Five Types of Cultural Studies

Assignment Topic: Five Types of Cultural Studies

Name: Nikunj Bhatti

Roll no.:19

M.A. Semester: 2

Enrolment No.: 14101005

Year: 2015-16

Paper no.: 8 (cultural studies)

Email id.:nikunjbhatti332@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English

 Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

     

Five Types of Cultural Studies

• Introduction:

As far as cultural study is concerned, it has broader meaning because we see from various perspective then an individual can know what actually it lies in the meaning. Therefore firstly it becomes my job to deconstruct the meaning of culture as the meaning is elaborated according to different critics so at first we will have glance on the meaning of culture. Generally it means Way of living life or it can also be said that the life style of people and Matthew Arnold also quotes about Culture that it is a march towards perfection.

To know more we will take bird’s view about culture and its types in detail.

What is culture?

  Ø Culture is derived from Latin word ‘cultura ’.

Ø ‘to honour ’ and ‘ protect ’.

Ø Culture is a symbolic communication.

Ø Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

Ø “Culture is the learned behaviour of society or a subgroup.”

    What is Cultural Study?

Cultural studies is the science of understanding modern society, with an emphasis on politics and power cultural studies is an umbrella term used to look at a number of different subject. Categories studied include media studies including film and Journalism, sociology, industrial culture, globalization and social theory.

“Cultural Studies is not a tightly coherent unified movement with a fixed agenda, but a loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions.”

Cultural studies is composed of elements of Marxism, Post structuralism and Postmodernism, Feminism, Gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy, popular culture studies and Postcolonial studies: those field that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause division and alienation.

The definition of cultural studies can sometimes be misconstrued. It is not simply the study of different cultures but uses many other studies to analyze different cultures such as philosophy, theology, literature etc.

Types of Cultural Studies

In Cultural Studies we can see five types of Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies describes very deeply about these five types of Cultural Studies. These Studies are:

·        British cultural materialism

·        New Historicism

·        American Multiculturalism

·        Post modernism and popular culture

·        Postcolonial studies etc.

Let’s have a glance on each of these in detail.

1.    British cultural Materialism

Cultural study is referred to as “cultural materialism in Britain. Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens” of British Culture. Edward Burnett Tylor’s pioneering anthropolog1ical study ‘primitive Culture’

“Culture or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Cultural Materialism began in 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis and heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold. Raymond Williams talks about attributes of working class and elite class. As Williams memorably states:

“There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.”

          In modern Britain two trajectories for "culture" developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annual the distinction between labor and leisure classes. Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois culture.

Cultural materialists also turned to the more humanistic and even spiritual insights of the great student of Rabelais and Dostoevsky, Russian Formalist Bakhtin, especially his amplification of the dialogic form of meaning within narrative and class struggle.

2.    New historicism

New Historicism is a school of literary theory, first developed in 1980. The term ‘new historicism’ was created by the American critic Stephen greenbelts. New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpreted within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic.

Definition: New historicism

 “New historicism is that it is a method based on the parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same historical period”.

 Louis Montrose defined the new historicism as

A number of historicists claim that these cultural and ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce.

A New Historicist looks at literature in a wider historical context, examining both how the writer's times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer's times, in turn recognizing that current cultural contexts color that critic's conclusions.

“The text is historical, and history textual”

                                                -Michael Warner phrases

“History is always historicized”

                                               

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

First we know what is Multiculturalism?

	“Multicultural is involving or relating to several ethnic groups or cultural groups within a society. It includes people who have many different beliefs and customs. It could be designed for cultures of different races.”

 

As a philosophy, multiculturalism began as part of the Pragmatism movement at the end of the 19^th century in Europe and the United States. American multiculturalism was come into existence   in 1964 with the passing Civil Right Act.

“Every American should understand Mexico from the point of view of the observer of the conquest and of the history before the conquest……”

In 1972 Harvard University study by the geneticist Richard Lewontin found that most genetic differences were within racial groups, not between them. In the new country, if interracial trends continue, Americans will be puzzled by race distinctions from the past since children of multiracial backgrounds may be the norm rather than the exception. And given the huge influx of Mexican Americans into the United States over the last fifty years, immigration patterns indicate that by the year 2050 Anglo-Americans will no longer be the majority, nor English necessarily the most widely spoken language.

In literary field America existence with different culture which belongs to different idea about literature.  Cultural studies, regarding America with other culture and then their multi production of Literary Forms also. Cultural Studies regards four writers from different culture whose concerns with American Literary field.

4.    Postmodernism and Popular Culture

v Postmodernism

The term “postmodernism” first entered the philosophical lexicon in 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard. It’s a reaction against the philosophical assumptions, values, and intellectual worldview of the modern period of western history. Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true.

Postmodernism possesses several elements which are necessary which given by Jean Baudrillard

·        Any Sign is empty

·        Virtual world

·        Status and Taboos

·        Hyperreal between the private and the public etc.

It also affected in

·        Building

·        Literature

·        Cinema

·        Painting

·        Music

·        Photography etc.

      In the English speaking world, modernism has a very specific meaning among most literature scholars, referring not to the “Modern Age” since the Enlightenment, or to “Modern” in the sense of contemporary, but to the period after World War-1, When T.S.Eliot, James Joyes, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were in their heyday. Postmodernism offers no suggestion of anything like a comprehensive substitute world- view. Postmodernism means to make a clean break with the past in the sense that the past and its way of looking at the world become the subject of satirical, often sarcastic “play” with historical figures texts, and ideologies. New literature, art, and culture after world war 2 created, Analyzes of those is known as Postmodernism. It is opposed modernism.

v Popular Culture

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.

          Once we define the term and then it becomes very easy to understand this term as it is also known as Pop-Culture so The term ‘Popular Culture' was coined in the 19^th century or earlier. Traditionally, the term has denoted the education and general “culturedness” of the lower classes, as opposed to the “official culture” and higher education emanated by the dominant classe.The stress in the distinction from “official culture” became more pronounced towards the end of the 19^th century, a usage that became established by the interbellum period.

          Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and dumbed 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.

There are four main types of popular culture studies analyses like:

·        Production Analysis

·        Textual Analysis

·        Audience Analysis

·        Historical Analysis

So with the help of these an individual can analyze the types as production analysis deals with the production and while on the other hand Textual analysis deals with the text and on the other side we can also say that the third one is audience analysis which has more importance in the popular culture because Audience remains at the center in this kind of analysis while last but not the list kind is Historical analysis which plays vital role in the popular culture or so called Pop-culture.

5    Postcolonial Studies

So far as my reading is concerned about this study of Postcolonial we can say that it is against colonialism because colonialism came in to existence at the beginning of the century but slowly and steadily some people started to oppose against it so Anti-colonialism came into enlightenment so Post-colonialism came into utilization to oppose the Colonialism though it came into later on but we can find the post-colonial study in the play A Tempest which is written by Aime Ceaser which also deals with the Post-colonial study because in this kind of study an Individual can find the conflict between colonizer and the colonized people as it is found in many of work of literature and the best example is A tempest which also highlights the same thing in the play.

                At first glance postcolonial studies would seem to be a matter of history and political science, rather than literary criticism. Britain seemed to foster in its political institutions as well as in literature universal ideas for proper living, while at the same time perpetuating the violent enslavement of Africans and other imperialist cruelties around the world, causing untold misery and destroying millions of lives. Postcolonial literary theorists study the English language within this politicized context, especially those writings that developed at the colonial “front,” such as works by Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Foster, Jean Rhys, or Jamaica Kincaid. Earlier figures such as Shakespeare’s Caliban are re-read today in their New World contexts. Works such as ‘The Empire Writes Back’, edited by Bill Ashcroft and others, and ‘The Black Atlantic’ by Paul Gilroy have radically remapped cultural criticism.

          Therefore we can say that all cultural studies possess its own value by its culture. Thus, postcolonial study studies opposite to colonial studies; it studies beyond to colonial studies.

Ø To wind up:

These Cultural Studies exists with particular ideas which shows particular cultural world. Sometimes popular culture can so overtake and repackage a literary work that it is impossible to read the original text without reference to the many layers of popular culture that have developed around it.