ENG 350

LITERARY CRITICISM Cultural Studies

Overview: attentive to the complex relationship between knowledge, power and cultural institutions/practices. discipline dedicated to the investigation of material culture and everyday life. concerned with the production of culture. highly interdisciplinary field informed by diverse research methodologies. Assumptions: perspectives from different disciplines can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations of culture and power. all those practices, institutions and systems of classification through which particular values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life, and habitual forms of conduct are are worth exploring. understanding culture in all its complex forms and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself are its main objectives. cultural artifacts should be studied and also connected to a larger, progressive political project. division of knowledge should be exposed and reconciled in order to overcome the split between tacit cultural knowledge and objective (universal) forms of knowledge, commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action is essential. power exists in diverse forms, including gender, race, class, colonialism, etc. connections between these forms of power will develop deeper ways of thinking about culture and power that can be utilized by agents in the pursuit of change. Practices: intervenes in cultural politics through contesting perspective of the field. explores culture as the signifying practices of representation within the context of social power. draws on a variety of theories, including Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism and feminism. employs eclectic methods. coheres conceptually around the key ideas of culture, signifying practices, representation, discourse, power, articulation, texts, readers and consumption. Questions: How does this portrayal criticize the leading political figures or movements of the day? How does the literary text function as part of a continuum with other historical/cultural texts from the same period? How can we use a literary work to "map" the interplay of both traditional and subversive discourses circulating in the culture in which that work emerged and/or the cultures in which the work has been interpreted? How does the work consider traditionally marginalized populations? Terminology Bricolage: The rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signifying objects to produce new meanings in fresh contexts. A process of re-signification by which cultural signs with established meanings are reorganized into new codes of meaning. Bricoleur: Someone who constructs a bricolage (above). Within cultural studies the term has most commonly been applied to those who stylize themselves using the clothing and artifacts of popular culture. Formation: Longstanding and relatively stable historical cultural views about certain practices or ideas, such as gender formation, class formation, race formation, etc.

Ideology: Belief system, true or untrue, shared by members of a society or subgroup within a society; commonly used to designate the attempt to fix meanings and world views in support of the powerful. Ideological Bias: The leaning towards one belief system or another in a society; texts contain visible or hidden messages that reflect the ideologies from which they come. Mass culture: Pejorative term used to suggest the inferiority of commodity-based capitalist culture as inauthentic, manipulative and unsatisfying. The concept draws its power from the contrast with high culture and/or an alleged authentic peoples culture. Meme: The smallest cultural element that is replicated by means of the human capacity for imitation. Memes are cultural instructions for carrying out behavior stored in the brains and passed on by imitation. Human consciousness is said to be a product of memes. Myth: Repeated stories that take on a central pattern of significance in a culture by linking many smaller stories together. Popular Culture: Widespread and common public texts. The meanings and practices produced by popular audiences. As a political category, the popular is a site of power and the struggle over meaning. The popular transgresses the boundaries of cultural power and exposes the arbitrary character of cultural classification through challenging notions of a high/low culture. Reductionism: By which one category or phenomenon is likened to and explained solely in terms of another category or phenomenon. In particular, cultural studies has argued against economic reductionism, by which cultural texts are accounted for in terms of political economy. Reflexivity: A process of continuous self-monitoring. The use of knowledge about social life as a constitutive element of it. Discourse about the experience and revision of social activity in the light of new knowledge. Representation: By which signifying practices appear to stand for or depict another object or practice in the real world. Better described as a representational effect since signs do not stand for or reflect objects in a direct mirroring mode. Representations are constitutive of culture, meaning and knowledge. Subculture: Small contingent within a larger cultural group; can be religious, political, occupational, or even media based; some subcultures are considered alternative because they directly challenge the mainstream culture. Subjectivity: The condition and processes of being a person or self. For cultural studies, subjectivity is often regarded, after Foucault, as an effect of discourse because subjectivity is constituted by the subject positions which discourse obliges us to take up. The characteristics of agency and identity that discursive subject positions enable for a speaking subject.do not stand for or reflect objects in a direct mirroring mode. Representations are constitutive of culture, meaning and knowledge.