Cultural studies : five types of cultural studies

Hello readers !

♣️ British cultural materialism :-

                         This is first type of cultural  studies. Cultural study is referred to as "cultural materialism " in Britain, and it has a long tradition . In modern Britain two trajectories for " culture " developed.

1. one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past .
2. The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annul the distinction between labour and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity , the norm .

             This cultural materialism furnished  a leftist orientation " critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism,  and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism" ; such was the description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism . Cultural materialism began in earnest in the 1950s with the work of F. R. Leavis heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analysis of bourgeois culture.  Althusser saw popular literature as merely " carrying the baggage of a culture's ideology", whereas " high" literature retained more autonomy and hence had more power. Walter Benjamin attacked fascism by questioning the value of what he called the " aura" of culture . Feminism was also important for cultural materialists in recognizing how seemingly "disinterested" thought is shaped by power Structures such as patriarchy .

♣️ New Historicism :-

💠What is contribution of Michel foucault in new historicism ? :-

                           Michael Warner phrases new historicism's motto as, " the text is  historical and history is a textual". New historicism concerns itself with extraliterary matters - letters, diaries , films, paintings, medical treatises--looking to reveal opposing historical tension in a text. Michel foucault, new historicists developed the idea of a broad " totalizing" function of culture observable in its literary texts, with foucault called the episteme . For foucault history was not the working out of "universal" ideas: because we cannot know the governing ideas of the past or the present, we should not imagine that"we" even have a "center" for mapping the "real". Furthermore, history itself is a form of social oppression, told in a series of ruptures with previous ages; it is a more accurately described as discontinuous, riven by " fault lines" that must be integrated into succeeding cultures by the epistemes of power and knowledge . A new episteme  will render obsolete our way of organizing knowledge and telling history .

💠How can new historicism help in answering the question raised against Laputa episode in a Gulliver's Travels .

                         " The Flying Island and Female Anatomy : Gynaecology and Power in gulliver's Travels"  Susan Bruce offers a reading  of book III that makes some new historicists sense out of Swift's use of laputa . Laputa is gigantic trope of the female body : the circular island with a round chasm at the centre, through which the astronomers of island descend to a domelike structure of the " Flandona Gagnole " or " astronomer's cave ". As Bruce remarks , " it is this which engenders the name of the island : in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the achievement of male control over female body itself readers that body the whore : Laputa ".  Bruce connects the man's "doomed attempt of various types of science to control the women's body " to debate about language in book III . " A voyage to Laputa ", control of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality reflecting the contemporary debate of Swift's day .

💠 Exemplify four types of analysis of popular culture ?

                    Here we find four main types of Popular  culture analysis,

1. Production analysis
2. Textual analysis
3. Audience analysis
4. Historical analysis

                       Postmodernist tend to speak more of subject positions rather than the humanist notion of independent individuals . 

👉 Production analysis asked the following kind of questions : who owns the media ? Who creates text and why ? Under what constraints ? How democratic or elitist is the production of popular culture ? What about works written only for money?

👉 Textual analysis examines how specific works of popular culture create meanings .

👉 Audience analysis ask how different groups of popular culture consumers, or users, make similar or different sense of the same texts .

👉 Historical analysis investigates how the other three dimensions change over time .

💠 Difference between modernism and postmodernism :-

     

                 Postmodernism questions everything rationalist European philosophy held to be true arguing that it is all contigent and the most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering member of a dominant social group at the expense of " others ".  modernist literature rejected the Victorian aesthetic of prescriptive morality and using new techniques drawn from psychology, experimented with point of view, time, space, and stream of consciousness writing. Major figure of " high modernism"  radical redefined poetry and fiction included Virginia Woolf, James Joyce , TS Eliot , William Faulkner etc. Modernist novels sought to be metafictive , or self referencial about their status as text, their production as art, and their reception . Postmodernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with givens of society;  a penchant for irony ; the self conscious " play" within the work of art; fragmentation and ambiguity ; and a destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject . but while modernism presented a fragmented view of human history, this fragmentation was seen as tragic . Postmodernism refers " mini- narratives " of local events . Similarly, Jean Baudrillard describes the " simulacra" of postmodern life which have taken the place of "real" objects .

Thank you.........