Suchergebnisse

Der Autor legt die historischen Hintergründe der Cultural Studies frei und fasst den Stand der gegenwärtigen Diskussion zusammen. Dabei arbeitet er das ursprüngliche Interesse der britischen Cultural Studies an einer politisch verstandenen Gesellschafts- und Kulturwissenschaft heraus. Kultur ist demnach ein Feld von Machtbeziehungen, auf dem soziale Identitäten wie Klasse, "Rasse", Geschlecht oder sexuelle Orientierung konstruiert werden. Ausgehend von dieser politischen Perspektive, die beträchtlichen Einfluss erlangt hat, wird ein systematisches Modell der Cultural Studies entwickelt.

JARVIS, B., 2011. Cultural studies. IN: Wolfreys, J. (ed.) The English Literature Companion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 321 - 324 is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive version of this piece may be found in The English Literature Companion by Julian Wolfreys which can be purchased from www.palgrave.com ; Why do literature students need to know about cultural studies? There are two main reasons. Firstly, cultural studies is partly responsible for the shape of the syllabus in many English departments in the twenty-first century. It was involved in the challenge to the traditional 'canon' of 'Great Works' by DWEMS (Dead White European Males). Cultural studies, therefore, is partly responsible for the fact that somewhere in your department people will be studying (get ready either to cheer or sneer) Harry Potter, or Stephen King, or Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997). Although this might not seem especially contentious nowadays, just a few decades ago the idea that students might study graphic novels (that's the posh term for comics) or Hollywood adaptations of Shakespearean drama would have made most academics apoplectic (that's the posh term for very angry). A second reason why cultural studies is relevant to literature students is that it has been at the forefront of developing a distinctive approach to texts which is interdisciplinary, self-consciously theoretical and politicised. The 'cultural studies approach' has been imported into literary criticism and you are certain to encounter it at some stage in your secondary reading.

This book is not quite the usual introduction to cultural studies an academic field thatwe can define, without messing about, as the engaged analysis of contemporarycultures. Cultural studies is engaged in three different senses. First, in the sense that it isnot neutral in relation to the exclusions, injustices and prejudices that it observes. Ittends to position itself on the side of those to whom social structures offer least, so thathere engaged means political, critical. Second, it is engaged in that it aims to enhanceand celebrate cultural experiences: to communicate enjoyment of a wide

Featuring new essays by such prominent cultural theorists as Tony Bennett, Homi Bhabha, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Constance Penley, Janice Radway, Andrew Ross, and Cornel West, Cultural Studies offers numerous specific cultural analyses while simultaneously defining and debating the common body of assumptions, questions, and concerns that have helped create the field

A review of John Hartley's A Short History of Cultural Studies (Sage, London, 2003).