Four
Goals of Cultural Studies
Name : Bhumi
Vajani
M.A.
– English Part – I
Sem. : 2
Roll
No. : 04
Paper : Cultural Studies
Topic : Four Goals of Cultural Studies
Submitted
to : Dr. Dilip Barad
Dept.
of English
M.K.
Bhavnagar University
Four
Goals of Cultural Studies
‘Culture’
is a term which has may connotations cultural is refinement or development of
mind tastes, etc. by education, training and experience. It is a form of
civilization. It can be called an advance development of the human power. Also
culture is an evidence of intellectual development in a particular nation. The
meaning and context of culture differs from country to country and person to
person.
A
college class on the American novel is reading a famous book of Allice Walker
called. The Colour purple (1982). In the classroom the professor identifies
African American literacy and cultural sources and then he describers the
book’s multilayered narrative structure. Also the professor gave a brief review
of its feminist critique of American gender and racial attitudes. Films and
novels of different countries show their varied culture even gestures differ
from culture.
ORIGIN
:
‘Culture’,
derives from ‘Cultura’ and ‘colere’ meaning ‘to cultivate’. It also meant ‘to
honour’ and ‘project’ by the 19th century in Europe it tastes of the
upper class (elite).
‘culture’
is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over
which meanings are valid. Elite culture controls meanings because it controls
the terms of the debate.
Culture
studies looks at marker popular culture and everyday life. Popular culture is
the culture of masses. A culture study argues that culture is about the
meanings a community or society generates. A cultural study believes that the
‘culture’ of a community includes various aspects: economic, spatial,
ideological, erotic and political. Culture is not a natural thing it is
produced, cultural studies is interested in production and consumption of
culture. Emphasis on discourse and totality are at centre to cultural studies.
It believes that we cannot ‘read’ cultural artifacts only within the esthetic
realm.
Stuart
Hall’s work has been a trendsetter in cultural studies and inaugurated the field
in Britain. Hall’s essay of ‘encoding’ and Decoding ‘set the scene’ for
cultural studies of the media. The essay argued about meaning within the texts
– songs, painting, TV soaps takes helps of codes to organize. ‘Culture’ which
makes a society “a cultured society”.
Margaret Mead: “Culture is the learned
behavior of society or a subgroup.”
Clifford Geertz : “Culture is simply
ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”
The tone of this early version of
cultural studies was set by students if the British New left, especially
Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.
Function
:
What
cultural studies does is to interpret sings of culture such as the ones listed
above as part of a power struggle to acquire, maintain or contest meanings. The
‘Critique’ component of cultural studies explores the political significance of
the signs of signs as what they mask or gloss, what they refinance, cultural
studies, studies the language in and through which meanings are made in a
particular culture. Cultural studies questions how such meaning reflect the
power struggle within that culture studies explores how certain meanings are
privileged in that culture at the cost of others.
“A cultural study is the analysis of
cultures systems of meaning – production and consumption.”
Steven spielber’s movies and opera Winfred
show point out, examine inter-relationship among – race, gender, popular
culture, the media, and literature. The director and anchor, both of them
question cultural conventions. Historical and contemporary aspects are on the
oprah Winfred show, in Hollywood films. The TV Programmers in our country also
presents various cultures. Gujarati, Bengali and Rajasthan TV soaps on channels
are famous now a days. Such movies also run well in theatres for long time.
Elaine Showalter in her essay on
feminism talks about the different cultures and contexts. She talks about
American culture as well as French culture. Ronald Barlher, Claude
Levi-Straurs, Jacuque Derride and Michel Foucault all had to say one or the
other thing about culture in their critical essay. A culture study has
connection with maxims, the new historicism, multiculturalism, postmodernism,
popular culture and postcolonial studies.
Cultural
Studies approaches share four goals :
(1) Cultural
Studies transcends the confiner of a particular discipline such as literacy
criticism or history.
(2) Cultural
studies are politically engaged.
(3) Cultural
studies deny the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ are elite and popular culture.
(4) Cultural
studies analyze 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 simply or essentially 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.” Intellectual works are
not limited by their “borders” as single text, historical problems 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 disciplinary
divisions in most institutions of higher educational. For students, this
sometimes means that a professor might make his or his own political view part
of the instruction, which of course, can lead to problems. But this kind of
criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity.
(2) Cultural
Studies is politically engaged:
The
cultural critics see themselves as “Oppositional” not only within their own
discipliner but to many of the power structures of society at large. The
cultural critics question inequalities within power structures and try to find
out the models for restructuring 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 relocation of esthetics and
culture from the ideal realsm of taste and sensibility into the arena of a
whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.
(3) Cultural
studies demise the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or elite and popular culture.
In
these days cultural critics work to transfer 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
distinction 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 images of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of
British ray by writes like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal and
entrenched imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination
of white superiority and world wide 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 issue 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 describe ‘what’ is produced and
how various productions relate to one another. They do not determine to find
out which one is the best work. Their aim is to reveal the political economic
reasons ‘why’ a certain 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 analyses not only the
cultural work, but also the means of production.
Marxist
critics have recognized the importance of such par literary 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 analysis 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.”
Another 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 separate from our past, present and future.’
Cultural studies joins subjectivity
means culture in relation to individual lives with ‘engagement’ a direct
approach to attacking social malpractices. The practitioners of cultural
studies deny ‘humanism’ or ‘the humanities’ as universal categories. The practioners
strive for what they might call ‘social - reason’, which often resemble 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
increasingly 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 ‘white’, ‘Caucasian’ and Anglo will be
the minority Americans, particularly with the dramatically increasing 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.”
Above discussed are the four goals of
cultural studies. Also a cultural study is divided into five parts. The first
part deals with British cultural materialism where British culture and the
writes and theorize are discussed. The second one in New Historicism. It
discusses various historical novels with a new approach. In the discusses
‘Laputa’ is given more space and with it feminism is appropriately discussed.
The third one is American multiculturalism. Here, various cultures and their
works on widely discussed. American condiment has mar countries and of course
they were European colonies in the past. The culture of Mexicans red Indians
and ‘white’ are presented with their mode of writers. This writer write about
the way they were treated in past, the way they fought for the rights and the
way they live theirs life or is Asian American writers. These, writers are migrates
from Asian – sub – continent. The fourth one is postmodernism and popular
culture. This part wildly discuss the term postmodernism, how the writers apply
this terms – ‘the fifth is postcolonial studies’.
Through the study of various one becomes
a better person with his whole heart.
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