Thinking activity : Five types of Cultural studies

Hello readers !

This is my academic blog. This blog is about Cultural studies (what is cultural studies). This task is given by Dr. Dilip barad sir. Some of the questions are given below. So exactly the task is we have to give answers to the questions.

• Your understanding of British Cultural Materialism, in your words ?

 In Cultural materialism we find that 'Marxist idea' and 'hegemony'.  As Matthew Arnold mentioned materiality is not culture but that beyond something is happening very significant.  So the materiality in the past and how that is changed in future and presence. How power is changed with cultural Materialism. In Which parameters culture is changing, materialism is one of them. In British materialism we find that the class distribution through the materialists things. In modern Britain two trajectories for   Cultural materialists deal with specific historical documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.

• What is the contribution of Michel Foucault in new historicism ?

The New Historicism was influenced by Foucault‘s theories of Power/Knowledge and Discourse. So from Foucault's point of view New historicism 

developed the idea of a broad " totality" function of culture observable in literary texts, which Foucault called the episteme.  From Foucault's point of view history  is the important thing that was not the working out of "universal ideas ".  If we don't know the history then we can't understand the governing ideas of the past and present. That though we got the knowledge of how the power changed with time and also in which factor that is too much changed. History is a form of social oppression told in the series of explodes with previous ages. 

How people narrate the history is more important. So the "fault" lines that must be integrated into succeeding culture by the epistemes of power and knowledge. Foucault also mentioned  Methods of expression can also be methods of oppression.  The modern age is governed by a complex master narrative. It may still be seen only as a narrative to succeed those of earlier generations. So there is a new episteme that will render obsolete our ways if organizing knowledge and telling history. One of Foucault's main ideas is that knowledge is always constructed in specific historical contexts

• How can new historicists help in answering the questions raised against the Laputa episode in Gulliver's Travels ?

So the question is that  What did Jonathan Swift mean when he gave that name to the flying island in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels ?  The science fiction aspect of that island still amuses us but why "the whore" ?

So here Susan Bruce offers a reading of book 3 that makes some new historicist sense out if Swift's use of  Laputa.  Here we get the sense how to analyze the thing from the new historicism point of view. Bruce tries together the current issue and event happening at that particular time. The situation and the behavior of the women that particular time and what is portrayed by Swift.  In which the female body leads not to enhanced appreciation but rather to horror and disgust. Laputa is a gigantic trope of the female body. As Bruce remarks," It's this which engenders the name of the island: in a paradigmatic instance of misogyny, the achievement of mle control over the female body itself renders that body the whore: Laputa".

• Exemplify  four types of analysis of popular culture. Apply it on Cultural artefacts ?

 These analyses seek to get beneath the surface meanings and examine more implicit social meaning. In Popular culture we find that four types of analysis that are given below :

Production analysis : 

 So in this study the following kinds of questions asked, who owns the media ? Who creates text and why? Under what constraints ? How democratic or elitist us the production of popular culture? What about works written only for money?

Textual analysis:

 Textual analysis  examines how specific works of popular culture create meanings.

Audience analysis:

Audience analysis asks how different groups of popular culture consumers, or users, make similar or different sense of the same texts.

Historical analysis :

Historical analysis investigates how these other three dimensions change over time.

• Difference between Modernism and postmodernism. If possible give examples also .

First in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries in Europe and North America the term modernism started. The Modernist writers in general rebelled against clear-cut storytelling and formulaic verse from the 19th century. Instead, many of them told fragmented stories which reflected the fragmented state of society during and after World War I.

Definition of postmodernism :

" A general and wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality."

Postmodernism is the reaction to Modernism that was influenced by World War 2.

What is the difference between Modernism and postmodernism :

If we differentiate both terms then we find that both have very vast differences. 

The Modernist who thinks about the search for an abstract truth of life . While the postmodernist thinkers believe that there is no universal truth abstract or other.

If we think about art then the modern art is simply focused on the piece and the postmodern art is focused on the way the piece is made or told. 

Ex. The Modernist will draw attention to the painting but postmodern will also draw attention to the frame.

The modernist who focused on writers and the postmodernist who focus on the readers.

Modernism is an effort to reconcile the principles underlying architectural design with rapid technological design with rapid technological advancement and the modernization of society. And the postmodernism refers to the functional and formalized shapes and spaces of the modernist style are replaced by diverse aesthetics.

Thank you…..

Feminism : Elaine Showalter and Gayatri spivak

Hello readers!

Elaine Showalter and Gayatri Spivak play a vital role in feminism. Here is am going to write about her views on feminism. What exactly they think about feminism . How they differ from others. This movement feminism is started by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The first gathering devoted to women's rights in the United States was held July 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. The principal organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a mother of four from upstate New York, and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott.

So let's think and Know about Showalter and Gayatri Spivak about feminism. Let's take one by one.

• Elaine Showalter :

 Who has better known as American literary critic, Feminist and writer on cultural and social issues. And also known for Gynocriticism. Showalter has been a television critic for people magazine and a commentator on BBC radio and television. She had faced many problems , easily did not get this position, and fought with her parents.A school of feminist criticism concerned with “woman as writer…with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women.”

• Her works :

- Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (1977),

- The Female Malady (1985)

- Towards a feminist Poetics (1979)

- Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1990)

- Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (1991)

- Hystories: Historical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997),

- Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (2001),

 - A Jury of Her Peers (2009),

- The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe (2016)

This Toward a Feminist Poetics Showalter best known work. It is divides feminist criticism into two sections:

• The Woman as Reader or Feminist Critique :

So in the first part we find that the women as a reader. Male writers written and the women who just go through the reading. So we can say that male writers can't express female thinking , female psychology. One of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male–orientated. How women are manipulating and exploiting. in literary work. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics. Writers are not learning what women have felt and experienced, but only what men thought women should be.

They used women as a sign. As many popular literature and add. Women show work in the house , to care for their children. Unconsciously women also believe that idea, women are for doing household work. She also treats her girl as the same ideas. In many advertisements we saw that mother and daughter work together at home instead of the boy who goes outside and plays. So in this way think about feminist critique.

Here one proverd and related that one story is here. In which the narration is very problematic. Here we can see that how male writer think about woman's psychology and thinking.

• The Woman as Writer or Gynocritics : 

Gynocriticism attempts to construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature and focus on female subjectivity, female language and female literary career. She says that gynocritics may never succeed in understanding the special differences of women’s writing, or realize a distinct female literary tradition.

"Gynocritics begins at the point when we free ourselves from the linear absolutes of male literary history, stop trying to fit women between the lines of the male tradition, and focus instead on the newly visible world of female culture."

So that through bwe understand that the Gynocritics main aim is to understand the specificity of writing not as a product of sexism but as a fundamental aspect of female reality. Language  and the theories all are man dominated. There is a concept like the otherness of language.Many female writer like Meena kandaswami, Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" written in her way.

• Three phases :

1)    The ‘feminine phase’ 

It dates from about 1840-1880. Women, in this stage, wrote to level standards of intellectual achievements with that of male culture. Use of male pseudonyms on the part of female writers is one of the most unique aspects of this stage. For example women like George Eliot who started writing with pennames

2)      The ‘feminist phase’  :

 It ranged from 1882 to 1920.  It followed the efforts to win rights for women. The New Women Movement had become quite strong and women had won the right to vote. During this stage, women writers expressed their feelings regarding sufferings of women in the society.

3)      The ‘female phases:

The Female phases has been continuing since 1920.  Showalter considers imitation and protest to symbolize the dependence of females on male. Thus, women rejected both these ideas. Here women depend on their own attitude and experiences to participate in the literary process. Writers like  Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley who represent this stage, also identified the uniqueness of female experience. They went to the extent of identifying differences between male and female sentences.Women, in general, began to be more aware about forms and techniques of art and literature.

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak :

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (24 February 1942) is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Her famous essay is "Can the subaltern speak ?Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her essay “Feminism and Critical Theory”, describes the relationship between feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction through her own thoughts, critical literary works of others and a image of the present state of these areas of thought.

Her essay is divided into four parts :

 “The first section of the essay is a version of a talk I gave several years ago.  The second section represents a reflection on that earlier work. The third section is an intermediate moment.  The fourth section inhabits something like the present.”

In the second part she says that :

“In a matter of race-sensitive analyses, the chief problem of American feminist criticism is its identification of racism as such with the constitution of racism in America.” 

Thank you.....

Thinking activity on Cultural studies unit :1

Hello readers !

Welcome to my world. 

Each and every society have their own culture. Every society followed some kind of rules and regulations. Like how to live life, what to eat, what to wear, how to wear, how to behave etc: We also mentioned one thing is that cultural studies is not about praising particular Culture but it is thinking critically towards Culture.

In a way culture is bounding us for various things like you don't eat this food, you don't think in this way, don't wear particular type of clothes, follow the rules made by culture. Among all the things Culture are interesting and beautiful thing or ritual. Sometimes culture became helpful for humanity. If we think about what is the thing ? that make a difference between human being and animal. Then we can say that human being have culture and that is the superiority of human being. And that is the difference between Man and animal.

★ What is Culture ?

https://images.app.goo.gl/Exh9aQF76Kgfwa6u5

The word "culture" derives from a French term, which in turn derives from the Latin "colere," which means to tend to the earth and grow, or cultivation and nurture. "It shares its etymology with a number of other words related to actively fostering growth," De Rossi said.

Culture is the characteristic and knowledge of a particular group of people encompassing language, social habits,arts and music. "Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, our marriage system, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and many more things,". 

In simple words we can say that Culture is a word for the 'way of life' of groups of people, meaning the way they do things.

★ What is Cultural studies :

     To define " cultural studies" is very hard. In the summer of 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, travelled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures on something called “Cultural Studies.” This way cultural studies started.

As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out , cultural studies is not ' a tightly coherent, unified movement with fixed agenda' but a ' loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues and questions'.

If we look at for main aims and characteristic of the culture studies are here : In the book "Introducing Cultural studies" by Ziauddin Sardar (1994)

In this book we find five characteristics of cultural studies. That is given below :

• The aim of cultural studies is to examine cultural practices and their relation to power.

• The objective of cultural studies includes understanding culture in all its complex forms and analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests.

• Cultural studies is a site of both study/analysis and political criticism/action.

• Cultural studies attempts to expose and reconcile constructed divisions of knowledge that purport to be grounded in nature.

• Cultural studies has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.

★ Four Goals of Cultural studies :

How is understanding " power " at the center of cultural studies ?

There are connections between power and culture. Cultural issues and the themes are mediated through with the question of profit ( economic) and power ( politics). Culture is therefore about power.

Power plays a vital role in democracy, that through the definition of the power is changed. There are six types of Civic force of power.

Physical force, Wealth, State action, Social power,deals and Number.

If these six elements mingling then those who get powerful positions,  who feel like a king.

There is a noticeable thing that power is always changing, not static. It keeps shifting. Power is like water. Another thing is that power compound. 

So that all the things through we can read the power properly. Just read the power that is not important but how you interpret it the opposite way that is major things. After reading to write about it that is also needed. For example if one person who got the power and then increases the power more and more then that is highly problematic for democracy. Because that is the situation that brings us in dangerous parts of the time.

If we look at our democracy's definition then we find : democracy means of the people , for the people and by the people. But that is not in reality. In reality the words are slightly changed.

Of - cut off the people

For - that is only for four people who support the power.

By - In reality not 'by' the people but that is 'buy' the people.

For the reference of this concept I would recall here the quote from George Orwell. In the 'Animal Farm'. That is

" All are equal but some are more equal than others"

This sentence is fairly connected with the concept of power.

Thank you ….

Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism

George Eliot and Charles Dickens

Hello readers !

Welcome

Mary Ann Evans George  ( 1819 - 1880) Eliot and Charles Dickens ( 1812 - 1870)  both writer belongs to the Victorian period. Both known for his or her novel. And also here I am mentioned one thing is that both writer's life has shaped by their family, friends and environment. This three play a vital role. And however, it is individual that eventually had to make initiative upon themselves that finally make the difference.

Let's discuss one by one this important writer.

Charles Dickens :

Dickens is a poor obscure and suffering child. He was helping to support a shiftless family by pasting labels on blacking bottles,sleeping under a counter like a homeless cat. In 1836 his Pickwick was published and his life is changed.

" Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but I hope into a better shape. "

So in this quotation through we get the idea about his suffering. As a boy he worked in cellar blacking factory. Dickens was a marvelously keen observer, with an active imagination which made stories out of incidents and character acters that ordinary men would have hardly noticed.

No.	Famous work	Publication date
1.	Pickwick	( 1836-1837)
2.	American Notes	1842
3.	Martin Chuzzlewit	1843-1844
4.	A Christmas Carol	1843
5.	David and Copperfield	1850
6.	Bleak House	1853
7.	Oliver twist	1838
8.	Great Expectations	1861

★ Dickens novel :

If we look at on his novel then and then we find that the subject matter and all the things. Like in his first novel  Pickwick and n which we find that each chapter have cartoon by Seymour, so this novel through Dickens labeled a humorist.

In the Oliver twist we got the real picture of the poor people. How they suffering throughout the novel. It's hero is poor child and he was the unfortunate victim of society.

In his every novel he portrayed child character as hero and also the poor people. So in his next work like Nicholas Nickleby  in which vww find that the giving us mirth on the one hand, injustice and suffering on the other,, mingling humor band pathos, teat and laughter.

Also in his novel we find that the real picture of Victorian period and that people and society.  He was highlighted the factory system and it's illness.

David Copperfield is masterpiece big him. That is not only famous for unusual interest of the story, but also for the glimpse it gives us of the author's own boyhood and family

• His style of writing :

Dickens written in picturesque style.  That through reveals his usual imaginative outlook on life and his fondness for fine sentiment band dramatic episodes.

George Eliot : 

Mary Ann Evans  that is her real name . George Eliot is her pen name.

" It is never too late to be what

you might have been "

So in her sentence through we find that her characteristic. As a woman what type of thought she have and what is the mentality of society in those days, but how she is fighting against that tradition of patriarchal society. Here she including women's identity.

In her work through we got the idea and also analyze the problems of life and on the other tendency to teach  problems may be solved.

Adam bede - 1859

The Mill on the Floss

Middlemarch -( 1871-1872)

Daniel Deronda - 1876

Romola (1862- 1863)

The Spanish Gypsy -1868

Felix Holt - 1866

Collection of miscellaneous Essays called The Impression of Theophrastus Such (1879)

 If look at in her works then we got ideas that How she thinks about people and various types of situations. What is the importance of women in Victorian period.  In her work  Romola, we find that  mingling of moral Philosophy, against the background of the mighty Renaissance movement. In which she was writing of things of which she had no personal knowledge. In which she discussed Italian life.

In her novel Middlemarch we find that less spontaneous and more laboured and pedantic than her early novel.

General characteristic of her novel :

In the words of D. H. Lawrence, “It all started with George Eliot; it was she who put the action on the inside,” thus giving impetus to the rise of the psychological novel, where the most significant actions derive from the motives of the characters rather than from external events.

Thank you.....🙂