Written Assignment Paper - 5

Department of English,M. K. Bhavnagar University     

Name :-  Niyati Vyas

Roll No :- 14

Department :-M. A.English department

Semester :-  3

Paper No :-  205 Cultural Studies 

UNIT - 2 Five Types of Cultural Studies  

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC - Popular Culture                 

                                         This blog is a part of my academic written assignments.              

                         Cultural Studies

                                    Culture is the word which is next to impossible to describe in one word. Culture is something which reflects in your identity. To know more about culture, we have to study about it. “Culture” itself is so difficult to pin down and “Cultural Studies” is very much hard to define. “Cultural Studies” is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practice.

                                    If we go deeper in meaning of cultural Studies than we find that Cultural Studies is an academic field of critical theory and literary criticism initially introduced by British Academies in 1964 and subsequently adopted by allied academics throughout the world. Cultural Studies is an academic discipline aiding cultural researchers who theorize about the forces from which the whole of humankind construct their daily lives. It is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches methods and academic properties.

                “A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.”

                              Cultural Studies combines feminist theory, political theory, social theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/ criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Thus, cultural studies seek to understand how meaning is generated, disseminated and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a given culture. Cultural studies composed of elements of Marxism post structuralism and postmodernism: those fields that concentrate on social and cultural forces that either create community or cause diversion and alienation.

                                 The term Cultural Studies was used by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Studies or CCCS. Cultural Studies approaches generally share four goals:

           

     

                                     Cultural studies transcend the confines of particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. Cultural studies deny the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and popular culture. A cultural study is politically engaged. Cultural studies analyzed not only the cultural work, but also the means production.

                                              Though cultural studies practitioners deny “humanism” or “the humanists” as universal categories they, strive for what they might call “social reason” which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

                                      There are five types of Cultural studies. They are:

1.       British Cultural Materialism

2.       New Historicism

3.       American Multiculturalism

4.       Postmodernism and Popular culture

5.       Post colonial Studies

                              Let's understand about Popular Culture. 

                   POPULAR CULTURE 

                                           It is also known as POP culture. Of Culture studies also includes mass or popular cultural and everyday life.

Ø The department popular culture at Bowling Green Uni. Launched the journal of popular culture.

Ø Popular culture is the culture of masses.

There are four type of popular culture :

(1) Production Analysis: It ask quotations like:

a)     Who own the media?

b)    Who create text and why?

c)     How democratic of elitist is production of popular culture ?

d)    What about works written only for money?

  Example like: Television programme

(2) Textual analysis: It examines how specific works of popular culture created meanings.

(3) Audience analysis: it asks different group of popular culture consumers or users, make similar of different sense of some texts.

(4) Historical analysis:  It investigates how these other three dimensions over times.

                                       These analyses seek to get beneath the surface meaning and examine more implicit social meanings. 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. As we will also point out, the popular culture reconstruction of a work like Frankenstein can also open it to unforeseen new interpretations.

                                     Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are preferred by an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the late 20th and early 21st 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 dumped-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 countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist, and corrupted. 

                                          The term "popular culture" was coined in the 19th century or earlier refers to the education and general "cult redness" of the lower classes, as was delivered in an address at the England. The term began to assume the meaning of a culture of the lower classes separate from (and sometimes opposed to) "true education" towards the end of the century, a usage that became established by the antebellum period. The current meaning of the term, culture for mass consumption, especially originating in the United States, is established by the end of World War II the abbreviated form "pop culture" dates to the 1960s.

                                                Before 1960s there was a time when popular culture was not studies by academics when popular culture was not studies by academics when it was well, just popular culture. But within American Studies programs at first and then later in many disciplines including semiotics, rhetoric literary criticism, film studies and psychoanalytic approaches, critic examine such as cultural media  as pulp fiction, comic books, television film, advertising, popular music and computer cyber culture. They assess how such factors as ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, region and sexuality are shaped by and reshaped in popular culture.