TOPIC : British Culture:-PAPER : 8 The cultural study NAME : Monali JethwaROLL NO : (Sem -2) M.ASUBMITTED TO : Dr Dilip Barad Dept. of English . M.K. Bhavnagar University

INTRODUCTION

Cultural studies is the science of understanding modern society, with an emphasis on politics and power cultural studies is an umbrella term used to look at a number of different subject.

The British critic Graham Holderness describes cultural materialism as ‘ a politicised form of historiography”.

We can explain this as meaning the study of historical material within a politicised framework, this framework including the present which those literary texts have in some way helped to shape.

DEFINITION THE DEFINITION OF CULTURAL STUDIES CAN SOMETIMES BE MISCONSTRUED. IT IS NOT SIMPLY THE STUDY OF DIFFERENT CULTURES BUT USES MANY OTHER STUDIES TO ANALYZE DIFFERENT CULTURES SUCH AS PHILOSOPHY, THEOLOGY, LITERATURE ETC.…

British cultural

Materialism

New Historicism

American Multiculturali

sm

Postmodernism and popular

cultural

Post-colonial studies

TYPES OF CULTURAL STUDIES

BRITISH CULTURAL MATERIALISM

Cultural studies is referred to as “cultural materialism in Britain.Mathew Arnold redefine the givens of British culture.Edward Tylor argued that “Culture or civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense is a complex whole which ‘includes knowledge, belief, art, moral, Law custom and any other.Capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

MANY CRITICS REDEFINE THE BRITISH CULTURE, -BRITISH CULTURE,-PRIMITIVE CULTURE,-PRIMITIVE PEOPLE, -WORKING CLASS AS WELL AS ELITE.-

• To appreciate the importance of this revision of ‘culture’ we must situation it within the controlling myth of social and political reality of British empire upon which the sun never set, an ideology left over from previous century.

• The cultural materialism furnished a leftist orientation: “ Critical of the aestheticism , Formalist , Anti historicism , apoliticism , common among the dominant postwar method of academic literary criticism”.

Feudal Hierarchies in the past

Socialist utopia

Cultural Materialism began in 1950s with the work of F.R Leavis and heavily influenced by Matthew Arnold.Raymond Williams talks about attributes of working class and elite class.“There are no masses ; there are only ways of seeing people as masses”

Ironically the threat to their project was mass culture.

Inspired by Karl Marx, British theorist were also influenced by Gyorgy, Theodor, Louis Althusser, Horkheimer, Mikhail Bakhtin and Antonio.

Williams noted that hegemony was “ a sense of reality for most people… beyond which it is very difficult for most members of society to move”.

But people not always victims of hegemony. Althusser insisted that ideology was

ultimately in controlled of people and “main function of ideology is to reproduce the society’s existing relations of production, function are even carried out in literary texts”.