1. • Name: vagh vanita r
• Roll no: 14
• Sem: 2
• Paper: Cultural studies
• Topic: Four goals of cultural studies
• Year: 2013
2. INTRODUCTION :- “CULTURAL STUDIES”
• Cultural studies is an innovative
interdisciplinary field of research and
teaching that investigates the ways in which
“culture” creates and transforms individual
experiences, everyday life, social relations
and power.
3. conti. . .
• Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960s
, cultural studies is composed af elements of
marxism, poststructuralism and post
modernism, femining,gender
studies, anthropology, sociology,race and ethnic
studies, film theory,urban studies, public
policy,popular culture studies and postcolonial
studies.
5. 1. FIRST: cultural studies transcends the confines of a
PARTICULAR DISCIPLINE such as literary criticism or history.
• cultural studies involves scrutinizing the
cultural phenomenon of a text – for
example Italian opera, a Latino
telenovela, the architectural styles of
prisons, body piercing and drawing
conclusion about the change in textual
phenomena over time.
6. Conti. . .
• Henty Giroux and others write in their Dalhousie
Review manifesto that cultural studies
practitioners are “resisting intellectuals” who see
what they do as “an emancipatory project.”
Because it erodes the traditional disciplinary
divisions in most institutions of higher education.
7. 2. SECOND: 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
stuctures and seek to disover models for
restructuring relationship among dominant and
“minority” or “subaltern” discourses.
8. 3. THIRD: cultural studies denies the separation of “HIGH”AND
“LOW” OR elite and popular culture.
• you might hear someone remark at the symphony or art
museum: “i came here to get a little culture”.
• Cultural critics today work to transfer the term culture to
include mass culture, whether popular , folk , or urban.
Following theorists Jean Baudrillard and Andreas
Huyssen, cultural critics argue that after world war II the
distinctions among high , low and mass culture collapsed
, and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and
Dick Hebdige on how “good taste” only reflects prevailing
social, economic and political power bases.
9. 4. FORTH: cultural studies analyzes not only the cultural work
, but also the means of production.
• Marxist critics have long recognized the
importance of such paraliterary questions as
these :-
• who supports a given artist ?
• Who publishes his or her books, and how are
these books distributed?
• Who buys books?
• For that matter,who is literate and who is not?
10. conclution
• Cultural studies thus joins subjectivity – that is
, cultural in relation to individual lives- with
engagement , a direct approch to attacking social
ills. Though cultural studies practitioners deny
“humanism“ or “the 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.
