Thinking Activity : Cs : Unit 2 : Five types of Cultural studies

Thinking Activity : Cs : Unit 2 : Five types of Cultural studies

1 . Your Understanding of British Cultural Materialism, in your own words?

           Materiality is not Cultural but Culture is beyond the materialistics.

            For example: Piramid

            Another example is that we found materialistics scenes in the movies ,where villains are rich and the hero of the movie belongs to a poor family. So there are conflicts between labor and leisure classes.

           British Culture is rather Cultural than American culture.

           Cultural studies is referred to as "Cultural Materialism" in Britain and it has a long tradition in Britain. Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the British Culture. Revision of Culture is the controlling myth of the social and political reality of British Empire. In modern Britain two trajectories for "Culture" developed. 

Led back to the past and feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past, Cultural acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past.

Led towards a future socialist that would annul the conflict between labor and leisure classes.

          Cultural Materialism began in the 1950s with the work of F.R. Leavis influenced by Matthew Arnold's analyses of bourgeois Culture.

2 . What is the contribution of Michel Foucault in New Historicism?

          The contribution of Michel Foucault in New Historicism was Michel Foucault's new historians developed the idea of a broad " totalising" function of Culture observable in its literary text which Foucault called the "episteme".

          Foucault understood power as continually articulated knowledge and vice versa; that knowledge always endorses the position of the powerful and that knowledge is created by power structures. Foucault based his approach both on his theory of the limits of collective cultural knowledge and on his technique of examining a broad array of documents in order to understand the episteme of a particular time.

           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 center for mapping the real.

           History itself is a form of social oppression. Methods of expression can also be methods of oppression. The modern age is governed by a complex master narrative, it may still be seen as only a narrative to succeed those of earlier generations. A new episteme will render obsolete our ways of organizing knowledge and telling History.

        

3 . How can New Historicism help in answering the questions raised against the Laputa episode in Gulliver's Travels?

          New Historicism, Michel Warner phrases new Historicism's motto as "The text is historical and history is textual"

           New Historicism helps in answering the questions raised against the Laputa episode in Gulliver's travels." The flying Island and Female Anatomy : Gynaecology and power in Gulliver's Travels" Susan Bruce connects Gulliver's anxious fixation on the female body to the anxieties of his age involving the rise of female body to the changing role of women.

         Laputa is a gigantic trope of the female body, the island with a round chasm at the center. Laputa has at its giant lodestone on which the movement of the island depends. The floating structure of Laputa is like a uterus and vagina, Gulliver and Laputians are able to enter this cavity at will and control not only movement os lodestone and island but also the entire society.

4. Exemplified four types of analysis of Cultural studies. Apply it in popular artefacts.

            There are four types of popular culture analyses.

1. Production analysis 
2. Textual analysis
3. Audience analysis
4. Historical analysis

             These analyses get the surface meaning and implicit social meaning. These four approaches view culture as narrative or story telling process in which particular text or Cultural artifacts consciously or unconsciously link themselves to large stories at play in the society.

1 ) Production analysis

           Production analysis asks the following kinds of 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?

2 ) Textual analysis

           Textual analysis examines how specific works of popular create meaning.

3 ) Audience analysis

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

4 ) Historical analysis

            Historical investigates how these other three dimensions change over time.

5 . Difference between Modernism and postmodernism. If possible give examples also.

Difference between Postmodernism and Modernism

Postmodernism began in the mid-

18

Modernism began in the 1980s.

Postmodernism emerged in art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion and other fields.

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. 

Postmodernism not only does not mourn the loss of meaning but celebrate the activity of fragmentation. 

Whereas modernism still seeks a rational meaning in a work of art, postmodernism explores the provisional ity and irrationality of art.

Postmodernism thinking rational and logical 

Whereas modernism denied logical thinking.

    Thank you…...