What is cultural study?

             First to know cultural study we have to know what is culture. Here I gave simple meaning of culture.

                                      

                                           ”Culture is the great help out of our present difficult; Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know on all the matter which most concern us the best which has being thought and said in the world: and through this knowledge turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits which we follow staunchly but mechanically.”

                                                                                        -Mathew Arnold                 

                                              Now come to Cultural Study Cultural studies is very hard to define it but cultural studies is not so much a discrete approach at all, but rather a set of practice. With the reference book of Elice Walker novel is ‘The color Purple’ (1982). Through this book, the professor identifies African American literary and cultural sources and described the book’s multilayered narrative structure, moving on to the brief review of its feminist critique of American gender and racial attitude. Students and professor discuss the key facts and the different approaches of the novel. 

                                     A student raises her hand and says about the film version of Steven Spielberg, angry responses from many African viewers. The class member gave the reactions to the points examine the interrelationship among the race, gender, popular culture, the media, and the literature. They question cultural conventions both the side- historical and contemporary.

Cultural studies is not “a tightly coherent, unified movement of agenda”, but a “loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions”. Cultural studies is composed with the Marxism, post-structuralism and post-modernism, feminism, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, film theory, urban studies public policy, popular cultural studies and post-colonial studies.

Michel Foucault came to an idea of power is a whole complex of forces, it is that which produced and what happened, accepted ways to thinking, writing, and speaking and practice that embody, exercise and amount the power.

Location of culture:

             It is the trope of our time to lacate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond. At the century age we are less exercised by annihilation-the death of the author or epiphani-the birth of “subject” our existent today is marked by tenebrous sense of survivle leaving on the boddle eyes of the “present” for which their seems to be no prorer name other then the current and controvercial shiftness of the prefix “post” .

Origin of culture:

                                                   ‘Culture’, derives from ‘Cultura’ and ‘colere’ meaning ‘to cultivate’. It also meant ‘to honour’ and ‘project’ by the 19^th century in Europe it tastes of the upper class (elite).

          ‘culture’ is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a negotiation over which meanings are valid. Elite culture controls meanings because it controls the terms of the debate.

Culture studies looks at marker popular culture and everyday life. Popular culture is the culture of masses. A culture study argues that culture is about the meanings a community or society generates.

For example,

Drawing from Roland Bartner on the nature of literary language and  claude Levi-Strauss on anthropology, cultural studies was influenced by structuralism and post structuralism. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” of the world distinct, like all his deconstructions or enabled cultural critics “to erase culture, classic and popular literals texts and literature and other cultural discourses that following Derrida may same textually”. 

The discipline of psychology has also entered the field of cultural studies. For example, Jacques Lacan’s psycho analytic language prompted emphasis upon language and power as symbolic systems.

Definition of cultural studies:

four goals of Cultural Studies :

(1)     Cultural Studies transcends the confiner of a particular discipline such as literacy criticism or history.

(2)     Cultural studies are politically engaged.

(3)     Cultural studies deny the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ are elite and popular culture.

(4)     Cultural studies analyze not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

(1)     Cultural Studies transcends the confiner of a particular discipline such as literacy criticism or history.

                   A cultural study is practiced in such journals as critical Inquiry, Representation and boundary. Italian Opera, a Latino ‘telenovela’ the architectural styles of prisons, body piercing – and drawing conclusion about the changes in textual phenomena over time-such things are found in these kinds of newspapers cultural studies not simply or essentially about literature in the traditional sense or even about “Art”.

Lawrence Grosberg, cary Nelson, and Paula. Trencher stress that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to “cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene.” Intellectual works are not limited by their “borders” as single text, historical problems or disciplines, and the critical own personal connections to what is analyzed and described. Henry Giroux and others write in their “Dalhousie Revise” manifesto that cultural studies practitioners are ‘resisting intellectuals’ who see what they do as “an emancipator project” as it erodes the traditional disciplinary divisions in most institutions of higher educational. For students, this sometimes means that a professor might make his or his own political view part of the instruction, which of course, can lead to problems. But this kind of criticism, like feminism, is an engaged rather than a detached activity.

(2)     Cultural Studies is politically engaged:

          The cultural critics see themselves as “Oppositional” not only within their own discipliner but to many of the power structures of society at large. The cultural critics question inequalities within power structures and try to find out the models for restructuring relationships among the dominant and “minority” of “Subaltern” discourses. The meaning and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be reconstructed. This type of idea, taken to a Philosophical extreme, demise the autonomy of the individual whether an actual person or a character in literature, a rebuttal of the traditional humanistic “Great man” or “Great Book” theory and a relocation of esthetics and culture from the ideal realsm of taste and sensibility into the arena of a whole society’s everyday life as it is constructed.

(3)     Cultural studies demise the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ or elite and popular culture.

                   In our society basically we have three class. In these days cultural critics work to transfer the term culture to include mass culture, whether popular, folk, or urban. Jean Belldrillard, Andreas Huyssen and some other critics of cultural studies argue that after World War II the distinction among high low and mass culture collapsed. They look forward on other theorists like pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste often only reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases.”

Jean Baudrillard and Andreas who were the theorists and argued that after World War II the distinctions among high, law and mass culture collapsed and they cite other theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu and Dick Hebdige on how “good taste” and reflects prevailing social, economic and political power bases. Their argument for white superiority and worldwide domination of other races especially Asians.

                                    French historian Michel de certeau, cultural critic examine “the practice of everyday’s life” studying literature as an anthropologist world, as a phenomenon of culture, including a culture’s economy. Transgressing of boundaries among discipline law and high can make cultural studies research paper with the title: - The birth of Captain Jack Sparrow; an analysis and four sources of Johnny Depp’s funky performance in Disney’s pirates of the Caribbean: The course of the Black Pearl (2003), you could research cultural topics ranging from the trade economics of the sea two hundred years ago.     

4.    Cultural Studies analyses not only the cultural work, but also the means of production.

                                        Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such paraliterary question as these: who supports a given artists? Who publishes his or her book, and how are these book distributed? Who buys book? For what matter who is literate and who is not? A well-known analysis of literary production is Janice Redway’s study of American romance novel, Reading the Romance, Woman, patriarchy and popular literature which demonstrates the textual effect of publishing industry’s decision about the books that will minimize its financial risks. Cultural studies thus join subjectivity and the cultural in location to individual lives with engagement a direct approach to attacking social ills. Cultural studies practitioners deny,“Humanism” or “the humanities” as universal categories which resembles the goals and values of humanistic and democratic ideals.

Conclusion:

                 Thus we can say that Cultural Studies have it’s own aspectes, scope and aim .We sawn cultural studies aim in detail. These are main goals of Cultural Studies. Thus cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning is generated disseninated and produced from the social, political and economic.