerous ideological state whose meaning and values in the individual. Culture is therefore a locus of class struggle .The organization of subjectivity in culture becomes a central area in Cultural Studies.

                   Cultural Studies was understanding that existing disciplines such as sociology , history and literary studies did not present this method for understanding  culture .Cultural Studies work  on working class writing , popular fiction  and also writing on women, what is valuable and worthy of study .Exclusion question not only of class , but also of race , sexual , colonialism , gender  and orientation .

                                                As Cary Nelson has argued,

‘ Cultural studies is not simply the close analysis of objects other than literary texts .some English department would like to believe that transportable method of close reading can make them cultural studies departments as soon as they expand the range of cultural objects they habitually study….. the immanent , formal , thematic or semiotic analysis of films, painting, songs, romance novels, comic books or clothing style does not , in itself , constitute cultural studies .’

                     Cultural Studies does not involve abandoning what has traditionally been studied in literature departments .It urges latest ways of studying such texts .Cultural Studies is concerned with the struggles over meaning that define the land of culture. It is devoted , to studying the politics of signification .Cultural Studies is dedicated to studying the production , response and various use of texts, their characteristics of internal .

                Cultural Studies began with the study of popular literary forms such as the detective novel and with such daily practices as punk fashion. The examination of the accepted realm, but in theory it also encompasses high culture as well and can , in the form of such visual studies, cover a variety of high culture and popular materials .In point of view of cultural studies the difference between art and the popular becomes insignificant .

               Cultural Studies argues that culture is about meanings a community is not easy process, as those power seek to organize meaning .For this purpose definite forms of art and their meanings are treated as inferior .Cultural study argued that the objects and artefacts that are used made sense of by the masses must be taken seriously .Some forms of art as comic strips or the detective novel made by the people for themselves .Cultural Studies believes that the culture of a community includes different  of aspects like, spatial , economic and political . Cultural Studies therefore aims to include all these in its ambit .Here says how particular objects acquire meaning and value in society.

                The method of cultural studies adapts of analysis from various disciplines, media studies, cultural anthropology, discourse analysis and popular culture. Most of these methods , when appropriated by Cultural Studies  are greatly influenced and informed by the theories . All the cultural forms are linked to institution and the market . Cultural Studies believes that we cannot must be read not only within the aesthetic realm. A novel must be read not only its general conventions and the history of the novel also in terms of the publishing industry .The political of awards the hype publicity machinery that sells the book , but cultural studies project deals with J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter book only for fantasy writing, because public obviously buy Harry Potter book  to got enterprise of it .

Four Goals of Cultural Studies:

1.Cultural studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history .

2. Cultural studies is politically engaged .

3. Cultural studies denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture.

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

1.   Cultural Studies transcends the confiner of a particular discipline such as literacy criticism or history.

               A cultural study is practiced in such journals as critical Inquiry, representation and boundary. Italian Opera, a Latino ‘telenovela’ the architectural styles of prisons, body piercing – and drawing conclusion about the changes in textual phenomena over time-such things are found in these kinds of newspapers cultural studies not basically or really about literature in the traditional sense or even about “Art”. Lawrence Grosberg, cary Nelson, and Paula. Trencher stress 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.” Logical works are not limited by their “borders” as single text, historical troubles or disciplines, and the critical own personal connections to what is analyzed and described. Henry Giroux and others write in their “Dalhousie Revise” manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are ‘resisting intellectuals’ who see what they do as “an emancipator project” as it erodes the traditional corrective divisions in most institutions of higher educational. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or his own political analysis part of the training, which of course, can direct to problems. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a removed activity.

2.   Cultural Studies is politically engaged:

                 The cultural critics see themselves as “Oppositional” not only within their individual discipliner but to many of the power structures of society at huge. The cultural critics question inequalities within power structures and try to find out the models for reformation relationships among the dominant and “minority” of “Subaltern” discourses. The meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. This type of idea, taken to a Philosophical extreme, demise 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 transfer of esthetics and culture from the ideal realms of taste and sensibility into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.

3. Cultural studies denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture.

                            In these days cultural critics work to remove the term culture to include mass culture, whether popular, folk, or urban. Jean Belldrillard, Andreas Huyssen and some other critics of cultural studies argue that after World War II the difference among high low and mass culture collapsed. They look forward on other theorists like pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases.”

              For example, the descriptions of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of British raj by writes like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal and entrenched imperialist argument for transparent superiority and worldwide domination of transparent superiority and worldwide domination of other races, especially Asians wherever British or French or any other whoever ruled the colonist tried to show their culture superior. But race along was not the matter for the British raj: money was also another determining factor. Thus, drawing also upon the ideas of French Gistorian Michel de Certeam, cultural critics examine.

“The practice of everyday life”, studying literature as an anthropologist would, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture’s economy. Cultural critics explain ‘what’ is produced and how various productions narrate to one another. They do not determine to find out which one is the best work. Their aim is to expose the political economic reasons ‘why’ a confident cultural product is more valued at certain times than others.

Changing of boundaries among disciplines high and low can make cultural studies just plain fun. Some of these examples are the given titles.

The birth of captain Jach Sparrow :

An Analysis,

Disney’s pirates of the Caribbean: The curse o the Blach Pearl (2003)

R.L. Stevenson’s long John Silver in ‘Treasure Island’ (1881)

Keith Richard’s eye makeup.

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

                Marxist critics have predictable the importance of such paraliterary questions such as –

‘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 examination of literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the America romance (novel) and its readers, “Reading the Romance: women, patriarchy and popular literature, which demonstrates the textual effects of the publishing industry’s decisions effects of the publishing industry’s decisions about books that will reduce its financial risks.”

              One more contribution is the collection ‘Reading in America which is 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 immolation as cheaper eyeglasses, electric lights, and trains, the book – of the month club and how written and texts go through fluctuations of popularity and canonicity. Thus we can say that literature is not divide from our past, present and future.’

Cultural studies joins subjectivity means culture in relation to individual lives with ‘engagement’ a direct approach to aggressive social malpractices. The practitioners of cultural studies deny ‘humanism’ or ‘the humanities’ as universal categories. The practioners attempt for what they might call ‘social - reason’, which often differ the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

                 Now, let us see what difference does a cultural studies approach make for the student? First of all, it is more and more clear that by the year 2050 the United States would be what demographers call a majority minority population; by this one has to understand that the present numerical majority of ‘transparent’, ‘Caucasian’ and Anglo will be the minority Americans, particularly with the dramatically growing numbers of Latina residents, mostly Mexican ameucans.

                                  Gerald Graff and James Phelan absolve,

“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 enquiry “why teach the controversy?” they noted 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 hope lessee compromised by racism, sexism and homophobia; professors can acknowledge these difference and encourage students to contract a conversation for themselves as “the most exciting part of their education.”

                 All the culture taken as  the same culture in cultural studies like western culture, minority culture so we have to drive the tendency of mix culture and the understand  of every culture is become an central thing in a cultural studies.