Name: Jayti R. Thakar.
Paper No: 8
Cultural Studies
Topic of
Assignment: What is Cultural Studies? ; And its Limitations
Roll No: 34.
Submitted
to: Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English
- What is Cultural Studies?
To define
cultural studies we should have one glance upon that what is ‘Culture’?
According to
Merriam Webster dictionary, Culture means, “the way of thinking, behaving, and
living of people.”
Another meaning of ‘Culture’ is ‘set of
Standards’.
Moreover,
the culture means, “the arts, and other manifestation of human intellectual
achievement regarded collectively.” In other sense we can also say that,
“ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people of society also
known as ‘Culture’”.
Now, the
question is what ‘Cultural Studies’ is?
“Cultural
Studies are innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that
investigates the way in which culture creates and transforms individual
experiences everyday life, social relations and power”.
Now the
prime concern is that where it (culture) can be studied? Or In which
departments it has studied?
Also in
other departments like,
· Archeology
· Botany
· Agriculture
· Philosophy
· Geography
What
Cultural Studies doing in English Department or in Literature Class?
A collage
class on the American novel is reading Alice Walker’s ‘The Color Purple
(1982).’ The professor identifies African American literary and cultural sources
and describes the book’s multilayered narrative structure, moving on a brief
review of its feminist critique of American gender and racial attitudes. Students
and professor discuss these various approaches, analyzing key passages in the
novel. Class members respond to these points, examining interrelationships
among race, gender, popular culture, the media, and literature.
This class
is practicing Cultural Studies. But, the word ‘Culture’ itself is so difficult
to pin down; “Cultural Studies” is hard to define.
As Pratick
Brantlinger has pointed out, culture studies is not “a tightly coherent,
unified movement with a fixed agenda,” but a “loosely coherent group of
tendencies, issues, and questions.”
Arising from
the social turmoil of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of elements of,
Marxism, post- structuralism, and post- modernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology,
sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies, public policy,
popular culture studies, and postcolonial studies. The discipline of psychology
has also entered the field of cultural studies.
· Cultural Studies approaches generally
share four goals.
a) First, cultural studies transcend the confines
of a particular discipline such as literary criticism or history. Cultural
studies are 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 disciplines,
and the critic’s own personal connections to what is being analyzed may also be
described. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his
or her own political views 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.
Cultural critics see themselves as “oppositional”, not only
within their own disciplines but to many of the power structures of society at
large. They question inequalities within power structures and seek to discover
models for restructuring relationship among dominant and “minority” or
“subaltern” discourses. Because meaning and individual subjectivity are
culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. Such a notion, taken to
philosophical extreme, denies the autonomy of the individual, weather an actual
person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic
“great man” or “great book” theory, and 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 deny the separation of “high” and “low”
or “elite” and “popular culture”.
You might hear someone remark at the symphony or at end art
museum: “I came here to get a little culture”. Being a “cultured” person used
to mean being acquainted with “highbrow” art and intellectual pursuits. But
isn’t culture also to be found with a pair of tickets to a rock concert? Cultural
critics today work to transform the term culture to include mass culture,
weather popular, folk, or urban. Following theorists Jean Baudrillard and
Andreas Huyssen, cultural critics argues that after world war 2 the distinction
among high, low and mass culture collapsed, and they site other theorists such
as Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good test” often only reflects
prevailing social, economic, and the political power basis. For example, the
images of India that were circulated during the colonial rule of the British
raj by writers like Rudyard Kipling seem innocent, but reveal an entrenched
imperialist argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other
races, especially Asians. But, race alone was not the issue for British Raj:
money was also deciding factors. Thus drawing also upon the ideas of French
historian Michel de Certeau, cultural critic examine “the practice of everyday
life”, studying literature as an anthropologist as a phenomenon of culture,
including culture’s economy.
4) Finally, cultural studies analyze not only the cultural
work, but also the means of production; Marxist critics have long recognized
the importance of such peraliterary questions as these; who supports a given
artist? Who publishes his or her books, and how are these books distributed?
Who buys these books? For that matter, who is literate or who is not? A well-
known literary production is Janice Radway’s study of the American romance
novel and its readers. Cultural studies thus join subjectivity- that is,
culture and relation to individual lives- with engagement, a direct approach to
attacking social ills. Though cultural studies practitioners deny “humanism” or
“humanities” as universal categories, they strive for what they might call “social
reason”, which often resembles the goals and values of humanistic and
democratic ideals.
Limitations of Cultural Studies:-
Cultural studies though have few limitations like,
1. It begins from somewhere and ends somewhere
else. So its strength becomes weakness.
2. It has another limitation is that the
cultural critics doesn’t analyses the matter and doesn’t collects data as
historians does. To put it bluntly, cultural studies is not always fueled by
the kind of hard research (including scientifically collected data) that
historians have traditionally practiced to analyze “Culture”.
3. Cultural studies practitioners often
know a lot of interesting things and possess the intellectual ability to play
them off interestingly against each other, but they sometimes lack adequate
knowledge of the “deep play” of meaning or “thick description” of a culture.
And sometimes they (Cultural Critics) directly jump upon the conclusion.
4. Defenders of tradition and advocates
cultural studies are waging what is sometimes call “cultural wars” or
“academia”.
5. The tone of cultural studies
sometimes seems rather politically incorrect or anti- power.
Conclusion:-
Thus, cultural studies work in different terms and it also having its
limitations.
To evaluate my assignment Click Here.
No comments:
Post a Comment