How Cultural Studies Began
Cultural studies arose in the 1970s and 1980s as a way of empowering otherwise disenfranchised voices: those who did not follow common or accepted political or social norms. It is a way of challenging an established power by investigating issues of "multiculturalism, the politics of literacy, and the implications of race, class, and gender". Within the discipline exists a variety of agendas and methods, but the fundamental idea behind cultural studies is to give voice to "the masses" and encourage representation of all cultures within a society.
Cultural studies pedagogy tends to include examinations of pop culture and media texts and rhetoric. Cultural studies is influential in the composition classroom because it enables instructors to help students write about subjects they were familiar with and to "teach close reading and interpretation of texts....substituting popular culture or media for literary texts"; allows for the idea that we are inundated by culture in everything we see and read, and so it is useful in the composition classroom to analyze, examine, close-read, and understand the meaning in and around the texts.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Studies Theory Of Composition
Famous quotes containing the words cultural, studies and/or began:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming “Off with her head! Off with—”
“Nonsense!” said Alice loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)