Literature and Cultural Studies

7/31/2019 Literature and Cultural Studies

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Presented to: Dr. Shahzad-ul-Hassan Farooqi

Presented by: Nadeem Hayat

Khurram Piracha


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Background about the

Development of Cultural Studies It came from the French structuralism of the 1960s

which treated culture(including literature) as a seriesof practices whose rules and conventions should bedescribed.

On the other hand by the French literary theoristRonald Barthes mythologies(1957) who undertakes a

range of cultural activities i.e. advertisement etc.


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Tensions Cultural studies is driven by the tension between the desire

to recover the popular culture of the people ofmarginalized groups and the study of mass culture as an

ideological imposition. The study of popular culture is to know what is important

for ordinary people.

How people are shaped are manipulated by cultural forces,advertisement etc.

Analysts desire to analyze a culture as a set of codes andpractices ,and his wish to find in popular culture in anauthentic value.

Popular cultural is made from mass culture.


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The Literary CanonIntroduction

The term "literary canon" refers to aclassification of literature. It is aterm used widely to refer to a group

ofliterary works that areconsidered the most important of aparticular time period or place.


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Cultural Studies and The literary CanonMuch is said regarding Cultural

Studies and the Literary Canon.

Certain charges were made.


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Charges Against Theory

It makes one read philosophical and

psychoanalytic texts along with literaryworks.

It took students away from the classics.


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More ChargesWhat will become of the literary canon if

cultural studies swallows literary studies?

Have the soaps replaced Shakespeare and, if so,is cultural studies to blame?

Has the cultural studies killed literature by

encouraging the study of films, television, andother popular cultural forms rather than theclassics of world literature?


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In DefenseBut theory has reinvigorated the traditional

literary canon.

It has opened the door to more ways of

reading the great works of English andAmerican literature.

Never has so much been written about

Shakespeare; he is studied from every angleconceivable, interpreted in feminist,Marxist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and

deconstructive vocabularies.


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More in DefenseWordsworth has been transformed by literary theory

from a poet of nature to a key figure of modernity.

The growth of cultural studies has accompanied anexpansion of the literary canon.


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Modes of Analysis The second broad topic of dissension concerns the modes of analysis inliterary and cultural studies. When cultural studies was a renegade formof literary studies, it applied literary analysis to other cultural materials.If cultural studies became dominant and its practitioners no longer

came to it from literary studies, might not that application of literaryanalysis become less important? The introduction to an influentialAmerican volume, Cultural Studies, declares, although there is noprohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they arealso not required. This assurance that close reading is not prohibited isscarcely reassuring to the literary critic. Freed from the principle that

has long governed literary studies that the main point of interest is thedistinctive complexity of individual works cultural studies could easilybecome a kind of non-quantitative sociology, treating works as


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Chief among these is the lure of totality, the notion that there isa social totality of which cultural forms are the expression or thesymptom, so that to analyse them is to relate them to the socialtotality from which they derive. Recent theory debates the

question of whether there is a social totality, a socio-politicalconfiguration, and if so, how cultural products and activitiesrelate to it. But cultural studies is drawn to the idea of a directrelationship, in which cultural products are the symptom of anunderlying socio-political configuration.


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Goals Finally there is the question of the goals of literary and

cultural studies:

Practitioners of cultural studies often hope that workon present culture will be an intervention in culturerather than mere description

Cultural studies thus believes that its own intellectual

work is supposed make a difference.


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More Goals Cultural studies in America has few of the links with

political movements that have energized cultural studies inBritain, and it could be seen as primarily a resourceful,interdisciplinary, but still academic study of cultural

practices and cultural representation. Cultural studies issupposed to be radical, but the opposition between anactivist cultural studies and a passive literary studies maybe wishful thinking.


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Distinctions Debates about the relation between literature and cultural studies are replete with complaints about elitism and charges that studying popular culture will bring the death of literature. In all the confusion, it helps to separate two sets of questions. The first are questions about the value of studying one sort of cultural object or another. The value of studying Shakespeare rather than soap operas can no longer be taken for granted and needs to be argued: what can different sorts of studies achieve, in the way of intellectual and moral training, for example?

Such

arguments are not easy to make: the example of German concentrationcamp commanders who were connoisseurs of literature, art, and musichas complicated attempts to make claims for the effects of particularsorts of study. But these issues should be confronted head on.


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Distinctions (cont.)A different set of questions involves the methods for

the study of cultural

objects of all sorts the advantages and disadvantagesof different

modes of interpretation and analysis, such asinterpreting cultural

objects as complex structures or reading them assymptoms of social

totalities.


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