Two Types of Cultural Studies

  Name- Rajyaguru Mansi D.

 Sem- 2

 Roll no- 12

 M.A-1 

Paper- Cultural Studies

Topic- "Two Types of Cultural Studies"

Submitted to,

Dr. Dilip Barad, 

Dept. of English,

Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar.

 

"Two types of cultural studies"

As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out, cultural studies is not "a tightly coherent, unified movement with a fixed agenda," but a "loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues, and questions"

British cultural Materialism and New Historicism are one of them

# British cultural Materialism

                            Cultural studies is referred to as "cultural materialism" in Britain, and it has a long tradition. Claude Levi-Strauss's influence moved British thinkers to assign "culture" to primitive peoples, and then, with the work of British Scholars like Raymond Williams, to attribute culture to the working class as well as the elite. As Williams memorably states: "There are no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses"

                             

                                      This cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation "critical of the aestheticism, formalism, antihistoricism, and apoliticism common among the dominant postwar methods of academic literary criticism"

            Cultural materialism began in earnest 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.

        Walter Benjamin attacked fascism by questioning the value of what he called the "aura" of culture. Benjamin helps explaine the frightening cultural context for a film such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Feminism was also important for cultural materialists in recognizing how seemingly "disinterested" thought is shaped by power structures such as patriarchy.

# New Historicism

                   Michael Warner phrases new historicism's motto as, "The text is historical, and history is textual". Frederic Jameson insisted, "Always historicize!"

                        New historicists seek "surprising coincidences" that may cross generic, historical, or popular culture. New historians see such cross cultural phenomena as texts in themselves.

                  New historicism versus old historicism: 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.

                  

                From Foucault new historicists developed the idea of a broad "totalizing" function of culture observable in its literary texts, which Foucault called the episteme. For Foucault history was not the working out of "universal" ideas: because we can not know the governing ideas of the past or the present, we should not imagine that "we" even have a "center" for mapping the "real".

             New historicism frequently borrows terminology from the marketplace: exchange, negotiation, and circulation of ideas are described. H. Aram veeser calls "the moment of exchange" the most interesting to new historicists, since social symbolic capital may be found in literary texts. Bruce examines a four volume commentary on Gulliver's Travels by one Corolini di Marco. Bruce connects Gulliver's anxious fixation on the female body to the anxieties of his age involving the rise of science and the changing role of women.

     Bruce connects the men's "doomed attempt of various types of science to control the woman's body" to the debate about language in Book III.

           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.