Marija Dalbello

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Image credit Victor GAD
Marija Dalbello Reading Interests of Adults
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture
Rutgers School of Communication and
Informationdalbello_at_rutgers.edu
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• Overview
• _______________________________________
• Reading in a broader context
• of cultural production
• society and its institutions
• and consumption of texts
• Transmedia storytelling - convergence culture
• What is Popular Culture?
• Culture concepts
• grassroots, popular, common, mass, élite,
  high-middle-low brow
• Definitions and approaches to the study of
  culture
• What is Cultural Studies?
• Imagination revisited

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• Transmedia storytelling
• _______________________________________
• Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture
• Telling stories across multiple forms of media
• Mass audiences involved in their circulation and
  re-circulation
• Storylines, themes, messages - of mass media
  ecologies
• Popular fiction - node in a larger framework of
  storytelling
• Transmedia culture phenomena - examples
• The idea of literacy and reading - NEA Report
• Asking new questions about reading and popular
  genres

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• What is Popular Culture?
• _______________________________________
• Popular culture can be defined (cf. Storey)
• quantitatively culture of the many - forms
  widely favored
• residually denoting all that is not high
  culture
• as being same as mass culture (commercialized)
• as culture originating from the people
• as culture of resistance
• common culture today is overcome by commercial
  interest - leaves no space for authentic
  expression
• Related culture concepts
• grassroots, popular, common, mass, élite,
  high-middle-low brow

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• What is culture? _________________________________
  ______
• Social behavior norms of politeness
• Material culture
• Hopi pottery
• Cultural texts and practices
• carnival
• Shared fantasies
• storytelling forms myths, fables, romances
• 300 definitions of culture recorded (Kroeber)

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• Culture approaches and definitions
  _______________________________________
• E.B. Tylor (1871) Culture is that complex whole
  which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
  law, customs, and other capabilities and habits
  acquired by man as a member of society
• M. Mead (1960s) Culture is a learned behavior
  of a society or a subgroup
• R. Williams (1970s) Culture includes the
  organization of production, the structure of the
  family, the structure of institutions which
  express or govern social relationships, the
  characteristic forms through which members of the
  society communicate
• C. Geertz (1980s) Culture is simply the
  ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about
  ourselves

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• Culture as an object of study
  _______________________________________
• Subject area not clearly defined all-inclusive
  notion of culture and study of a range of
  practices
• Principles and theories from social sciences
  disciplines, the humanities, and the arts are
  adapted to the purposes of cultural analysis
• Methodologies diverse textual analysis,
  ethnography, psychoanalysis, survey research,
  etc.

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• What is Cultural Studies? ________________________
  _______________
• Study of culture rather than society
• Progressive, radical, political
• Prevalent in arts, humanities, social sciences,
  science technology

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• Cultural Studies - non disciplinary
  _______________________________________
• Cultural studies impossible to define
  collective term for diverse and contentious
  intellectual endeavors
• Many theoretical and political positions
• Includes established and radical disciplines,
  political activism and modes of inquiry (critical
  theory)
• Anti-discipline not institutionalized in
  departments
• But with a distinct history

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• Historical background __________________________
  _____________
• Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)
  established in 1964
• Working Papers in Cultural Studies in 1972
• Forefathers Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams,
  E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall
• Working-class background role of popular
  culture in class-based society in England

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• R. Hoggart R. Williams _______________________
  ________________
• Working class intellectuals
• ?The culture of common people (working class
  culture) seen as more authentic than middle- and
  upper-class culture derives from experience
• ?Against canonical élitism (high culture)
• ?Interest in active appropriation of cultural
  forms class struggle in the cultural arena
• ?Mass culture seen as colonizingworking class
  culture -packaged for passive absorption by the
  cultural industry producers

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But what to do?
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• R. Hoggart ___________________________________
  ____
• Founder of CCCS
• ?The Uses of Literacy (1957) programmatic work
  parts of it written as a manifesto
• ?Problem working classes excluded from
  participation and dissemination of their cultural
  forms and practices
• ?Cultural struggle over legitimacy and cultural
  status of forms and practices
• ?Critical reading of art needs to reveal the
  felt quality of life of a society art captures
  the experience of the everyday as the unique

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• R. Williams __________________________________
  _____
• Marxist tradition (the New Left)
• ? Culture is an expression of the coherence of
  organic communities resisting determinism in its
  various forms
• ? Culture material, intellectual and spiritual
  (base and superstructure)
• ? Centrality of the culture of everyday life
  (texts that capture the structure of feeling of
  everyday life, the sense of an époque) - not only
  validates such culture and its study but
  validates its production and gives it a status of
  insight into the dynamics of societys struggle

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• Goals of Cultural Studies
• _______________________________________
• ? Examine cultural practices in their
  relationship to power how power shapes these
  practices
• ? Culture is studied in the social and political
  context in which its forms manifest themselves
• ? Culture is both object of study and vehicle for
  changing political consciousness through this
  understanding (scholarly applied)
• ? Reconcile division between tacit / universal
  knowledge validation of experience (local
  knowledge) in addition to generally shared forms
  of knowledge.
• ? Moral evaluation of modern society and means
  for radical action

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• Cultural Studies - concerns
• _______________________________________
• Cultural studies focus on analysis of cultural
  forms and their meaning in the context of power
  relations in society
• Study of social relations and meanings (how
  social divisions are made meaningful)
• Culture is terrain on which ideological
  representations of class, gender, race are
  enforced, and contested by social groups
  validating their experience
• Hegemony explains how society is bound together
  (without the use of force) under the moral and
  intellectual leadership of the ruling classes
• Operates in the realm of representations and
  consciousness
• Naturalizes a class ideology and renders it in
  the form of common sense
• Intellectuals forge consent in the interest of
  the ruling class

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• Culture is site of class struggle
• _______________________________________
• Gramsci (1891-1937) - Prison Notebooks

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• Hegemony
• _______________________________________
• Hegemony relies on negotiation consent
• Exercised through authority, not physical
  force
• Operates through institutions (educational
  system, media and the family)
• Competing classes achieve a compromise
  equilibrium
• Culture as key site of struggle of competing
  interests
• Popular culture is an arena of resistance but
  also of enforcing hegemony
• Paradoxically, the sphere of culture perceived
  as non-political although it is a conduit for
  hegemonic representations
• Implies power inequality in different segments
  of society

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• Theories and theorists of culture
• _______________________________________
• Culture and civilisation (Matthew Arnold
  Leavisism) canon
• Culturalism (Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson,
  Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall) authenticity
• Structuralism (Ferdinand de Saussure,Claude
  Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes) signs unconscious
  foundations signification
• Post-Structuralism Jacques Derrida, Jacques
  Lacan, Michel Foucault, Edward Said) meaning is
  process
• Marxism (Classical the Frankfurt School,
  Althusserian neo-Gramscian Bakhtin) cultural
  texts reflect how society is organized
• Feminism (Janice Radway) constructing identity
  through consumption
• Post-modernism (Jameson, Baudrillard) revolt
  against modernism

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• Popular culture as play
• _______________________________________
• Texts do not have a single meaning
• Readers are poachers
• Lart pour lart
• Mikhail Bakhtin carnivalesque nature of
  culture
• This playful and irreverent nature of culture is
  noted in medieval practices of carnival, but
  popular literary genres, music and other cultural
  forms reveal the sam process