What is cultural studies(British cultural materialism& new historicism)

Department of English

 Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai

Semester: 2

Class: M.A. Part: 1

Roll No: 29

Email Id: vanitabaldaniya0806gmail.com

Paper: 8 c (The Cultural Studies)

Topic: What is Cultural Studies

(1)              British Cultural Materialism

(2)              New Historicism

Work Form: Assignment

Guidance by:  Dilipsir Barad.

       Cultural Studies

What is a Cultural studies? 

        Cultural studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that investigates the ways inn which “culture” creates and transforms individual experiences, everyday life, social relations and power.

                   Cultural studies explore culture, power, and identity. In cultural studies, we analyze a wide variety of forms of cultural expression, such as TV, film, advertising, literature, art and video games. As well, we study social and cultural practices, like shopping, cell phone use, and social justice movements. We are concerned with thinking about identity and social roles, including gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. Cultural studies research and teaching seeks to be self-critical, self reflexive, and engaged. It challenges dominant or “normal” assumptions   about who we are, in relation to others, and how.

                   The program has a number of core and cultural studies- specific courses and relief on cultural studies focused courses in other disciplines, including: Anthropology, art History, English, French, Geography, German, History, indigenous studies, Japanese studies, Performance, Philosophy, Sociology, Spanish studies, Visual arts, and gender and Women’s studies.

                   “Culture has two aspects: the known meaning and direction, which its members are trained to: the new observation and meaning, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative: that it is both the most ordinary common meaning and the finest individual meaning. We use the word culture in these two sense: to mean a whole way of life- the common meanings: to mean the arts and learning- the special processes of discovery and creative effort”

                                                          -Raymond Williams

 Matthew Arnold says that is ;

Culture:-

                    

        Culture is opposite to nature. Power is important.cultural study another part is creative faculty and this is ideas(ideology) culture is define and describe the language is important.

          Nation is political contract, and country is Geography contract. Nature involve culture. Nation is idea and outside culture. Culture also deals with identity culture materialism. A micro-theory in anthropology which holds that most aspects of human culture can be explained in material terms.

                             British Cultural Materialism

                   Cultural studies is referred to as “cultural materialism”in Britain, and it has a long tradition. In the later nineteenth century Matthew Arnold sought to redefine the “givens”of British Culture. Edward Burnett Tylor’s pioneering anthropological study primitive culture argued that:-

                “culture or civilization, taken in

                   Its widest ethnographic sense, is

                   A complex whole which includes

                   Knowledge, belief, art, morals,

                   Low, custom and any other

                   Capabilities and habits acquired

                   By man as a member of society.” 

                   Claude Levi-Strauss’s influence moved British thinkers to assign “culture”to primitive peoples and then, which the work of British scholars like Raymond Williams, to a tribute culture to the working class as well as the elite. A William memorably states:- 

                   “There are no Masses; - there

                   Are only ways of seeing people

                   as Masses”.

              To appreciate the important of this revision of “culture”we must situate it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of the British Empire upon which the sun never set, an ideology left over from the previous century. In modern Britain two trajectories for “culture”developed: one led back to the past and the feudal hierarchies that ordered community in the past; here, culture acted in its sacred function as preserver of the past.

                   The other trajectory led toward a future, socialist utopia that would annul the distinction between labor and leisure classes and make transformation of status, not fixity, the norm. this cultural materialism furnished a leftist orintation “critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism”. Such, was the description in the Johns Hopkins Guide to literary Theory and Criticism.

                   Cultural materialism began in Ernest in the 1950s with the work of F.R.Leavis, heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold’s analyses of bourgeois culture. Leavis sought to use the educational system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely; Leavisites promoted the “great tradition”of Shakespeare and Milton to improve the moral sensibilities of a wider range of readers than just the elite.

                   Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture. Raymond Williams applauded the richness of canonical texts such as Leavis promoted, but also found they could seem to erase contain communal forms of life.

                   Karl Marx, British theorists were also influenced by Georgy Lukucs, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Max Horkheimer, Mikhil Bakhtin, and Antonio Gramsci. They were especially interested in problems of cultural hegemony and in the many systems of domination related to literature. From Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, for example, they got the concept of cultural “hegemony”referring to relations of domination not always visible as such.

                Williams noted that hegemony was “a sense of reality for most people… beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move.”  But the people are not always victims of hegemony; they sometimes possess the power to change it. Althusser insisted that ideology was ultimately in control of the people,that:

                “The main function of ideology is to

                   Reproduce the society’s existing relations

                   Of production, and that function is even

                   Carried out in literary texts”.

                   New Historicism

                   If the 1970s could be called the Age of Deconstruction.”write Joseph Litvak,

                   “some hypothetical survey of late

                   Twentieth century criticism might

                   Well characterize the 1980s as

                   Marking the Return to History,

                   Or perhaps the Recovery of the

                   Reference”.

                   As a return to historical scholarship, new historicism concerns itself with extra literary matters- latters, diaries, films, paintings, medical theatises- looking to reveal opposing historical tensions in a text New Historicists seek “Surprising Coincidences”that may cross generic, historical, and cultural lines in borrowings of metaphor, ceremony, or popular culture. New historians see such cress cultural phenomena as texts in themselves.

                   New historicism versus old histiricism the latter, says porter saw history as:-

                   “world views magisterially unfolding

                   As a series of tableaux in a film called

                   Progress”.

                   As though all Elizabethans for example, held views in common. The new historicism rejects this periodization of history in favor of ordering history only through the interplay of forms of power.

                   Steplen Greenblatt, a Renaissance scholars and founding editor of the journal Representations, may be credited with the coining of the term “new historicism”, new historicism exists, veeser explains, between these two poles in an attempt to work with the;

                  “apparently contradictory historical

                   Effects of capitalism”.

                   Without insisting upon an inflexible historical and economic theory, 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 “center”for mapping the “real”.

                   Furthermore, history itself is a form of social oppression, told in a series of ruptures with previous ages; it is more accurately described as discontinues, riven by “fault lines”that must be integrated into succeeding cultures by the epistemes of power and knowledge.

                   A new episteme will render absolets our ways or organizing knowledge and telling history. New historicism frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: exchange, negotiation and circulation of ideas are described.

                   What about Laputa? Hoe can new historicism help us answer the question raised a few pages ago? In “The Flying Island and Female Anatomy; Gynecology and power a reading of Book 3 that makes some new historicist sense out of Swift’s use of Laputa.

                   Culture notes the men ineffectual in several ways abstracted as they are in their foolish “science”, they are so absent minded they must have an attendant called a “flapper”who constantly must slap them out of their reveries. The women, on the other hand have an –

                   “Abundance of vivacity; they condemn

                   Their Husbands, and are exceedingly fond

                   Of strangers… mistress and lover may

                   Proceed to the greatest familiarities before

                   Face, if he be but provided with paper

                   And implements and without his flapper,

                   By his side.”

                   Bruce connects the men “doomed attempt of various type of science to control the woman’s body” to the debate about language in Book-3. While the men invent the 'Engine for Improving Speculative Knowledge’ that produces only brokehsomences, the women and other commoners clamor, after the manner of their forefathers.

                   Thus, in A voyage to Laputa”, control of women has to mean control of their discourse as well as their sexuality reflecting the contemporary debates of Swift’s day. So, above given deeply introduction about what is cultural studies and British cultural materialism and New Historicism.