Cultural studies emerged as a distinctive academic discipline in the English-speaking world between the 1960s and the 1990s as part of the broad shift in universities to new kinds of interdisciplinary analysis. Parallel to contemporaneous developments in ethnic studies and… Read More ›
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom
While the field of literary studies from its inception took as its exclusive object of interest the literary canon, cultural studies has generally been concerned with what is left over, popular or mass culture—newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, popular song,… Read More ›
Postcolonial (Cultural) Studies
Postcolonial (cultural) studies (PCS) constitutes a major intervention in the widespread revisionist project that has impacted academia since the 1960s—together with such other counterdiscourses that are gaining academic and disciplinary recognition as cultural studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies, African-American studies,… Read More ›
Ethnic Studies
Ethnic Studies, the theoretical study of race and cultural pluralism, began in the US with the work of African American writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African American studies has revealed the theoretical richness of African American… Read More ›
High Culture and Popular Music
The high-culture tradition is essentially a conservative one. It encompasses a defence of a narrowly defined high or elite ‘culture’, in the classic sense of Arnold’s ‘the best that has been thought and said’ (Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 1869). This… Read More ›
Mass Culture
Mass culture is a pejorative term developed by both conservative literary critics and Marxist theorists from the 1930s onwards to suggest the inferiority of commodity-based capitalist culture as being inauthentic, manipulative and unsatisfying. This inauthentic mass culture is contrasted to… Read More ›
Fashion and Cultural Studies
Cultural studies of fashion have been, for the most part, less concerned with formulating broad theories of fashion than with observing its social uses in relation to broader issues of social power. Two early influences on this work were the… Read More ›
University of Calicut Methodology of Literature Study Material
University of Calicut V Semester B.A. English Core Paper Methodology of Literature (EN5B03) Methodology of Literature PDF (To Download the Material Click on the Above Link) Topics Covered Russian Formalism, New Criticism, Archetypal Criticism, Myth Criticism, Deconstruction, Poststructuralism, Reader Response… Read More ›
Cultural Science Studies: Gillian Beer, Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles
What are cultural studies of science? While the term “cultural studies of science” designates a stream of research within the broader field of social studies of science, there is no clear consensus about what work is associated with this term…. Read More ›
Key Theories of Jürgen Habermas
Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929) is the most renowned member of the second generation of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Born in 1929 in Dusseldorf, Habermas wrote his Ph.D dissertation (published in 1954) on the conflict between the Absolute and… Read More ›
Introduction to Whiteness Studies
Whiteness studies investigates the parameters of white racial identity, locating its scope and function in systems of representation. This field of study takes as its founding premise the constructed nature of identity, a poststructuralist concept heralded by race theorists who… Read More ›
Anthropological Criticism: An Essay
Anthropological criticism refers, broadly speaking, to a form of criticism that situates the making, dissemination and reception of literature within the conventions and cultural practices of human societies. Such an undertaking has become increasingly suspect in the twentieth century as… Read More ›
Key Theories of Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams (1921-1988), Welsh cultural critic, who was a major forerunner of contemporary Cultural Studies. Books such as Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) served to map out much that is now taken as the basic… Read More ›
The Sociology of Emile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) French sociologist, regarded as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology. His early work developed a theory of society as a transcendent reality that constrained individuals, and proposed the methodology necessary to study that reality. His work… Read More ›
Cornelius Castoriadis: An Introduction
Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was an Economist, Psychoanalyst, Philosopher and social thinker, a founding and leading member of the French revolutionary journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, and author of numerous books and articles. In his The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis (1987)… Read More ›
Benedict Ruth and Cultural Anthropology
American cultural anthropologist who developed what is known as the configurational approach to anthropology, exploring the way in which the diverse institutions, activities and traits of a given culture are integrated into a patterned whole (or Gestalt). Patterns of Culture… Read More ›
Key Theories of Paul Gilroy
It is no mere incidental comment that opens the preface to Paul Gilroy’s (1956– ) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993): ‘This book was first conceived while I was working at South Bank Polytechnic in London’s Elephant and Castle.’… Read More ›
Cultural Studies
Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history/ criticism etc. to study cultural phenomena in various societies…. Read More ›
Raymond Williams as a Marxist Literary Theorist
Raymond Williams (1921-1988) is the most influential Marxist critics of the twentieth century, and one of the leading figures of the New Left. His work with the journal New Left Review and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies laid… Read More ›
Connotation and Denotation
Connotation and Denotation are crucial concepts in Semiotics, Structuralism, Marxism, Cultural Studies and in the entire realm of literary and cultural theory. Denotation refers to the primary signification or reference – the definitional, literal, obvious meaning of a sign. In… Read More ›
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