JISHA D - ASSIGNMENT I

                                          BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

          The British cultural studies were started in Britain in the 1950’s by Richard Hoggart, E P Thompson, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams on Marxist foundation. It was carried on by the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham. It focused on problems of race, gender, and call in contemporary popular culture. Now it can be described as a cross disciplinary field and an international intellectual movement in many ways. Since the golden years of the Bermingham Center, many other institutions and individuals also have carried on its tradition.

       Many thinkers believed that Britain no longer serves as the center for Cultural Studies, because with the advent of Thatcher Years, Cultural Studies in England fragmented to other English speaking countries like America, Australia, etc... Now Cultural Studies has roots in many countries all over the world. Both Hoggart and Williams can be located within a tradition of English Literary Criticism generally recognized with F R Levis and noted for its concentration on the forms of literary texts and on their moral/social significance.

       What was impressive about both Hoggart and Williams was their ability to organize their methods of Cultural Criticism so as to read cultural forms other than literature.  But at a one point of time both thinkers were suffered from the lack of methods that could more appropriately analyze the ways in which such cultural forms and practices produced their social meaning and pleasures. Janice Radway’s work Reading the Romance (1984) can be considered as a landmark in this field. The most surprising thing is that she was never heard of Birmingham and Cultural Studies when she was writing it.

      The European influence on British Cultural Studies largely came in the first instance at least from structuralism. Structuralism has many variants, but its common characteristics are an interest in the system, the set of relationships, the formal structures that frame and enable the production of meaning. The original structuralist element was influenced the British Cultural Studies was a theory of language and not a theory of culture. One of the inspirations was the work of Roland Barthes, who was interested in exploring the hidden meanings of everyday life.

      There are differences in Cultural Studies in national wise because each developed from entirely different experiences. On the whole Cultural Studies is imported from Europe, re-articulated in the U K and re-exported to USA market as an alternative to mainstream sociology and literary studies. According to the researchers, Cultural Studies shares a ‘center position’ which means a distancing from various forms of reductionism. And it underlined that the practices and symbolic of everyday life must not be treated in isolation from questions of power and politics.

     Now Cultural Studies is well known as the title for an important set of theories and practices within humanities and social sciences. As its international journal, Cultural Studies mentions that the field is dedicated to the notion that the study of Cultural processes, and especially of popular culture, is important complex and both theoretically and politically rewarding. So on the whole Cultural Studies addresses the particular features and problems of present day development in Western societies and also the entire world.

       According to Talcott Parson, Cultural Studies has the similarity of classical sociology. It is a fact that Sociology, Anthropology and Literary Criticism have cut off from to give a space to Cultural Studies.  In a sense Cultural Studies could be seen as another generation of Sociology and it is a discipline studying the present social and cultural conditions, sometimes called the post modern condition.

     Within the traditions of critical social theory and cultural criticism, there are many models of cultural studies. Both classical and contemporary theory have occupied the relationship between culture and society, and provided a variety of studies of culture. From this perspective, there are Neo- Marxian models of cultural studies ranging from the Frankfurt school to Althusserian paradigm: there are neo- weberian, post structuralist and feminist studies of culture and there are a wide range of diverse approaches that apply distinctive social theories to the study of culture.

     From the beginning itself the precursors of British cultural studies sought to affirm working class culture against the attacks of mass culture produced by the culture industries. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) contrasted the strength of British working class institutions and life with the artificiality of products of the culture industry. Hoggart’s The Long Revolution(1975) also influenced the field of Cultural Studies. During that time Raymond Williams put forwarded his conception of culture. That was beyond the literary conception dominated in the British academies. He conceptualized culture as a whole way of life that encompasses modes of sensibility, values and practices, as well as artifacts.

      Raymond Williams argued for the need to think together ‘culture and society’, seeing the importance of media culture, and overcoming the division between high and low culture. For him culture is not a leisure activity and he realized that the pleasure arise from the mass culture was a threat to the traditional literature. He was a Marxist thinker but he never called himself as Marxist, but he always preferred the label of ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’. The publication of Culture and society (1958) brought him into an active involvement in the political discussion concerning culture.

     During the sixties he came into contact with European Marxist theory and he began to analyze culture in the context of European Marxist theory. Marxism and Culture records his dialogue with Marxism. He was deeply doubtful regarding all forms of orthodoxies and truths. Theory for him was practice and he never professed anything that did not emerge from ‘practice’ or ‘experience’. He had difficulties in subscribing to Marx’s idea of ‘base’ and ‘super structure’. He wanted to redefine this hallowed concept of Marxism.

        Williams argued for seeing literature primarily a social practice which is specific and situated within a complex of social practices. He attacked the polarization of the lived experiences of people into the economic, political and cultural spheres. His argument for connections and relationships between varied social practices has given rise to the most important of his concepts ‘cultural materialism’.

     William’s early works carries the emphasis on ‘close reading’. But since the publication of Culture and Society Williams has been moving away from close reading of literary texts to the study of a wider field which he called culture. Culture, he argues, is itself a material activity and not an effect of superstructure which is caused by the economic base. Cultural materialism has been chiefly responsible for the emergence of ‘cultural studies’ as a distinct discipline in the British universities and also New Historicism in the US.

    As Cultural Studies is a field that began to take shape in the 1960s, its roots can be traced back to the theorists from other fields, whose work was related to cultural matters. The most notable predecessors are Coleridge, T S Eliot, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom are related by their ideas of culture being the solution for the contemporary social problems and at the same time being a concept opposed to democracy. Arnold’s most prominent work is Culture and Anarchy (1896), a collection of essays where he provides a definition of a cultural critic and his supposed functions.

       The American born author T S Eliot, also an influential personality of the 1930s extended the term Culture to all members of the society. According to T S Eliot, Culture may even be described as simple as that which makes life worth living....it includes all the activities and interest of the people.  This statement later came to be the basis for the theories of the scholars of 1950s and 1960s. And it motivated the ancestors of cultural studies to subvert the elitism of previous viewpoint.

Bibliography

Acasccutar, Pertti. Researching Culture- Quantitative Method and Cultural Studies. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1993.

Bennet, Tony. Culture a Reformers Science. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1998.

Bowman, Paul. Interrogating Cultural Studies- Theory, Polotics and Practices. London: Pluto Press, 2003.

Edwards, Tim. Cultural theory- Classsical Contemporary Positions. New Delhi: SAGE Publications., 2007.

Grossberge, Lowrence, et. al. Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992.