SISITHA KV – ASSIGNMENT-1

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

British Cultural Studies represents an ambitious attempt to assess the impact of both long term trends decolonization, industrial decline, and globalization, and recent political developments on contemporary British culture. Early in the history of cultural studies in Britain Richard Huggart (1969) stressed that cultural studies had no stable disciplinary base. The methodology of cultural studies provides an equal uneasy markes for cultural studies. It has no distinct methodology, no unique statistical, ethnomethodological or textual analysis to call its own. Its methodology, amboguos from the beginning could best be seen as a bricolage. Different scholars have endorsed different definitions of as a problematic, but most claim that cultural studies enables them to examine cultural object and practices from the point of view of their interaction with and within relations of power.

British cultural studies emerged from the work done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) an interdisciplinary research centre Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall established at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Interest in British popular culture came from other quarters as well as in the early 1950s the Independence group was examining the visual arts, architecture, graphic design and pop art and establishing itself at the institute of the contemporary arts in London. Whatever the merits of this particular suggestion, the national cultural context for adopting a body of thought generated in a different national context should be thoroughly explored. The emergence and influence of British cultural studies is a case in point.

In Britain, the cultural studies academic has been consistently figured as something like an organic intellectual that is, as a representative member of an oppressed or relatively powerless group. The dominant themes in Cultural Studies developed in Britain.  The stated purpose of Graeme Turner's introduction to cultural studies is to provide a student guide to the basic principles and categories within the field.  As the title suggests his book concentrates on work carried out in Britain and his central focus is on those substantive researches which have become accepted as classics in the history of British cultural sociology. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the legacy of the Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies features from the 1960s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students including Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon, John Clarke, Richard Dyer, Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain Chambers, Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon, Tony Jefferson, Michael Green and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement.

Raymond Williams is one of the contributors of British cultural studies who rejected the notion that literary language contains this kind of ethical capital and turned attention away from literature to culture. In Culture and Society (1958) he analysed the history in which .culture had long been imagined as a transcendent bulwark against modern society, commercialization and democratization. The problem with Culture and Society is that Williams himself was unable to jettison culture as defined in the conservative movement after Burke because he shared its negative views of the organization of modern society. Culture and Society ends by arguing that we need an expanded notion of culture as .a whole way of life, a phrase coined by T.S. Eliot, now given a radical twist, that would be developed further by Williams in his next book, The Long Revolution, but also, misguidedly as it turned out, that working-class solidarity might create its own democratic variation of high culture against capitalist, market-orientated modernity. Williams is at once the foremost British cultural theorist, yet curiously them ost neglected. Famously relegated to the historical sidelines by Anderson and attacked by Eagleton during the 1980s for his attachment to a socialist humanism, Williams nevertheless persisted with a series of works like The Country and the City (1973), Television, Technology and Cultural Form (1974), and Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980) to work across the boundaries of literary criticism, history, sociology, and political economy.

In his book Culture and Society which was published in 1958, Raymond Williams exploring how the notion of culture developed in the west, especially Great Britain, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Turner sets out to clarify the central principles of cultural studies: language and culture; Marxism and ideology; individualism and subjectivity texts, contexts, and discourses within the framework of British sociological and textual analysis.

Stuart Hall is another theorist who contributes in British cultural studies. While recognizing that cultural studies has many histories and legacies he has particular difficulty with the “Britishness” of “British cultural studies”, Hall insists that, the field emerges out of the 1950s disintegration of classical Marxism in its Eurocentrism and its thesis that the economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure. Hall acknowledges that cultural studies has been, and must be, formed in interruptions to its trajectories and perceived mission – notably, early on, by feminism and anti racism. he argues, what is stable in cultural studies is a Gramscian understanding of “conjunctural knowledge” knowledge situated in, and applicable to, specific and immediate political or historical circumstances; as well as an awareness that the structure of representations which form culture’s alphabet and grammar are instruments of social power, requiring critical and activist examination.

Douglas Kellner, who makes an interesting, though ultimately flawed, case for the missed articulation of Frankfurt Critical Theory and British Cultural Studies

In his seminal critique of British culture," Components of the National Culture, Paerry Anderson denied outright any intellectual weight to indigenous British intellectual life. Implicitly, he relegated the achievement of two of the founders of New Left Review, Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, to the intellectual backwaters of European thought.

Bibliography

§  During, S. (1999). The Cultural Studies Reader (2nd Edition ed.). London: Routledge.

§  Hepworth, M. (1993). The British Journal of Sociology. Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science , 350-351.

§  Steele, T. (2003). CRITICAL THEORY AND BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES. Critical Theory and the Human Condition: FOUNDERS AND , 222-237.

§  Turner, G. (1990). British Cultural Studies An introduction. London: Routledge.

§  Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. Chatto and Windus.