Paper-08
Name:
Ramiz M. Solanki
M. A.
Sem:- 2
Roll No.
27
Batch:
2017-19
Enrolment
No.2069108420180051
Paper No.
(Cultural Studies)
Assignment
Topic: Five Types of Cultural Studies.
Email Id:
ramiz.solanki39@gmail.com
Submitted
to: Department of English MKBU
Introduction/
What is Cultural Studies.
(1) Cultural studies (also cultural theory)[1] is a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically
engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of
contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts,
and contingencies.[2] Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how
cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or
operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation.
(2) Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of
research and teaching that investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and
transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power.
Research and teaching in the field explores the relations between culture
understood as human expressive and symbolic activities, and cultures understood
as distinctive ways of life. Combining the strengths of the social sciences and
the humanities, cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary
studies, sociology, communications studies, history, cultural anthropology, and
economics. By working across the boundaries among these fields, cultural
studies addresses new questions and problems of today’s world. Rather than
seeking answers that will hold for all time, cultural studies develops flexible
tools that adapt to this rapidly changing world.
Five Types of Cultural Studies.
(1) British
Cultural Materialism.
(2) New
Historicism
(3) American
Multiculturalism
(4) Postmodernism
and Popular Culture
(5) Postcolonial
Studies
British Cultural Materialism.
Materialism shows
the interest in material things. It shows the disinterest in spiritualism,
interested in body rather the soul. Cultural Materialism is the term used in
instead of Cultural Studies in Britain. So there would be always conflict
between spiritualism and materialism.
Cultural studies is
referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long
tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine
the "givens" of British cultural. Edward Burnett Tylor's pioneering anthropological
study Primitive cultural (1871) argued that "culture or civilization,
taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is a complex whole which includes
knowledge belief, art, morals, low, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society" (1). Claude Levi-Strauss's
influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive
peoples, and then, with the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams
memorably states: "There are no message; there are only ways of seeing
[other] people as masses" (300).
To appreciate
the importance of this revision of "culture" we must situate it
within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British
Empire upon which the sun never set, an ideology left over from previous
century. 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 and make transformation of
status, not fixity, the norm. This cultural materialism furnished a leftist
orientation "critical of the aestheticism, formalism, ant historicism, and
apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary
criticism"; such was the description in the John Hopkins Guide to Literary
Theory and Criticism (Groden and Krieswirth 180).
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. Leavis sought to
use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation
more widely; leavisites promoted the "great tradition" of Shakespeare
and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than
just the elite.
Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture.
Raymond Williams applauded the richness of canonical texts such as Leavis
promoted, but also found they could seem to erase certain communal forms of
life. Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Gorgy
Lukas, Theodor Adorns, Louis Althusser Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin, Antonio
Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and
in the many systems of domination related to literature. From Gramsci, an
Italian Marxist, for example, they got the concept of cultural
"hegemony," referring to relations of domination not always visible
as such. Williams noted that hegemony was "a sense of reality for most
people . . . beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to
move" (Marxism and Literature 110). But the people are not always of
hegemony; they sometimes possess the power to change it. Althusser insisted
that ideology was ultimately in control of the people, that "the main
function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relation of production,
and that function is even carried out in literary texts." Ideology must
maintain this state of affairs if the state and capitalism can continue to
reproduce themselves without fear of revolution. Althusser saw popular
literature as merely "carrying the baggage of a culture’s ideology,"
whereas "high" literature retained more autonomy and hence had more
power (233). Walter Benjamin attacked fascism by questioning the value of what
he called the "aura" of culture. Benjamin helps explain the frightening
cultural context for a film such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the will
(1935). Lukas developed what he called a "reflection theory", in
which he stressed literature's reflection conscious or unconscious, of the
social reality surrounding it not just a flood of realistic detail but a
reflection of the essence of a society. Fiction formed without a sense of such
reflection can never fully show the meaning of a given society.
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, at once conflictual and communal, individual and social.
Feminism was also important for cultural materialists in recognizing how
seemingly "disinterested" thought is shaped by power structures as
patriarchy.
American
Multiculturalism
America has
been a land who always open/welcome all kind of talents. In American
Multiculturalism everyone has their own individual voice, all kind of
religions, rituals, customs are allow there to perform without any force to
believe only in particular system. In the United States multiculturalism is not
clearly established in policy at the federal level, but ethnic diversity is
common in both rural and urban areas.
Mass
immigration was a feature of the United States economy and society since the 1st half
of 19thcentury. The absorption of the stream of immigrants became in
itself a prominent feature of America’s national myth.
The idea of
‘Melting Pot ‘is a metaphor that implied that each individual immigrant
and each groups of individual immigrant assimilated into American society at
their own pace which as defined above is not multiculturalism this is opposed
to assimilation and integration.
As a philosophy
multiculturalism began as a part of the ‘Pragmatism movement’ at the end
of the 19thcentury in Europe and United States then aspolitical
and cultural pluralism at the turn of 20thcentury.
It
was partly in response to a new wave of European imperialism in
Sub-Saharan Africa and the massive immigration of Southern and
Eastern Europeans to United States and Latin America. Philosophers,psychologists,historian and early
sociologist such as Charles Sanders Peirce,William James,
George Santayana, Horace Kallen,John Dewey,W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain
Locke developed concepts of cultural pluralism which known today as
Multiculturalism.
Leon Botstein believes a combination of traditional
and newer perspectives offers the best alternative: student must read Aeschylus
Dante and Shakespeare ‘’because what Shakespeare and Dante and the so called
Great Books are all about is penetrating through details to what’s really
essential about the common experience of being a member of this Species.’’But
at the same time that one reads Thucydides or the subject of being a member of
a seafaring, global power, one should also read Bernal Diaz’s account of the conquest
of Mexico.
Every American
should understand Mexico from point of view of 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 American History.
New Historicism.
Here new means that
history was already there but it is the new way to study the history. The moto
of Micheal Warner is that “The text is historical and the history is textual”
then Fredrick Jamson says that “always historicize (in political unconscious).
According to M. H. Abraham New Historicism is just to read the history because
we don’t know the real scenario of the historical event.
We can take the example of ‘Hamlet’ as
we read, studying and analyzing the ‘Hamlet’ but we are not aware about the
real situation of that time in which the ‘Hamlet’ was written by Shakespeare. We
don’t know either the motivation of Shakespeare to write ‘Hamlet’ or don’t know
the zeitgeist behind this piece of literature.
So, here is the need
of New Historicist, New Historicist find the letters, interviews, reviews,
pamphlet, news which concerns with a sort of literature or incident or movie,
he/she try to reopen the work and to see from the new angel that was hidden
till today. The prime job of New Historicist is to investigate a particular
literature besides other researches.
Work Cited.
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