Presented to: Presented by:

Dr. Shahzad-ul-Hassan Farooqi Nadeem Hayat Khurram Piracha

Literature and Cultural Studies

Literature is the study of life, its complexity, its

beauty, its insight and universality. It represents particular cultural practice in any society. Cultural studies is the practice of theory and theory is the theory of cultural studies. Both have interdisciplinary nature as cultural studies is deeply dependent on the theoretical debates about meaning, identity and its representation.

Background about the Development of Cultural Studies

It came from the French structuralism of the 1960s

which treated culture(including literature) as a series of practices whose rules and conventions should be described. On the other hand by the French literary theorist Ronald Barthes mythologies(1957) who undertakes a range of cultural activities i.e. advertisement etc.

The Relationship Between Literary Studies and Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is to understand functioning of

culture; how cultural productions work and how cultural identities are constructed and organized for individuals and for groups, in a world diverse and intermingled communities, state power, media and multinational corporations. It includes literary studies examining literature as a particular cultural practice.

Tensions
Cultural studies is driven by the tension between the desire

to recover the popular culture of the people of marginalized 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 and practices ,and his wish to find in popular culture in an authentic value. Popular cultural is made from mass culture.

The Literary Canon

Introduction The term "literary canon" refers to a

classification of literature. It is a term used widely to refer to a group of literary works that are considered the most important of a particular time period or place.

Cultural Studies and The literary Canon

Much is said regarding Cultural

Studies and the Literary Canon.

Certain charges were made.

Charges Against Theory

It makes one read philosophical and

psychoanalytic texts along with literary works.

It took students away from the classics.

More Charges
What 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, and other popular cultural forms rather than the classics of world literature?

In Defense
But theory has reinvigorated the traditional

literary canon. It has opened the door to more ways of reading the great works of English and American literature. Never has so much been written about Shakespeare; he is studied from every angle conceivable, interpreted in feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and deconstructive vocabularies.

More in Defense
Wordsworth has been transformed by literary theory

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

The growth of cultural studies has accompanied an

expansion of the literary canon.

Modes of Analysis
The second broad topic of dissension concerns the modes of analysis in literary and cultural studies. When cultural studies was a renegade form of 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 literary analysis become less important? The introduction to an influential

American volume, Cultural Studies, declares, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required. This assurance that close reading is not prohibited is scarcely reassuring to the literary critic. Freed from the principle that has long governed literary studies that the main point of interest is the distinctive complexity of individual works cultural studies could easily become a kind of non-quantitative sociology, treating works as

Social Totality
The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns,

arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.

 Chief among these is the lure of totality, the notion that there is

a social totality of which cultural forms are the expression or the symptom, so that to analyse them is to relate them to the social totality from which they derive. Recent theory debates the question of whether there is a social totality, a socio-political configuration, and if so, how cultural products and activities relate to it. But cultural studies is drawn to the idea of a direct relationship, in which cultural products are the symptom of an underlying socio-political configuration.

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

cultural studies: Practitioners of cultural studies often hope that work on present culture will be an intervention in culture rather than mere description Cultural studies thus believes that its own intellectual work is supposed make a difference.

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

political movements that have energized cultural studies in Britain, and it could be seen as primarily a resourceful, interdisciplinary, but still academic study of cultural practices and cultural representation. Cultural studies is supposed to be radical, but the opposition between an activist cultural studies and a passive literary studies may be wishful thinking.

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 concentration camp commanders who were connoisseurs of literature, art, and music has complicated attempts to make claims for the effects of particular sorts of study. But these issues should be confronted head on.

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

the study of cultural objects of all sorts the advantages and disadvantages of different modes of interpretation and analysis, such as interpreting cultural objects as complex structures or reading them as symptoms of social totalities.