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What is Cultural Studies?
Late 50s early 60s three keys texts:
-Richard Hoggart’s The use of literacy (1957)
-Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1750-1950 (1958)
-E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
These were considered to have begun a new intellectual and
political tradition which gradually evolved into the subject of C.S ;
gained credence after the establishment of the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies, under the directorship of R.H in
1964
The late 80’s
British Studies or British Cultural Studies. Or Area Studies
its subject
-was Linked to English language learning;
Its objective
-the study of British life, institutions and culture ,
Its assumption (belief)
-successful communication is possible where there is adequate
awareness of the cultural context within which a language is
used.
BS (British Studies) provides a bridge between Language study
and the social sciences.
B.C.S developed within literary studies, yet emphasis on the
study of cultural products, the approach founded on the
examination of different discourses not only on the study of
language and institutions.
Concerns about meanings of culture
in post-war Britain
• Hog. and Thompson believed in a radical and
influential way that
• “culture involved a whole way of life and thus
was not the privilege of any particular class or
intellectual elite”
• Williams on his part argued that in the modern
world
• “culture would be so complex that no individual
could ever grasp it in its entirety... Culture would
therefore always be fragmented, partly
unknown and partly unrealized.”
In the 1950s these standpoints challenged a fundamental
premise of homogeneity, the existence of a single entity that
could be controlled by those who decreed what culture was and
what culture was not. The working -class workers of the late 50s
were derided in many quarters as ‘kitchen sink’ authors, their
subject matter deemed a lapse of taste, a degeneration from
some ideal of literary production.
‘Culture’ was still thought of as the property of a group who
determined what should and should not be admitted to its
realm.
Against this view was Hog, Williams and Thompson’s argument
that
“culture is multi-faceted and includes the products of different
class, ethnic and generational groups.”
The generation of 1956
The public prominence of working-class artists of all kinds
(novelist and playwrights: Alan sillitoe shelagh, Joan littlewood’s
Theatre workshop, Charles Parker and the radio ballads ;) the
development of the popular music industry, the invention of the
teenager, the evolution of cultural phenomena targeted at quite
specific groups, all reinforced the idea that
a culture might not be a single all-encompassing entity but a
complex network of different systems, a Babel of different
languages.
Hoggart and Williams ‘view culture as plurivocal , a process, a
shifting mass of signs rather than sth that could easily be categorized
and examined . The same is true of CS that asks for questions instead
of providing answers, hard to categorize. It crossed disciplinary
boundaries and questioned assumptions about the validity of
disciplines. It widened into different , often conflicting lines of
enquiry. From the outset, it was to challenge the orthodoxies of the
academic establishment. The Birmingham Centre embarked on a
series of projects that went beyond the limits of the CANONICAL
texts studied in Lit Departments.
Hoggart
wanted to re-evaluate working –class culture and oral culture,
previously marginalized or excluded from the canon .
Stuart Hall
made the centre more internationalist , less literary in focus and less
resolutely English, by shifting attention to mass media culture, to
youth culture and the theoretical work of European and American
sociologists and critics.
Antony Easthope
In ‘But what is Cultural Stidies?’ he traces 3 phases since the 50s
1- the Culturalist phase of the 60s,
2- the Structuralis t of the 70s,
3- the Post-Structural-Culturalist of the last 20 years.
Rejects the positivist ideas of objectivity because the writers ‘ point of view is always
inscribed in their account of anything . Subjectivity is crucial element in the process .
Like H.and W Easthrope goes for CS as a field that invites a pluralistic approach.
Questions of race and gender added to the initial concerns of class, generation and
ethnicity.
CS reached other parts of the world (Australia, Canada, US .
In the 90s old questions of national identity, national culture were once again raised.
Franz Fanon the difference between nationalism( its dangers of inherent racism, and
xenophobia, and national consciousness which is an inclusive concept and embraces
racial, religious, and ethnic difference. This distinction is vital to any society veering
towards multiculturalism
‘A new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories.’
Otherness : Alterity
A national identity is also implicitly concerned with otherness, with what is not part of
the national heritage. If nationalism is about belonging, about ‘us’ , then anyone who is
not ‘one of us’ is one of ‘them’ . Home = foreign; civilization = barbarity.
Homi Bhabha about the Liminality of cultural identity, evokes(call / bring to mind, stir up,
suggest, remind.) the classic stereotype of the English weather not only to invoke images
of the weather but also images of its colonial alternative:
It encourages memories of the ‘deep’ nations crafted in chalk and limestone:
the moors menaced by the wind; the quiet cathedral; that corner of a foreign field that
is forever England. The English Weather also revives memories of its daemonic double:
the heat and dust of India; the dark emptiness of Africa; the tropical chaos that was
deemed despotic and ungovernable and therefore worthy of the civilizing mission.
In Homi Bhabha(ed.), (Nation and Narration London: Routledge, 1990), pp.319.
The question remains
What is cultural knowledge?
In foreign Language learning the persisting question is ‘What kind of knowledge do we
need to understand another culture?’
Contact wit another culture involves not only the acquisition of basic information but a
complex hermeneutic process for the individual. In this process perceptions are altered,
unquestioned assumptions about culture and identity are challenged.
“On the one hand, appropriation of a foreign means of
signification(like the English Language) does not leave it
‘untouched’: in acquiring bits and pieces of information we
transform it(usually through reduction) in such a way that we can
use it. On the other hand, our appropriation of a foreign means of
signification does not leave us ‘untouched’, either: in the process of
acquisition, our world-view changes... (it) is a hermeneutic process
in which we expose our own cultural identity to the contrasting
influences of the foreign language and culture”
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of cultural sign
processes (semiosis), analogy, metaphor, signification and communication, signs and
symbols. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which in its part, studies the
structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is usually divided into three
branches, which include:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or
meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions; for example,
Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as communication.
However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the science. They examine
areas belonging also to the natural sciences – such as how organisms make predictions
about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see semiosis). In general, semiotic
theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study: the communication of information
in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoosemiosis.
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and
symbols.[1] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are
combined to form phrases and sentences."[2] Charles Morris adds that semantics deals with
the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote; and,
pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological,
biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs.