Thinking Activity :Cultural Studies

              Five types of Cultural studies 

After a short discussion on four goals of cultural studies here is my blog on five main types of Cultural studies.  These are :-

1. British Cultural Materialism 

2. New Historicism 

3. American Multiculturalism 

4. Post Modernism and Popular culture 

5. Postcolonial studies

Here I would like to put my understanding on each of five types. Now let us discuss with the first type.

☆ About British Cultural Materialism  :-

Generally in British they referred the term, Cultural Materialism rather than cultural studies.  This has a long tradition for them. There were some cultural critics who gave their contribution like Matthew Arnold who sought to redefine the " given " of British Culture.  Edward Burnett Tylor who was the pioneer of the anthropological study, Primitive Culture ( 1871 ) and argued that there are only ways of seeing people as masses.  For the revision of " Culture " we must situate the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British empire upon which the sun never set. There are two major trajectories for " Culture " developed. First is the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past. The second is 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. The term Cultural Materialism began in 1950 with the work of F. R. Leavis heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold's analysis of bourgeois culture.  Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorist were also influenced by Gyorgy Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio Gramsci.  Feminism is also most important for cultural Materialism. 

☆ The Contribution of Michael Foucault in New Historicism  :-

Michael Foucault,  new historicists developed the idea of a broad, " Totalizing " function of cultural observable in its literary texts,  which Foucault called the, " epistème. "  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 " centre " for mapping the " real " Further more history itself is a form of social oppression told in a series of ruptures with previous ages. Even though the modern age is governed by a complex master narrative.  A new " epistème " will render obsolete our ways of organizing knowledge and telling history. This is all about the view of Michael Foucault of New Historicism. 

☆ The answers of New historicists about raised against the question of Laputa episode of Gulliver's travels  :-

" Laputa - the whore "  It is a question that has tantalized readers since the eighteenth century the science fiction aspect of that island still amuses us, but why the " the whore ?" In the answering of this question Susan Bruce offers a reading of Book III that makes some new historicists sense out of Swift's use of Laputa. Bruce examines a four volume commentary on Gulliver's travels by one Corolini di Marco, in which the author gives a fairly dry account of his observation until he gets to the episode in book IV, " A voyage to the Houyhnhnms, " in which Gulliver captures rabbits for food. Bruce connects Gulliver's anxious fixation on the female body to the anxieties on his age involving the rise of science and the changing role of women. 

Laputa is a gigantic trope of the female body : the circular island with a round chasm at the centre, through which the astronomers of the island descend to a domelike structure of the " Flandona Gagnole ", " Astronomer's cave." Bruce connects the men's " doomed attempt of various type of science to control the woman's body " to the debate about language in Book III. Thus in " A Voyage of Laputa " control of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality, reflecting the contemporary debates of Swift's day. 

☆ Four type of analysis of Population culture  :-

There are four main types of popular culture analysis  : 

1. Production analysis 

2. Texual analysis 

3. Audience analysis 

4. Historical analysis 

These approaches view culture as a narrative or story telling process in which perticular texts or cultural artifects consciously and unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at play in the society.  

♧ Production analysis asks the following questions  :

¤ Who owns the media ?

¤ Who creates texts 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 meaning. 

♧ Audience analysis asks how different groups of popular culture consumers or users make similar or different sense of the same texts. 

♧ Historical analysis investigates how these other three dimensions change over time.

☆ Difference between modernism and postmodernism  :-

Modernism	Postmodernism
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 figures of " high modernism " who radically redefined poetry and fiction included Virginia Woolf, James Joyes, T. S Eliot, William Faulkner etc.	Postmodernism is a critique of the aesthetics of the preceding age, but besides mere critique, postmodernism celebrates the very act of dismembering tradition.  Postmodernism questions everything rationalists European Philosophy held to be true, arguing that it is all contingent and that most cultural constructions have served the function of empowering members of a dominant social group at the expense of " Others."
Modernism presented a fragmented view of human history. This fragmentation was seen as tragic.	Postmodernism borrows from modernism disillusionment with the givens of society; a penchant for irony; the self conscious " play " within the work of art; fragmentation and ambiguity; and a destructured, decentered, dehumanised subject.
Modernism locate this hope, faint as it sometimes is, in such memorable passages as the Molly Bloom section that closes Joyce's " Ulysses."	Postmodernism does not mourn the loss of meaning, but celebrates the activity of fragmentation.

Frederic Jameson sees artistic movements like modernism and postmodernism as cultural formations that accompany particular stages of Capitalism and are to some extent constructed by it. 

♤ Market Capitalism  :- 

with its new technologies such as the stream engine that transformed everyday life.

♤ Monopoly Capitalism  :-

associated with electricity and internal combusion.

♤ Consumer Capitalism :- 

the emphasis placed on advertising and selling goods, now called Information age.