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Cultural studies concerns itself with the Meaning and practices of everyday Life . Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. Particular meanings attach to the ways people in particular cultures do things. In a loosely related but separate usage, the phrase cultural studies sometimes serves as a rough synonym for ''' Area Studies ''', as a general term referring to the academic study of particular cultures in departments and programs such as Islamic Studies , Asian Studies , African American Studies , African Studies , German Studies , ''et al.''. Overview In his book ''Introducing Cultural Studies'', Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:
Approaches Scholars in the , Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy . In contrast, the American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, Mass Culture ; American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of Fandom . See the writings of critics such as John Guillory . The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded. Some scholars, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the ''production'' of Meaning . This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing Cultural Artifact s. In a Marxist view, those who control the Means Of Production (the economic ''base'') essentially control a culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as Feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticise the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. Another major point of criticism involved the traditional view assuming a passive consumer. Other views challenge this, particularly by underlining the different ways people ''read'', receive, and interpret cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject, or challenge the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus away from the ''production'' of items. Instead, they argue that ''consumption'' plays an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming with Cultural Identity . Stuart Hall has become influential in these developments. Some commentators have described the shift towards meaning as the '' Cultural Turn ''. In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a '' and Popular Culture , but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is Comparative Cultural Studies , based on the discipline of Comparative Literature and cultural studies. Critical views Cultural studies is not a unified theory but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods, and academic perspectives; as in any academic discipline, cultural studies academics frequently debate among themselves. However, some academics from other fields have criticised the discipline as a whole. It has been popular to dismiss cultural studies as an academic fad. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom has been an outspoken critic of the cultural studies model of literary studies. Critics such as Bloom see cultural studies as it applies to literary scholarship as a vehicle of careerism by academics, as opposed to promoting the public interest by studying what makes beautiful literary works beautiful. Bloom stated his position during the 3 September 2000 episode of C-SPAN's "Booknotes": " are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [...is... the lunatic destruction of literary studies [...] and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who really do represent a treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'." [http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1580 Literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to cultural studies theory like Bloom, but has criticised certain aspects of it, highlighting what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as ''After Theory'' (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential. Compare Culture , Cultural History , Cultural Identity , Culture Theory , Cultural Critic . See also
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