Five types of cultural studies

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Five types of cultural studies

Name :- Vala Jyotsna T.

Roll no:- 38.

Paper : 8^th ( Cultural Studies)

Topic : Five types of cultural studies

Class : M.A.—1, SEM--2

Year : 2015-17

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinh Bhavnagar University.

Topic: -Five types of cultural studies

What is culture:-

Dictionary meaning of  Culture  is the way of living of the people of India. India's languages religions,dance, music, food and custom differ from place to place within the country.

Matthew Arnold says :-

                                    

It is a pursuit , collective not individual.

T.S.Eliot says:-

Three way actually spoken of cultures

(1). A synecdoche-e.g. Art – culture

(2). A kind of emotional stimulant / general well – being – e.g.

“The culture of India is very ancient and hallolded = an over arching statement.

(3). An aesthetic – an aesthetic used by politicious and the media as a rhetoric without any depth.

Raymond Williams:-

Culture is “Ordinary”

He says “Every worker is a cultures

“Every laborer is a culture” 

Stefan Collini:-

“Culture is an ideal of human life”.

 

·         Five types of cultural studies:

Cultural studies were divided into five parts;-

(1). British Culture Materialism

(2). New Historicism

(3). American Multiculturalism

(4). Postmodernism and Popular Culture

(5). Postcolonial Studies

Cultural study approach generally share four goals:=

(1). Cultural studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as literary criticism and 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 culture work, but also the means of production.

So let’ take introduction on five types of cultural studies.

1) British cultural Materialism:-

Cultural material began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R. leavis.

Cultural studies are referred to as cultural materialism in Britain.

                                      Matthew Arnold redefined the ‘givens’ of British culture.

“There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing (other) people as masses”

                                          

                                                    -Williams

Britain has two trajectories for culture

1).—First leads to past culture preserver

2).—Second leads to

Louis Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people that the main function of ideology was to produce the society’s existing relations of production and that function is even carried out in literary texts.

Some cultural materialists are:

1) Walter Benjamin

2) Leni Riefenstahl – Triumph of the Will.

3) Lukacs – Reflection theory

Cultural materialists also turned to:-

-Humanistic

-Spiritual insight.

2) New historicism:-

“If the 1970s could be called the age of deconstruction some hypothetical survey of late 20^thcentury criticism might well characterize the 1980s as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the recovery of the referent.”

American counterpart of British cultural  Materialism and history as a material:-

-Subjective

- not a unified whole

-Is the story of the ruling class

New historicist seek “surprising coincidences “that may cross.”

Stephen Greenbelt:-

coined the word New Criticism. “New historicism explains the word “Laputa”from Gulliver’s travels.

“Laputa means the whore” it is describes as gigantic trope of the female body.

The “New Historicism” movement is led by Stephen Greenbelt. It refers to the historical nature of the text and textual nature of the history. It is different from the New Criticism in which theories like deconstruction and structuralism give importance to linguistic approach of the text. On the other hand, new historicism connects the text with its non-literary, historical text and breaks down the distinction between them. It draws inspiration from Michel Foucault’s discourse and power that holds that we find the active reflection of the power relation of that time in the text and it makes and remakes the meaning. New historicism is less a theory for interpreting text and more a set of shared assumption that history and text are intimately interconnected.

New Historicism focuses on the way literature expresses-and sometimes disguises-power relations at work in the social context in which the literature was produced, often this involves making connections between a literary work and other kinds of texts. Literature is often shown to “negotiate” conflicting power interests. New historicism has made its biggest mark on literary studies of the Renaissances and Romantic periods and has revised motions of literature as privileged, apolitical writing. Much new historicism focuses on the marginalization of subjects such as those identified as witches, the insane, heretics, vagabonds, and political prisoners.

3)  American Multiculturalism:

In 1965 the Watts race riots draw

worldwide attention. They were given rights equal to Whites. Leon Botstein emphasized on reading classical and traditional books Bernard Diaz’s says….

“Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view the observers of the conquest and of the history before the conquest. No American should graduate from college without a framework of knowledge that includes at least some construct of Asian history of Latin American history, of African history.”

American political history and we witness bloodshed and atrocities in the name of racism. Fifty years later, if we look at the matter now, we find the idea of race and ethnicity has evolved over the years. Social scientists believe that “race” is the whites’ construct rather than scientifically approved, to assign their privilege and dominance over the black. Interracial marriage is so widespread that the bicultural or multicultural American is the norm rather than exception. With the huge influx of Mexican American, it is predicted that in 2050, English will no more be the national language and Anglo-American a majority.

American Multiculturalism includes:

- African American Writers

- Latina Writer

-  American Indian Writers

- Latin Writers Asian American writers

(4) Postmodernism and popular culture:-

Introduction:-

“Postmodernism” is a term usually applied to the period in literature  and literary theory since the 1960s, though some regard postmodernism as the prevailing intellectual mood since World War-2 ended in 1945. Numerous Philosophers, critics, and belletristic writers can be seen as precursors or early representatives of the cultural and aesthetic approach that would come to be called postmodernism, among them Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Bretch, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roland Barthes. Postmodernism is characterized by a strikingly radical skepticism toward all aspects of western culture, the impetus for which many practitioners of postmodern theory they trace back to the writings of the nineteenth century, philosopher Frederic Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s spiritual descendants seek, in so many words, a new kind of meaning independent of the prevailing cultural “myth” of objective truth.

Post modernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with the givens of society; a penchant for irony. The self-conscious “play “within the work of art: fragmentation and ambiguity; and a restructured, debentured, dehumanized subject.

Recently the notions of met modernism, post-postmodernism and the ‘death of postmodernism’ have been increasingly widely debated in his introduction to a special issue of the journal 20^th century literature titled ‘After postmodernism’ that “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. The exhibition post modernism- style and subversion 1970-1990 at the Victorian and Albert Museums was billed as the first however to document post ssmodernism as a historical movement.

Post modernism-:

- Ambiguity

- Fragmentation

- Dehumanization

Popular culture divided into…



-Production analysis

-Popular culture

- Historical analysis

- Audience analysis

- Textual analysis

Popular culture is studied after 1960s

popular culture reshaped……..

Popular culture…

1) Ethnicity

2) Race

3) Gender

4) Class

5) Age

6) Region

7) Sexuality.

Popular culture is the entirely of ideas, perspective, attitudes, images and other Phenomena that are within the mainstream of a given culture, especially western culture of the early to mid 20^th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20^th and early 21th century. Heavily influenced by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society.

Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumber down in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result it comes under heavy criticism from various non mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and counter cultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted.

5) Post colonial studies:-

Post colonial Theorists:-

      - Jean Rhys

              -Jamaica Kincaid

      -E.M. Forster

            -Rudyard Kipling.

Post colonialism is a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism, post colonial theories.

Post colonial literary theorist study the English language within the political zed context.

Gayatri Chakravorly Spivak is post colonial feminist who examined the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” sub proletarian women in the Third World. Spivak's subaltern study reveal how female subjects are silenced by dialogue between the male-dominated west and the male -dominated East, offering little hope for the subaltern woman's voice to rise up amidst the global social institution that oppress her.

Conclusion:

Thus, in cultural studies we can find five types of cultural studies. Which were helps to recognize the different cultures with the different communities and histories.

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