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110-464: Stowe's uncles lived in Cincinnati and called on the family at their home often. One day, Harriet Beecher's uncle Samuel Foote , who was a brother of Harriet Beecher's late mother, Roxanna Foote, invited Harriet and older sister Catherine Beecher to join his favorite club, The Semi-Colon Club. It was a literary club, made up of some of the best minds in Cincinnati, including future Chief Justice of

220-428: A "parallel products of a literate society". All ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so. Homer 's epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, was largely composed, performed and transmitted orally. As folklores and legends were performed in front of distant audiences, the singers would substitute the names in the stories with local characters or rulers to give

330-569: A Roman audience saw a Latin version of a Greek play. Literature in Latin would flourish for the next six centuries, and includes essays, histories, poems, plays, and other writings. The Qur'an (610 AD to 632 AD), the main holy book of Islam , had a significant influence on the Arab language, and marked the beginning of Islamic literature . Muslims believe it was transcribed in the Arabic dialect of

440-400: A central focus of cultural studies. Jeff Lewis summarized much of the work on textuality and textual analysis in his cultural studies textbook and a post-9/11 monograph on media and terrorism. According to Lewis, textual studies use complex and difficult heuristic methods and require both powerful interpretive skills and a subtle conception of politics and contexts. The task of

550-432: A context without the use of writing to record and preserve history, scientific knowledge, and social practices. While some stories were told for amusement and leisure, most functioned as practical lessons from tribal experience applied to immediate moral, social, psychological, and environmental issues. Stories fuse fictional, supernatural, or otherwise exaggerated characters and circumstances with real emotions and morals as

660-433: A form of production (of meanings, of identities, etc.) in its own right. Stuart Hall , John Fiske , and others have been influential in these developments. A special 2008 issue of the field's flagship journal, Cultural Studies , examined " anti-consumerism " from a variety of cultural studies angles. Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue, cultural studies must grapple with the fact that "we now live in an era when, throughout

770-602: A group that included men. Not until after the Civil War did Stowe embark on a speaking tour where she publicly spoke to audiences of men and women. This article about a literary society or organization is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels , plays , and poems . It includes both print and digital writing . In recent centuries,

880-463: A key site of political and social struggle. In his view, capitalists used not only brute force ( police , prisons , repression , military ) to maintain control , but also penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a variety of ways in their efforts to win popular "consent." It is important to recognize that for Gramsci, historical leadership, or hegemony , involves the formation of alliances between class factions, and struggles within

990-617: A kind of empty version of " postmodern " analysis, others hold that at its core, cultural studies provides a significant conceptual and methodological framework for cultural , social , and economic critique. This critique is designed to " deconstruct " the meanings and assumptions that are inscribed in the institutions, texts, and practices that work with and through, and produce and re-present, culture. Thus, while some scholars and disciplines have dismissed cultural studies for its methodological rejection of disciplinarity, its core strategies of critique and analysis have influenced areas of

1100-431: A kind of radical interdisciplinarity as the basis for cultural studies. One sociologist whose work has had a major influence on cultural studies is Pierre Bourdieu , whose work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews. However, although Bourdieu's work has been highly influential within cultural studies, and although Bourdieu regarded his work as a form of science , cultural studies has never embraced

1210-405: A means of teaching. Plots often reflect real life situations and may be aimed at particular people known by the story's audience. In this way, social pressure could be exerted without directly causing embarrassment or social exclusion . For example, rather than yelling, Inuit parents might deter their children from wandering too close to the water's edge by telling a story about a sea monster with

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1320-576: A more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form. Though in both ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica , writing may have already emerged because of the need to record historical and environmental events. Subsequent innovations included more uniform, predictable legal systems , sacred texts , and the origins of modern practices of scientific inquiry and knowledge-consolidation , all largely reliant on portable and easily reproducible forms of writing. Ancient Egyptian literature , along with Sumerian literature , are considered

1430-581: A particular subject. Developments in print technology have allowed an ever-growing distribution and proliferation of written works, while the digital era had blurred the lines between online electronic literature and other forms of modern media. Definitions of literature have varied over time. In Western Europe, prior to the 18th century, literature denoted all books and writing. It can be seen as returning to older, more inclusive notions, so that cultural studies , for instance, include, in addition to canonical works , popular and minority genres . The word

1540-537: A pouch for children within its reach. The enduring significance of oral traditions is underscored in a systemic literature review on indigenous languages in South Africa, within the framework of contemporary linguistic challenges. Oral literature is crucial for cultural preservation, linguistic diversity, and social justice, as evidenced by the postcolonial struggles and ongoing initiatives to safeguard and promote South African indigenous languages. Oratory or

1650-543: A prestigious chair in sociology at the Open University , and Richard Johnson took over the directorship of the centre. In the late 1990s, "restructuring" at the University of Birmingham led to the elimination of CCCS and the creation of a new Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology (CSS) in 1999. Then, in 2002, the university's senior administration abruptly announced the disestablishment of CSS, provoking

1760-501: A question of class alliance . The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics. Edgar and Sedgwick write: The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies [particularly The Birmingham School . It facilitated the analysis of the ways subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination. The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as

1870-677: A range of studies on media policy , democracy , design , leisure , tourism , warfare , and development. While certain key concepts such as ideology or discourse , class, hegemony, identity, and gender remain significant, cultural studies has long engaged with and integrated new concepts and approaches. The field thus continues to pursue political critique through its engagements with the forces of culture and politics. Many cultural studies practitioners work in departments of English or comparative literature . Nevertheless, some traditional literary scholars such as Yale professor Harold Bloom have been outspoken critics of cultural studies. On

1980-472: A range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies , cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields. Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around

2090-424: A reform in the education system (if one changes the education system, then one can change the culture). Hall viewed culture as something that is institutionalized, which could only be studied through the interactional patterns that people within a culture exhibit and experience. Culture is something that makes up society, is a learned trait, and is influenced by various forms of media that help to establish it. Power

2200-465: A role in an individual's psychological development. Psychologists have also been using literature as a therapeutic tool. Psychologist Hogan argues for the value of the time and emotion that a person devotes to understanding a character's situation in literature; that it can unite a large community by provoking universal emotions, as well as allowing readers access to different cultures, and new emotional experiences. One study, for example, suggested that

2310-405: A standpoint of radical contextualism . In other words, cultural studies rejects universal accounts of cultural practices , meanings, and identities. Judith Butler , an American feminist theorist whose work is often associated with cultural studies, wrote that: the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to

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2420-530: A substantial impact on sociology . For example, when Stuart Hall left CCCS at Birmingham, it was to accept a prestigious professorship in Sociology at the Open University in Britain. The subfield of cultural sociology , in particular, is disciplinary home to many cultural studies practitioners. Nevertheless, there are some differences between sociology as a discipline and the field of cultural studies as

2530-568: A substantial international outcry. The immediate reason for disestablishment of the new department was an unexpectedly low result in the UK's Research Assessment Exercise of 2001, though a dean from the university attributed the decision to "inexperienced 'macho management'." The RAE, a holdover initiative of the Margaret Thatcher-led British government of 1986, determines research funding for university programs. To trace

2640-420: A view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with

2750-421: A whole. While sociology was founded upon various historic works purposefully distinguishing the subject from philosophy or psychology , cultural studies have explicitly interrogated and criticized traditional understandings and practices of disciplinarity. Most CS practitioners think it is best that cultural studies neither emulate disciplines nor aspire to disciplinarity for cultural studies. Rather, they promote

2860-409: Is "what is literature?" – although many contemporary theorists and literary scholars believe either that "literature" cannot be defined or that it can refer to any use of language. Literary fiction is a term used to describe fiction that explores any facet of the human condition , and may involve social commentary . It is often regarded as having more artistic merit than genre fiction , especially

2970-527: Is a "minimum age constraint for human presence in Victoria ", and also could be interpreted as evidence for the oral histories of the Gunditjmara people, an Aboriginal Australian people of south-western Victoria, which tell of volcanic eruptions being some of the oldest oral traditions in existence. An axe found underneath volcanic ash in 1947 had already proven that humans inhabited the region before

3080-641: Is also used in reference to non-written works: to " oral literature " and "the literature of preliterate culture". Etymologically , the term derives from Latin literatura/litteratura , "learning, writing, grammar," originally "writing formed with letters," from litera/littera , "letter." In spite of this, the term has also been applied to spoken or sung texts. Literature is often referred to synecdochically as "writing," especially creative writing , and poetically as "the craft of writing" (or simply "the craft"). Syd Field described his discipline, screenwriting , as "a craft that occasionally rises to

3190-416: Is believed to have been recited or sung, employed as a way of remembering history , genealogy , and law. In Asia, the transmission of folklore, mythologies as well as scriptures in ancient India, in different Indian religions, was by oral tradition, preserved with precision with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques . The early Buddhist texts are also generally believed to be of oral tradition, with

3300-467: Is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in

3410-442: Is consumed, mediated and negotiated, etc. Hall has also been accredited with the expansion of cultural studies through “the primacy of culture’s role as an educational site where identities are being continually transformed, power is enacted, and learning assumes a political dynamic.” He viewed politics as being used mainly for power instead of the betterment of society. This led to the belief that political dynamics could change with

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3520-399: Is generated, disseminated, contested, bound up with systems of power and control, and produced from the social, political and economic spheres within a particular social formation or conjuncture. The movement has generated important theories of cultural hegemony and agency . Its practitioners attempt to explain and analyze the cultural forces related and processes of globalization . During

3630-461: Is instead encompassed by textual criticism or the history of the book . "Literature", as an art form, is sometimes used synonymously with literary fiction , fiction written with the goal of artistic merit , but can also include works in various non-fiction genres, such as biography , diaries , memoirs , letters , and essays . Within this broader definition, literature includes non-fictional books , articles, or other written information on

3740-689: Is one of the distinctive Australian contributions to the field, though it is not the only one. Australia also gave birth to the world's first professional cultural studies association (now known as the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia) in 1990. Cultural studies journals based in Australia include International Journal of Cultural Studies , Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies , and Cultural Studies Review . In Canada , cultural studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society , continuing

3850-685: Is relatively undeveloped in Germany , probably due to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School , which is now often said to be in its third generation, which includes notable figures such as Axel Honneth . Cultural studies journals based in continental Europe include the European Journal of Cultural Studies , the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies , French Cultural Studies , and Portuguese Cultural Studies . In Germany,

3960-880: Is the underlying tone of Hall’s cultural studies. Hall believed that culture has some power, but the media's use of it is what sways and dictates culture itself. In the US, prior to the emergence of British Cultural Studies, several versions of cultural analysis had emerged largely from pragmatic and liberal-pluralist philosophical traditions. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, when British Cultural Studies began to spread internationally, and to engage with feminism , poststructuralism , postmodernism , and race, critical cultural studies (i.e., Marxist , feminist, poststructuralist, etc.) expanded tremendously in American universities in fields such as communication studies , education , sociology , and literature . Cultural Studies ,

4070-584: The Journal of African Cultural Studies . In Latin America , cultural studies have drawn on thinkers such as José Martí , Ángel Rama , and other Latin-American figures, in addition to the Western theoretical sources associated with cultural studies in other parts of the world. Leading Latin American cultural studies scholars include Néstor García Canclini , Jésus Martín-Barbero , and Beatriz Sarlo . Among

4180-643: The Labour Party to the Conservative Party had to be explained in terms of cultural politics, which they had been tracking even before Thatcher's first victory. Some of this work was presented in the cultural studies classic, Policing the Crisis , and in other later texts such as Hall's The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left , and New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in

4290-641: The Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age . The period between approximately the 6th to 1st centuries BC saw the composition and redaction of the two most influential Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , with subsequent redaction progressing down to the 4th century AD such as Ramcharitmanas . The earliest known Greek writings are Mycenaean ( c.  1600 –1100 BC), written in

4400-567: The Linear B syllabary on clay tablets. These documents contain prosaic records largely concerned with trade (lists, inventories, receipts, etc.); no real literature has been discovered. Michael Ventris and John Chadwick , the original decipherers of Linear B, state that literature almost certainly existed in Mycenaean Greece , but it was either not written down or, if it was, it was on parchment or wooden tablets, which did not survive

4510-925: The Quraysh , the tribe of Muhammad . As Islam spread, the Quran had the effect of unifying and standardizing Arabic. Theological works in Latin were the dominant form of literature in Europe typically found in libraries during the Middle Ages . Western Vernacular literature includes the Poetic Edda and the sagas , or heroic epics, of Iceland, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf , and the German Song of Hildebrandt . A later form of medieval fiction

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4620-575: The Vedas , dating back to 1500–1000 BC, and continues with the Sanskrit Epics of Iron Age India . The Vedas are among the oldest sacred texts . The Samhitas (vedic collections) date to roughly 1500–1000 BC, and the "circum-Vedic" texts, as well as the redaction of the Samhitas, date to c.  1000 ‒500 BC, resulting in a Vedic period , spanning the mid-2nd to mid-1st millennium BC, or

4730-748: The Vedas , the Torah , the Bible, and the Quran . The King James Version of the Bible has been called "the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language", "the most important book in English religion and culture", and "arguably the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world ," principally because of its literary style and widespread distribution. Prominent atheist figures such as

4840-617: The destruction of the Mycenaean palaces in the twelfth century BC . Homer 's epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , are central works of ancient Greek literature . It is generally accepted that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary . Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally . From antiquity until

4950-696: The invention of printing . Prior to printing, distributed works were copied manually, by scribes . The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c.  1045 and was spread to Korea later. Around 1230, Koreans invented a metal type movable printing. East metal movable type was spread to Europe between the late 14th century and early 15th century. In c.  1450 , Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in Europe. This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available. Early printed books, single sheets, and images created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or incunabula . "A man born in 1453,

5060-586: The social sciences and humanities ; for example, cultural studies work on forms of social differentiation , control and inequality , identity , community-building , media, and knowledge production has had a substantial impact. Moreover, the influence of cultural studies has become increasingly evident in areas as diverse as translation studies , health studies, international relations , development studies , computer studies , economics , archaeology , and neurobiology . Cultural studies has also diversified its own interests and methodologies, incorporating

5170-504: The structuralism of Louis Althusser , and later in the 1970s turned decisively toward Antonio Gramsci . Cultural studies has also embraced the examination of race, gender, and other aspects of identity, as is illustrated, for example, by a number of key books published collectively under the name of CCCS in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination (1978), and The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982). To understand

5280-399: The utilitarians and Benthamites , promoted the possibility of including courses in English literary study in the newly formed London University ". This further developed into the idea of the study of literature being "the ideal carrier for the propagation of the humanist cultural myth of a well educated, culturally harmonious nation". The widespread education of women was not common until

5390-489: The " Birmingham School " of cultural studies, thus becoming the world's first institutional home of cultural studies. Hoggart appointed as his assistant Stuart Hall , who would effectively be directing CCCS by 1968. Hall formally assumed the directorship of CCCS in 1971, when Hoggart left Birmingham to become Assistant Director-General of UNESCO . Thereafter, the field of cultural studies became closely associated with Hall's work. In 1979, Hall left Birmingham to accept

5500-514: The "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential. English departments also host cultural rhetorics scholars. This academic field defines cultural rhetorics as "the study and practice of making meaning and knowledge with the belief that all cultures are rhetorical and all rhetorics are cultural." Cultural rhetorics scholars are interested in investigating topics like climate change , autism , Asian American rhetoric , and more. Cultural studies have also had

5610-405: The 1990s . In 2016, Duke University Press launched a new series of Stuart Hall's collected writings, many of which detail his major and decisive contributions toward the establishment of the field of cultural studies. In 2023, a new Stuart Hall Archive Project was launched at the University of Birmingham to commemorate Hall's contributions in pioneering the field of cultural studies at CCCS. By

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5720-433: The English-speaking world, who really do represent treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'." Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies, but has criticised aspects of it and highlighted what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as After Theory (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about

5830-585: The European Romantic era. Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) is the first major English woman novelist, while Aphra Behn is an early female dramatist. Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded between 1901 and 2020 to 117 individuals: 101 men and 16 women. Selma Lagerlöf (1858 – 1940) was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature , which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she

5940-567: The European canon of Romantic literature , there is one notable exception, the French novelist and memoirist Amantine Dupin (1804 – 1876) best known by her pen name George Sand . One of the more popular writers in Europe in her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s, Sand is recognised as one of the most notable writers of

6050-665: The Grand Historian , c.  94 BC ). Ancient Chinese literature had a heavy emphasis on historiography, with often very detailed court records. An exemplary piece of narrative history of ancient China was the Zuo Zhuan , which was compiled no later than 389 BC, and attributed to the blind 5th-century BC historian Zuo Qiuming . In ancient India , literature originated from stories that were originally orally transmitted. Early genres included drama , fables , sutras and epic poetry . Sanskrit literature begins with

6160-526: The Latin littera , "letter," essentially writing. Alternatives such as "oral forms" and "oral genres" have been suggested, but the word literature is widely used. Australian Aboriginal culture has thrived on oral traditions and oral histories passed down through tens of thousands of years. In a study published in February 2020, new evidence showed that both Budj Bim and Tower Hill volcanoes erupted between 34,000 and 40,000 years ago. Significantly, this

6270-576: The United States Salmon P. Chase ; Judge James Hall , who was editor of Western Monthly Magazine ; novelist Caroline Lee Hentz , and the couple Calvin Ellis Stowe and Eliza Tyler Stowe . [1] . Other members included pioneering physicians Daniel Drake of Cincinnati, who founded the first medical school in the city, and Elizabeth Blackwell , who later became the first American female physician and, owing to her English origins,

6380-410: The agency of subordinated people run counter to the work of traditional structuralists . Some analysts have however been critical of some work in cultural studies that they feel overstates the significance of or even romanticizes some forms of popular cultural agency. Cultural studies often concerns itself with the agency at the level of the practices of everyday life, and approaches such research from

6490-465: The art of public speaking was considered a literary art for a significant period of time. From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in Western education in training orators, lawyers, counselors, historians, statesmen, and poets. Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became

6600-690: The beginning of the 1990s. Cultural studies journals based in Asia include Inter-Asia Cultural Studies . In India, the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore and the Department of Cultural Studies at The English and Foreign Languages and the University of Hyderabad are two major institutional spaces for Cultural Studies. Marxism has been an important influence upon cultural studies. Those associated with CCCS initially engaged deeply with

6710-451: The capitalist world, the overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness." Cultural studies, drawing upon and developing semiotics , uses the concept of text to designate not only written language, but also television programs , films , photographs , fashion , hairstyles , and so forth;

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6820-586: The changing political circumstances of class , politics , and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at The Birmingham School turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci , an Italian thinker, writer, and Communist Party leader. Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists ? What strategic approach is necessary to mobilize popular support in more progressive directions? Gramsci modified classical Marxism , and argued that culture must be understood as

6930-421: The contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. In recent decades, as capitalism has spread throughout the world via contemporary forms of globalization , cultural studies has generated important analyses of local sites and practices of negotiation with and resistance to Western hegemony . Cultural studies criticizes the traditional view of the passive consumer, particularly by underlining

7040-677: The cultural analyst, for Lewis, is to engage with both knowledge systems and texts and observe and analyze the ways the two interact with one another. This engagement represents the critical dimensions of the analysis, its capacity to illuminate the hierarchies within and surrounding the given text and its discourse . Cultural studies has evolved through its uptake across a variety of different disciplines— anthropology , media studies , communication studies , literary studies , education , geography , philosophy , sociology , politics , and others. While some have accused certain areas of cultural studies of meandering into political relativism and

7150-401: The cultural realm of everyday common sense. Hegemony was always, for Gramsci, an interminable, unstable and contested process. Scott Lash writes: In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci gave to us

7260-485: The definition has expanded to include oral literature , much of which has been transcribed. Literature is a method of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and entertainment . It can also have a social, psychological, spiritual, or political role. Literary criticism is one of the oldest academic disciplines, and is concerned with the literary merit or intellectual significance of specific texts. The study of books and other texts as artifacts or traditions

7370-515: The development of British Cultural Studies, see, for example, the work of Richard Hoggart , E. P. Thompson , Raymond Williams , Stuart Hall, Paul Willis , Angela McRobbie , Paul Gilroy , David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon , Richard Dyer , and others. There are also many published overviews of the historical development of cultural studies, including Graeme Turner's British Cultural Studies: An Introduction , 3rd Ed. and John Hartley's A Short History of Cultural Studies Beginning in 1964, after

7480-462: The different ways people read , receive and interpret cultural texts, or appropriate other kinds of cultural products, or otherwise participate in the production and circulation of meanings. On this view, a consumer can appropriate , actively rework, or challenge the meanings circulated through cultural texts. In some of its variants, cultural studies has shifted the analytical focus from traditional understandings of production to consumption – viewed as

7590-678: The dynamics of especially contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture ) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology , class structures , national formations , ethnicity , sexual orientation , gender , and generation. Employing cultural analysis , cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses

7700-541: The earliest and most influential works of ancient Greek literature. Classical Greek genres included philosophy, poetry, historiography, comedies and dramas. Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) authored philosophical texts that are regarded as the foundation of Western philosophy , Sappho ( c.  630  – c.  570 BC ) and Pindar were influential lyric poets , and Herodotus ( c.  484  – c.  425 BC ) and Thucydides were early Greek historians. Although drama

7810-609: The emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan , Harold Innis , and others. Cultural studies journals based in Canada include Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies . In Africa, human rights and Third-World issues are among the central topics treated. There is a thriving cultural and media studies scholarship in Southern Africa, with its locus in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Cultural Studies journals based in Africa include

7920-547: The eruption of Tower Hill. Oral literature is an ancient human tradition found in "all corners of the world." Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially on an oral tradition, across various cultures: The Judeo-Christian Bible reveals its oral traditional roots; medieval European manuscripts are penned by performing scribes; geometric vases from archaic Greece mirror Homer's oral style. (...) Indeed, if these final decades of

8030-515: The first by comparing inconsistencies in the transmitted versions of literature from various oral societies such as the Greek, Serbia and other cultures, then noting that the Vedic literature is too consistent and vast to have been composed and transmitted orally across generations, without being written down. According to Goody, the Vedic texts likely involved both a written and oral tradition, calling it

8140-572: The first practicing female physician in England. Catherine Beecher , Harriet's sister, was an early advocate of education for girls, helping to found several schools and colleges for women. Notable about the Semi-Colon Club was the mixing of the sexes in literary activity and recitation. Stowe presented her early works to the entire group, even though the Victorian social standards of the day would have excluded her from speaking in public to

8250-522: The flagship journal of the field, has been based in the US since its founding editor, John Fiske , brought it there from Australia in 1987. A thriving cultural studies scene has existed in Australia since the late 1970s, when several key CS practitioners emigrated there from the UK, bringing British Cultural Studies with them, after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979. A school of cultural studies known as cultural policy studies

8360-416: The flavor championed by Stuart Hall, lacks a stable research agenda, and privileges the contemporary reading of texts, thus producing an ahistorical theoretical focus. Many, however, would argue, following Hall, that cultural studies have always sought to avoid the establishment of a fixed research agenda; this follows from its critique of disciplinarity. Moreover, Hall and many others have long argued against

8470-484: The following five main characteristics of cultural studies: Dennis Dworkin writes that "a critical moment" in the beginning of cultural studies as a field was when Richard Hoggart used the term in 1964 in founding the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham . The centre would become home to the development of the intellectual orientation that has become known internationally as

8580-590: The genre. The Hebrew religious text, the Torah , is widely seen as a product of the Persian period (539–333 BC, probably 450–350 BC). This consensus echoes a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra , the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation. This represents a major source of Christianity's Bible, which has had a major influence on Western literature. The beginning of Roman literature dates to 240 BC, when

8690-495: The grave and oblivion. The very best in literature is annually recognized by the Nobel Prize in Literature , which is awarded to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel , produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" (original Swedish: den som inom litteraturen har producerat det mest framstående verket i en idealisk riktning ). Some researchers suggest that literary fiction can play

8800-433: The idea that it should aspire toward "scientificity," and has marshalled a wide range of theoretical and methodological arguments against the fetishization of "scientificity" as a basis for cultural studies. Two sociologists who have been critical of cultural studies, Chris Rojek and Bryan S. Turner , argue in their article, "Decorative sociology: towards a critique of the cultural turn," that cultural studies, particularly

8910-663: The initial appearance of the founding works of British Cultural Studies in the late 1950s, Stuart Hall 's pioneering work at CCCS , along with that of his colleagues and postgraduate students, gave shape and substance to the field of cultural studies. This would include such people as Paul Willis , Dick Hebdige , David Morley, Charlotte Brunsdon , John Clarke, Richard Dyer , Judith Williamson, Richard Johnson, Iain Chambers , Dorothy Hobson, Chris Weedon , Tony Jefferson, Michael Green and Angela McRobbie . Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis , exploring

9020-527: The key issues addressed by Latin American cultural studies scholars are decoloniality , urban cultures , and postdevelopment theory . Latin American cultural studies journals include the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies . Even though cultural studies developed much more rapidly in the UK than in continental Europe , there is significant cultural studies presence in countries such as France , Spain , and Portugal . The field

9130-588: The late Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have praised the King James Version as being "a giant step in the maturing of English literature" and "a great work of literature", respectively, with Dawkins adding: "A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian". Cultural studies Cultural studies is a politically engaged postdisciplinary academic field that explores

9240-614: The late 1970s, scholars associated with The Birmingham School had firmly placed questions of gender and race on the cultural studies agenda, where they have remained ever since. Also by the late 1970s, cultural studies had begun to attract a great deal of international attention. It spread globally throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As it did so, it both encountered new conditions of knowledge production, and engaged with other major international intellectual currents such as poststructuralism , postmodernism , and postcolonialism . The wide range of cultural studies journals now located throughout

9350-437: The level of methodology , these scholars dispute the theoretical underpinning of the movement's critical framework. Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of C-SPAN 's Booknotes , while discussing his book How to Read and Why : [T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and its replacement by what

9460-436: The level of art." A value judgment definition of literature considers it as consisting solely of high quality writing that forms part of the belles-lettres ("fine writing") tradition. An example of this is in the 1910–1911 Encyclopædia Britannica , which classified literature as "the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing". The use of the term "literature" here poses some issues due to its origins in

9570-420: The meanings and practices that arise from the constant power dynamics that comprise culture. Hall viewed culture as a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled." He perceived culture as a power dynamic, in which the media unintentionally possesses more control over ideology than the public. Hall viewed the media as a source of preserving

9680-431: The millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the other we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality. The earliest poetry

9790-576: The most commercially oriented types, but this has been contested in recent years, with the serious study of genre fiction within universities. The following, by the British author William Boyd on the short story, might be applied to all prose fiction: [short stories] seem to answer something very deep in our nature as if, for the duration of its telling, something special has been created, some essence of our experience extrapolated, some temporary sense has been made of our common, turbulent journey towards

9900-569: The nineteenth century, and because of this, literature until recently was mostly male dominated . George Sand was an idea. She has a unique place in our age. Others are great men ... she was a great woman. Victor Hugo , Les funérailles de George Sand There were few English-language women poets whose names are remembered until the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century some notable individuals include Emily Brontë , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , and Emily Dickinson (see American poetry ). But while generally women are absent from

10010-561: The passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology. The development of hegemony theory in cultural studies was in some ways consonant with work in other fields exploring agency , a theoretical concept that insists on the active, critical capacities of subordinated people (e.g. the working classes , colonized peoples, women). As Stuart Hall famously argued in his 1981 essay, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular ' ": "ordinary people are not cultural dopes." Insistence on accounting for

10120-451: The post-WWII period. Also during the 1970s, the politically formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's manufacturing industries while continuing to grow in output and value, were decreasing in share of GDP and numbers employed, and union rolls were shrinking. Millions of working-class Britons backed the rise of Margaret Thatcher , through the labour losses. For Stuart Hall and his colleagues, this shift in loyalty from

10230-432: The presence of familiar cultural values in literary texts played an important impact on the performance of minority students. Psychologist Maslow's ideas help literary critics understand how characters in literature reflect their personal culture and the history. The theory suggests that literature helps an individual's struggle for self-fulfillment. Religion has had a major influence on literature, through works like

10340-415: The present day, the influence of Homeric epic on Western civilization has been significant, inspiring many of its most famous works of literature, music, art and film. The Homeric epics were the greatest influence on ancient Greek culture and education; to Plato , Homer was simply the one who "has taught Greece" – ten Hellada pepaideuken . Hesiod 's Works and Days (c.700 BC) and Theogony are some of

10450-509: The relationships between cultural forms (i.e., the superstructure ) and that of the political economy (i.e., the base ). By the 1970s, the work of Louis Althusser radically rethought the Marxist account of base and superstructure in ways that had a significant influence on the "Birmingham School." Much of the work done at CCCS studied youth-subcultural expressions of antagonism toward "respectable" middle-class British culture in

10560-658: The rise of neoliberalism in Britain and the US, cultural studies both became a global movement, and attracted the attention of many conservative opponents both within and beyond universities for a variety of reasons. A worldwide movement of students and practitioners with a raft of scholarly associations and programs, annual international conferences and publications carry on work in this field today. Distinct approaches to cultural studies have emerged in different national and regional contexts. In his 1994 book, Introducing Cultural Studies , orientalist scholar Ziauddin Sardar lists

10670-469: The status quo of a reflection that already exists in society. The media hegemony in question, he emphasized, "is not a conscious plot or conspiracy, it’s not overtly coercive, and its effects are not total." Compared to other thinkers on this subject, he studied and analyzed symbols, ideologies, signs, and other representations within cultural studies. Most of his contributions occurred in the 1980s, where he looked at how media cultivates cultural power, how it

10780-624: The stories a local flavor and thus connect with the audience by making the historicity embedded in the oral tradition as unreliable. The lack of surviving texts about the Greek and Roman religious traditions have led scholars to presume that these were ritualistic and transmitted as oral traditions, but some scholars disagree that the complex rituals in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were an exclusive product of an oral tradition. Writing systems are not known to have existed among Native North Americans (north of Mesoamerica) before contact with Europeans. Oral storytelling traditions flourished in

10890-608: The term cultural studies specifically refers to the field in the Anglosphere , especially British Cultural Studies, to differentiate it from the German Kulturwissenschaft which developed along different lines and is characterized by its distance from political science. However, Kulturwissenschaft and cultural studies are often used interchangeably, particularly by lay people. Throughout Asia, cultural studies have boomed and thrived since at least

11000-605: The texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. This conception of textuality derives especially from the work of the pioneering and influential semiotician, Roland Barthes , but also owes debts to other sources, such as Juri Lotman and his colleagues from Tartu–Moscow School . Similarly, the field widens the concept of culture . Cultural studies approach the sites and spaces of everyday life, such as pubs, living rooms, gardens, and beaches, as "texts." Culture , in this context, includes not only high culture , but also everyday meanings and practices,

11110-488: The world's oldest literatures . The primary genres of the literature of ancient Egypt — didactic texts, hymns and prayers, and tales—were written almost entirely in verse; By the Old Kingdom (26th century BC to 22nd century BC), literary works included funerary texts , epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. It

11220-633: The world's first print cultures . Much of Chinese literature originates with the Hundred Schools of Thought period that occurred during the Eastern Zhou dynasty (769‒269 BC). The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism , of Daoism , of Mohism , of Legalism , as well as works of military science (e.g. Sun Tzu 's The Art of War , c.  5th century BC ) and Chinese history (e.g. Sima Qian 's Records of

11330-508: The world, as shown below, is one indication of the globalization of the field. For overviews of and commentaries on developments in cultural studies during the twenty-first century, see Lawrence Grossberg's Cultural Studies in the Future Tense , Gilbert Rodman's Why Cultural Studies? and Graeme Turner's What's Become of Cultural Studies? Hall's cultural studies explores culture as a system that affects individuals' identities through

11440-878: The world. Cultural studies is avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti-disciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives. Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn including semiotics , Marxism , feminist theory , ethnography , post-structuralism , postcolonialism , social theory , political theory , history , philosophy , literary theory , media theory , film/video studies , communication studies , political economy , translation studies , museum studies and art history /criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies and historical periods. Cultural studies seeks to understand how meaning

11550-582: The year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330." Eventually, printing enabled other forms of publishing besides books. The history of newspaper publishing began in Germany in 1609, with the publishing of magazines following in 1663. In late 1820s England, growing political and social awareness, "particularly among

11660-567: Was not until the early Middle Kingdom (21st century BC to 17th century BC) that a narrative Egyptian literature was created. Many works of early periods, even in narrative form, had a covert moral or didactic purpose, such as the Sanskrit Panchatantra ( 200 BC – 300 AD), based on older oral tradition. Drama and satire also developed as urban cultures, which provided a larger public audience, and later readership for literary production. Lyric poetry (as opposed to epic poetry)

11770-626: Was often the speciality of courts and aristocratic circles, particularly in East Asia where songs were collected by the Chinese aristocracy as poems, the most notable being the Shijing or Book of Songs (1046– c.  600 BC ). In ancient China , early literature was primarily focused on philosophy, historiography , military science , agriculture, and poetry . China, the origin of modern paper making and woodblock printing , produced

11880-435: Was popular in ancient Greece, of the hundreds of tragedies written and performed during the classical age , only a limited number of plays by three authors still exist: Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Euripides . The plays of Aristophanes ( c.  446  – c.  386 BC ) provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy , the earliest form of Greek Comedy, and are in fact used to define

11990-641: Was the romance , an adventurous and sometimes magical narrative with strong popular appeal. Controversial, religious, political and instructional literature proliferated during the European Renaissance as a result of the Johannes Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press around 1440, while the Medieval romance developed into the novel. Publishing became possible with the invention of writing but became more practical with

12100-621: Was the first woman to be granted a membership in The Swedish Academy in 1914. Feminist scholars have since the twentieth century sought to expand the literary canon to include more women writers. A separate genre of children's literature only began to emerge in the eighteenth century, with the development of the concept of childhood . The earliest of these books were educational books, books on conduct, and simple ABCs—often decorated with animals, plants, and anthropomorphic letters. A fundamental question of literary theory

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