Cultural Studies

"From culture to critique, Kant to Gadamer, Marx to Bourdieu, this detailed & brilliantly argued account of the history, theory, & practice of cultural studies is the best introduction to the subject that we have." Eric Gould University of Denver "An excellent pathway through a diverse field.... The special appeal of this book is to clarify the role of the critic, who is both immanent & transcendent, participant & objective observer alike.... It places current trends from Deconstruction Semiotics into Postmodernism & Poststructuralism in their historical & theoretical background, ranging from Hermeneutics to Marxism. In a truly Renaissance manner, Dr. Surber has incorporated the diverse trends in a loose, yet clear structure." Achim D. Koddermann SUNY at Oneonta

Since the late 1960s, both internationally and locally, we have witnessed the growth of subject areas outside the traditional liberal arts curriculum and disciplinary structure of the university curriculum: Black Studies (or Indigenous Studies), Feminist or Women's Studies, Critical Legal Studies, Film & Media Studies, Gay Studies, and Cultural Studies are some of the most popular. The principles underlying a global neo-liberalism and managerialism were responsible for restructuring universities during the 1980s. Some thought that such developments imperiled the humanities, while others believed that the context of globalization and the development of new communications technologies offered new hope for both interdisciplinary work and the emergence of a critical approach.

Cultural studies has generally organized itself around the opposition of high to low culture, reversing the traditional hierarchy of value, but leaving intact the polarity and the direct correlation of culture and class. Through detailed readings of the work of Pierre Bourieu, Michel de Certeau, Stuart Hall, and Ernesto Laclau, John Frow challenges this key assumption. He argues that the field of culture now has multiple centers and multiple domains of value and that these are irreducible to a single scale. Intellectuals play the crucial role in the mediation of the cultural field; their possession of cultural capital endows intellectuals with specific class interests which are distinct from those of the classes of groups for whom they claim to speak. Cultural Studies and Cultural Value seeks a revitalized and "poststructuralist" account of social class, a basis from which cultural studies can effect a much-needed reorientation.

"The discipline of cultural studies compels teachers-paradoxically & politically-to undo the very processes of knowledge production that they engage in as teachers. The contributors to this collection are at their best when they use their day-to-day struggles as teachers to inform their responses to this pedagogical challenge." Elizabeth Ellsworth University of Wisconsin at Madison

Adam Katz is an adjunct English instructor at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, New York.

Henry A. Giroux challenges the contemporary politics of cynicism by addressing a number of issues including the various attacks on cultural politics, the multicultural discourses of academia, the corporate attack on higher education, and the cultural politics of the Disney empire.

Oxford Readings in Feminism provide accessible, one-volume guides to the very best in contemporary feminist thinking, assessing its impact and importance in key areas of study. Collected together by scholars of outstanding reputation in their field, the articles chosen represent the most important work on feminist issues, and concise, lively introductions to each volume crystallize the main lines of debate in the field. This collection, edited by Morag Shiach, brings together exciting work in feminism and cultural studies from different countries and different historical moments. It combines 'classic' articles with more recent work to offer an insight into the challenges and innovations of work within cultural studies. The collection is organised thematically in ways which illuminate the development of theoretical and political debates within feminism and cultural studies. Different traditions within cultural studies are brought into relation with each other to explore areas such as commodification, women and labour, mass culture, fantasy and ideas of home.

Are indeterminancy and relativism the only possible consequences of embracing the uncertainties of the postmodern era? Are other less deconstructive options to be found emmbedded in postmodernism's many ambiguities? In arguing affirmatively to both questions, this study points--in a constructively postmodern way--toward renewal in literary and cultural theory.

The essays in 'Bringing It All Back Home' bring a sense of history, depth, and contestation to the current success of cultural studies while charting Grossberg's intellectual and theoretical developments from his time at Birmingham to the present.

In this intellectual history of British cultural Marxism, Dennis Dworkin explores one of the most influential bodies of contemporary thought. Tracing its development from beginnings in postwar Britain, through its various transformations in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emergence of British cultural studies at Birmingham, and up to the advent of Thatcherism, Dworkin shows this history to reflect a coherent intellectual tradition, one that represents an implicit and explicit theoretical effort to resolve the crisis of the postwar British Left.

Limited to neither a single discipline nor a particular intellectual figure, this book comprehensively views British cultural Marxism in terms of the dialogue between historians and the originators of cultural studies and in its relationship to the new left and feminist movements. From the contributions of Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Sheila Rowbotham, Rodney Hilton, Catherine Hall, and E. P. Thompson to those of Perry Anderson, Barbara Taylor, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Dick Hebdidge, Dworkin examines the debates over issues of culture and society, structure and agency, experience and ideology, and theory and practice. The rise, demise, and reorganization of journals such as The Reasoner, The New Reasoner, Universities and Left Review, New Left Review, Past and Present are also part of the history told in this volume. In every instance, the focus of Dworkin's attention is the intellectual work seen in its political context.

Capturing the excitement and commitment that more than one generation of historians, literary critics, art historians, philosophers, and cultural theorists have felt about an unorthodox and critical tradition ofMarxist theory, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain will appeal to students and scholars of cultural studies as well as those interested in the broader terrain of Marxist theory and contemporary critical theory.

French Cultural Studies: An Introduction challenges received theories about France and French culture. Taking into account the major changes which have been taking place in French Studies (with the focus shifting to a broader range of cultural forms), the Introduction adopts an interdisciplinary approach in its wide-ranging study of French culture and society since 1870, and suggests new ways of looking at France and the French-speaking world through the ideas, images, and narratives of more than a century of turbulent history and political change.

Introduction 1. Culture and Modernity: The Case of Spain I: Elites in Crisis, 1898-1931 National Identities 2. The Loss of Empire, Regenerationism, and the Forging of a Myth of National Identity 3. The Nationalisms of the Periphery: Culture and Politics in the Construction of National Identity Ideological Tensions 4. The Social Praxis and Cultural Politics of Spanish Catholicism 5. Education and the Limits of Liberalism Modernismo and Modernisme 6. Literary Modernismo in Castilian: The Creation of a Dissident Cultural Elite 7. Catalan Literary Modernisme and Noucentisme: From Dissidence to Order 8. Catalan Modernista Architecture: Using the Past to Build the Modern The Avant-Garde 9. The Literary Avant-Garde: A Contradictory Modernity 10. Internationalism and Eclecticism: Surrealism and the Avant-Garde in Painting and Film, 1920-1930 11. The Musical Avant-Garde: Modernity and Tradition Popular Culture 12. Rural and Urban Popular Cultures 13. The Cuple: Modernity and Mass Culture II: The Failure of Democratic Modernization, 1931-1939 Sexual Politics 14. Women and Social Change 15. Beyond Tradition and `Modernity': The Cultural and Sexual Politics of Spanish Anarchism Intellectuals and Power 16. Reform Idealized: The Intellectual and Ideological Origins of the Second Republic 17. The Republican State and Mass Educational-Cultural Initiatives, 1931-1936 Monolithicity versus Pluralism: Political Debates 18. The Political Debate within Catholicism 19. Catalan Nationalism: Cultural Plurality and Political Ambiguity The Cultural Politics of the Civil War 20. The Republican and Nationalist Wartime Cultural Apparatus 21. Propaganda Art: Culture and the People or For the People? III: Authoritarian Modernization, 1940-1975 i. Building the State and the Practice of Power, 1940-1959 The Material Reality of State Power 22. `Terror and Progress': Industrialization, Modernity, and the Making of Francoism 23. Gender and the State: Women in the '40s Cultural Control 24. Education and Political Control 25. The Moving Image of the Franco Regime: Noticiaros y Documentales 1943-1975 26. The Ideology and Practice of Sport 27. Censorship or the Fear of Mass Culture Cultural Nationalism 28. Cifesa: Cinema and Authoritarian Aesthetics 29. Constructing the Nation: Francoist Architecture 30. Music and the Limits of Cultural Nationalism Resisting the State 31. The Urban and Rural Guerrilla of the '40s 32. Popular Culture in the `Years of Hunger' 33. The Emergence of a Dissident Intelligentsia ii. Developmentalism, Mass Culture, and Consumerism, 1960-1975 Adapting to Social Change 34. Social and Economic Change in a Climate of Political Immobilism 35. Educational Policy in a Changing Society 36. Catholicism and Social Change Opposition Culture 37. The Left and the Legacy of Francoism: Political Culture in Opposition and Transition 38. The Politics of Popular Music: On the Dynamics of New Song Artistic Experiment and Diversification 39. Literary Experiment and Cultural Cannibalization 40. Painting and Sculpture: The Rejection of High Art 41. Cimema, Memory, and the Unconscious IV: Democracy and Europeanization: Continuity and Change, 1975-1992 Democracy and Cultural Change <

In a wide-ranging account of a variety of cultural forms and site of cultural production -- literature, cinema, radio, television, the visual art, journalism, advertising and consumerism, music theatre, the Church -- this groundbreaking book gives greater prominence to the processes of cultural reception than in previous texts. In essays by an international roster of specialists, the volume spotlights the role images of national identity, gender politics, youth culture and the interactions of public and private consciousness have played in the formation of cultural forms in the USSR and post-communist Russia.