Cultural Studies and its four goals

Topic: Cultural Studies and its four goals

Name: Urvi Dave

Class: M.A.

Sem: 2

Batch Year- 2014-16

Enrollment number:14101009

Paper no.: 8c (Cultural Studies)

email id: dave.urvi71@gmail.com

Guidance: Dr. Dilip Barad

Submitted to: Smt. S B Gardi    

                          Department of English  

                          M K Bhavnagar Uni.

Question: What is Cultural Studies? Explain four goals of Cultural Studies.

Introduction

    Before knowing about Cultural Studies, we should know what culture is. Culture is a anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be directly attributed to genetic inheritance. The term culture in American anthropology had two meanings-

(I) the evolved to classify and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively.

(ii) the distinct ways that people live, differently, classified and represent their experiences and acted creatively.

 Culture is central to the way we view, experience and engage with all aspects of our lives and the world around us. Even our definitions are shaped by the historical, political, social and cultural contexts in which we live. Culture is the mode of generating meanings and ideas. This mode of negotiation under which meanings are generated by power relations. Culture is a social phenomena which tends to regularate the mindset and behaviour of people which is set on ancient rules and regularities and experiences. Culture is the identity of particular society and it is the mirror of the society. Culture in a simple way can be said as a particular way of life. Tradition, customs, rules and regulations, norms, artifacts (signs), religions, communities, material things, journey of 'Man' from caves to present day civilization are also culture. opposite of nature is culture. Nature is outside and the moment Man enters, it becomes culture. Whatever which is not nature is culture. All the activities that are done between people on the piece of land and with the other people, culture is the entire range of activities that all the people of the society do. Culture deals with identity. For example, Mahatma Gandhi is the icon of India.

Nature is something which is outside the control of human beings and culture is the introduction of what humans do and think. Culture is the great help out of our present difficulties; Culture beings the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which has been thought and said in the world: and through his knowledge, turning of stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits, which we follow but mechanically. When the things are done by elite group, it is called Culture and when the same things are done by minority group, it s called sub-culture. Elite culture controls meanings because it controls the terms of the debate. Non-elite views on life and art are rejected as 'Tasteless', 'useless' or 'even stupid' by the elite. Culture is one of the two or three terms to define. It is an umbrella term. Literature is one of its discipline. It cannot be understood by one discipline. We are multi-disciplinary. Every discipline studies culture but in a different way.    

Culture   ---->       Cultural Criticism      ----->       Cultural Studies

   

Cultural Studies

To analyse the ways of life related to culture is called Cultural Studies. According to Elaine Showalter's "cultural" model of feminine different at all, but rather a set of practices. According to Patrick Brantlinger, cultural studies is not "a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda", but a "loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions."

          Culture itself is so difficult to pin down, cultural studies is hard to define. "cultural studies" is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practices. Marxism, post structuralism and post modernism, feminism, gender studies, film theory, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies and post colonial studies: those fields that study 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 Levi Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced. Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction" of the world/text distinction is "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." Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious structured as a language promoted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems. If we talk about India, lots of vanity and hypocrisy is there like religious etc. Popular representation of human life is important in cultural studies. the idea of West is more prominent hegemonically whether it is for society, politics or culture. When there is challenge in the hegemony, the "other" is powerful, at that time, we can find diversity.

For example, the supremacy of Aristotle's idea of catharsis is challenged and we can get so many views of readers.        

                                        

If we believe in hierarchy, then we are cultured. Hegemony is elated with the power position. The people who are at the center, in power position, decide it and the others who are on periphery, inferior or marginalized have no right to do so. For example, in Western culture, we find class system and in India, we have caste system. Basic preposition of the cultural studies is the deconstruction of the idea with the reference of Derrida.

 Four Goals of Cultural Studies

1) Cultural studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline such as 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) Cultural studies denies the separation of "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 (2003)"  are some famous works and movies.

4) Cultural studies analyses not only the cultural work, but also 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 (their) education".