Cultural Studies |
Working Definition:
Cultural Studies, as the phrase is currently used, is ambiguous. It can refer to a school of criticism, a widespread critical movement, or to a program within a university. When it is used to name a school of criticism, the term usually refers to the issues that were formulated by the Birmingham School in England and imported into the United States through the Cultural Studies anthology edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Triechler. When it is used to refer to a widespread movement, the term has a much broader range of application and may designate any number of types of criticism, each dealing with the cultural contexts of various signifying systems. In this sense, it can be understood as an underlying interest in the formation of culture. When it is used to refer to a program of study, it is not always the case that the method of study is cultural critique and the intellectual precursors are associated with the Birmingham school. It is sometimes the case, as at UIC, that the methods of study are varied and the intellectual heritage is global. In the last few years, the phrase, "Cultural Studies," has increasingly paralleled the use of phrases such as "Women's Studies," "African American Studies," "Gender Studies," and so on. In this usage, Cultural Studies seems to be gaining ground on the phrase "English Studies" as a way of describing the research projects in English Departments. jjs
Historical Note: Cultural Studies Culture is itself an extremely complex concept - one which has involved related but nonetheless separate traditions of research and theory in a range of different academic disciplines (Anthropology, Social History, Linguistics, Sociology, and Literary Studies, among others). Cultural Studies has emerged as a separate field of interdisciplinary study during the past three decades, initially in Britain, but more recently in the United States and in other countries.
Disciplinary Definitions:
"Cultural Studies is not simply the close analysis of objects other than literary texts. . .[it] does not, as some people believe, require that every project involve the study of artifacts of popular culture. On the other hand, people with ingrained contempt for popular culture can ever fully understand the cultural studies project. Cultural Studies also does not mean that we have to abandon the study of what have been historically identified as the domains of high culture, although it does challenge us to study them in radically new ways. . .[it] conceives culture relationally. Thus, the analysis of an individual text, discourse, behavior, ritual, style, genre, or subculture does not constitute cultural studies unless the thing analyzed is considered in terms of its competitive, reinforcing, and determining relations with other objects and cultural forces." Nelson, Cary. "Always Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences and a Manifesto." Covino and Jolliffe. Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. pp. 323-4.
Other definitions can be found in:
Hall, S. (1981). Cultural Studies: Two Pardigms. In e. a. T. Bennett (Ed.), Culture, Ideology, and Social Process. London: Batsford.
Grossberg, L. Nelson, Cary. Treichler, Paula A. (1992). Cultural studies. New York: Routledge.
During, S. (2005). Cultural studies: a critical introduction. London ; New York: Routledge.
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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