Ku Wi eigene Zusammenfassung PDF

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1) What is Culture?

"All the standard accounts of cultural studies trace its origins to the 1950s and to the emergence of three key texts. However, as Stuart Hall […] reminds us, there are no 'absolute beginnings' to the project of cultural studies. Even if this is so, it would be foolish to under-estimate the impact of the works which marked its formal, textual starting point: Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957); Raymond Willliams's Culture and Society (1958); and E.P. Thomson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963)." Jessica Munns, Gita Rajan (eds.), A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice, London/NewYork: Longman 1995; 149-151. "Cultural studies in Britain developed in reaction to the dominant definition of 'culture' bequeathed by the conservative tradition of cultural criticism, and challenged it at two basic levels. In opposition to the identification of 'culture' with a particular selection of canonized texts and legitimised practices, it reasserted the anthropological conception of culture as all the ways in which people make sense of their situation and express these understandings. It was therefore as interested in the 'lived texts' of social rituals and social institutions as in artefacts. Where cultural criticism saw only an absence of 'culture' within the working class, cultural studies set out to uncover the variety and vitality of situated practices and beliefs, and to demonstrate their authentic roots in popular experience." Graham Murdock in Ann Gray, Jim McGuigan (eds.), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader, London/New York: Arnold, 1997. 81.

While we most commonly think of culture as literature, music and theatre, it is actually one of the most complicated words in the English language and can not only refer to what we perceive as some kind of high culture (going to the theatre and having a certain expertise in literature is often seen as intellectual and sophisticated), but also to our everyday lives, habits and even whole countries. Nevertheless, due to its complex historical development and dynamic meaning, it remains difficult to define. While it was still mainly used as a synonym for civilization during the 19th century, it has now even become a broad field of research at many universities all around the world. According to Raymond Williams’ traditional approach, in 19th and 20th there are 3 active categories of the usage of the word culture, which are: 1. General Human Development - describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development (derived from the 18th century and very similar to our modern understanding of culture) 2. Particular Way of Life - indicates a particular way of life (groups of people, habits..) 3. Works & Practices of Art and Intelligence – describes the works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity, culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture,

theatre and films

According to Aleida Assmann there are six different concepts of culture in her rather typological approach to the understanding of culture. Three of them unbiased/ descriptive (unvoreingenommen) and three biased/ normative.

Unbiased/ descriptive: 1. Care (Pflege) – from Latin “colere” (= improvement + appreciation Aufwertung of something)  This care was originally bound to agriculture, but broadened its meaning to toiletries (Hygieneartikel) or bacterial culture. Meanwhile, it can refer to anything that shows development/ degree of diversity and development of internal differentiation, like party culture, fitness culture or even cheese culture.

2. Geographical & Political Units/ areas (nations) (French/ Western culture) - with different historical development. unites people in such units and at the same time

excludes other people; united by languages, mentalities, forms of art and lifestyles, habits; (only visible from the outside, inside the people do not understand themselves as “uniformly”, it is not uniform) Principle of making a difference from you and others (= Abgrenzung) Determing, who you are, in terms of saying who you not are. - Claiming a difference. unified nation = fiction, but with personifying of landscapes (black forrest, etc.) is is still given and will never fully can be neglected. It is personified, stereotyped and simplified, Zuschreiben of Wesen (e.g. discipline, …) as to create identity (this concept

cannot always be applied to modern nations, due to multiculturalism) Means used by nation - Symbols: Flag - Products: Cars, Food - Habits: greeting 3. Antropological Term – refers to everything that has to do with the coexistence of human beings. Therefore culture is all that, what people make out of themselves and what they experience meanwhile. This includes symbolic, religion, rituals, styles of art, social systems, media [...]. Somehow, culture is “everything” Universal concept.

If everything is seen as culture, to what extend can this term still be of any interest to researchers? Biased/ normative: show culture is not always something good but needs critical reflection 1. Elitist Term of High Culture - deals with values. This term implies a hierarchical order of cultures and places itself to the highest level in 2 ways: social location in society and aesthetic evaluation of artistic excellence (Stratification within culture and society) .So “high culture” has an elitist meaning and fences off other social layers. People belonging to this

group valued arts and the aesthetic in a sense of cultivating and had nothing to do with the entertainment industry of lower status groups.

Culture as a privilege; restricted to higher social classes; exclusive. 2. Culture in a sense of Civilization (civilizing cultural term) (Freund/ Elias) Culture is everything that bounds us off from wilderness and makes us to human beings. So one person is not human eo ipso, but due to his cultivating work on himself. Therefore the mastery of natural instinct is the most important factor. So the key to culture is:

discipline and seeking control over oneself. (People that are not civilized (tribes etc.) are not at the same level of civilized people.) 3. Culture as Opposition/ counterpart to Real World (criticizing cultural term) (Adorno/ Bejamin) - culture as a critical position towards reality. Here culture is a critical counterpart to reality; it unifies demanding (anspruchsvoll) excellence of artistic expression. Pieces of art get a nearly religious status, they are a way of transcendence and they oppose against entertaining mass culture. Aura (go back to Benjamin) = religious quality of grance/ daintiness (Anmutungsqualität). (Frankfurt School)

2) Briefly explain the difference between Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaft! Are they synonyms?

Even though often used as synonyms, Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaft are in fact two different things, thus quite similar to each other.



Cultural Studies Cultural studies regards culture more as part



Kulturwissenschaft whereas in Kulturwissenschaft, culture is

of the social movement and cultural

mainly seen and understood as a matter of

practice

research (= subjects of research) and only act on universities and academies



Cultural studies are active and form their



rather reflexive and critical approach.

opinions on values and identities. They are part of a battle ground for values,

whereas Kulturwissenschaft (now) stands for a



They canonize and try to contextualize,

reassessments/ revaluations and identity

arrange texts and artifacts according to their

politics

time of development.

Developement 



Cultural Studies “Cultural studies” are a result of a crisis of



Kulturwissenschaft The German “Kulturwissenschaft” resulted as

the “humanities”(= humane discipline

well from a crisis (crisis of the humane

Geisteswissenschaften) in the 1950s.

discipline): Whereas the sciences are up to

Stuart Hall was one of the leaders in this

date and form our modern world, the

development. He was a Marxist student of

“Geisteswissenschaften” were the losers of

English literature. His teacher, F.R. Leavis,

modernization.

had an elite concept of civil high culture, and



They stuck to old values, looked only in the

Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, Edward

past and did nothing to fulfill their educational

Thompson and Richard Hoggart were not

function.

able to identify with this. They distanced from



Replacement of the term spirit/ mind and

Leavis and founded the Birmingham School,

insertion of the terms symbol, medium/

where they studied the industrial mass

subject and culture.

culture. For them culture was scene of fight



They were supposed to contribute to the

for power, money and prestige, so they

remodeling of our world. Instead of

broadened the meaning of culture from high

transforming to a new field of studies,

culture to a “popular culture”, as a term of

humane discipline created a new field of the

“collective, cultural tradition/

humane discipline: the Kulturwissenschaften.

transmission”. Feminists, migrants and other 



Georg Simmel, Karl Lamprecht, Aby Warburg,

social minorities felt addressed.

Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer made a

The cultural studies aimed to abolish abschaffen

start for the this before World War II

the term high culture and wanted to create a new



entering to mass culture. Therefore they changed the canon, so that minorities were able to get access to culture.

3) Explain the position of cultural studies within English Studies    

English studies consist of 2 parts: linguistics and literary studies. Landeskunde and Sprachpraxis are additional parts.  some universities add cultural studies as a third part! (east Germany) It adds knowledge and content; leads to understanding; inclusion of new fields (e.g. media, but it should be as important as literature and linguistics.) Focus on new sources in addition to texts, like musik, film, art, digital media, which became more a more important.

4) What do you know about the development of “Cultural Studies” in Britain?



Has developed from interdisciplinary studies and disciplines; emerged from crisis in humanities; began with debate about nature of social and cultural change in postwar Britain in 1950’s



fonders: Hoggart, Williams, Thompson = “First New Left”  Hoggart founded Center of Cultural Studies  first institutionalization of cultural studies was in 1964 

their tasks: light educational assumptions underpinning the practice; expose educational program; understand social and cultural change in british society since war



they raided sociology, humanities and anthropology and constructed cultural studies

 

cultural studies also engaged political problems

Cultural Studies emerged from a crisis of the humanities as a result of social and cultural change in post war Britain and the attempt to break up the traditional hierarchy of culture under the impact of mass media and an emerging mass society.



Thatcher also refers to this as a profound crisis of national identity and redefinition of national culture.



As a result of an enormous struggle as to discover what British (especially English) could still mean, if Britain was not the only centre of a huge imperialist and economic Empire anymore, Cultural Studies was first identified by the New Left in the 1950’s under the direct and indirect influence of Hoggart, Williams and Thompson, who were also fairly active outside the universities, which also indicates the distinct status of Cultural Studies compared to the humanities and social sciences that it had derived from, even though it has still remained a cross-over discipline.



Cultural Studies began its actual work in the 1960’s and 1970’s and most probably only survived the latter decade because of the translation of the so-called “Ur-Texts” (i.e. major works of Frankfurt School) that were essential for its further development.



The intention was to address the problems of the “national popular” (Gramsci), which was mostly realized by founding the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham in order to not only connect culture, politics and society, but also theoretical and practical aspects of Cultural Studies.

5) Who is Raymond Williams? What is characteristic of his concept of culture? (bei Folien: change 1964 to 1946) Raymond Williams lived from 1921-1988. He was born in Wales and came from a working class background. He worked as a teacher in adult education and later became a professor of drama in Cambridge. He was also a student of Leavis, but they later went their separate ways. Most characteristic for his understanding of culture is that he does not see culture as something exclusive that is only available to higher social classes, but thinks of it as something that belongs to everyone in society. His views were greatly influenced by Marxist positions in which culture must be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production, also aiming for a somehow prescribed system of education and also by Leavis, who on the other hand stood for a slightly more elitist opinion on the topic. Williams entirely rejected the so-called Teashop culture (culture defined by trivial differences between social classes) and clearly considered an ability and desire for learning and arts as a natural trait in people rather than a specific characteristic of higher social classes.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988) Grew up in poorer surroundings; at the countryside (simple life); went to Trinity College, Cambridge and became teacher in adult education. He was professor of drama and dealt a lot with the meaning of culture. His concept of culture could be summarized as “culture is ordinary”. He says that culture is a product of all people; therefore everyone has a culture and lives in a culture culture consists of individual meanings; no one is excluded from English culture, so people do not have to think and write in prescribed ways to produce culture. He claims that British culture has one major problem: through the development from agricultural England with a traditional culture of great value, art and literature became replaced by a modern, organized industrial state. But even through industrialization there is a kind of progress/ cultural development, which has some kind of value, even if this is cheapening  brings more power to the working class, because the working class gets access to education. People are individual, not all the same, and there has always been “bad culture”, so there is no decline of culture. Culture has 2 senses: 1. means a whole way of life (common meaning) and 2. means arts+ learning. (teashop: was outward and emphatically visible sign of a special kind of cultivated people) o Lower culture: cinema, TV shows (easy to access) for everyone; this is bad o Higher culture: books, knowledge (difficult to access) not for everyone; this is good, because it gives culture a special status

6) Explain the significance of Raymond Williams’ biographical background for his concept of culture! Due to his own working class background, Williams experienced the difference between lower level working class education and higher elitist education during his academic career. He discovered a split between them, when he went to university himself and therefore became motivated to do research on the topic. Because according to an elitist definition of culture even he would be excluded to some extent, he developed his own ways of thinking and as a result his own concept of culture, meaning that culture is nothing exclusive, but something that belongs to everyone and is influenced by everyone.

7) Can you explain the title of Williams’ essay (“Culture is Ordinary”)? As already mentioned, Williams’ concept of culture excludes an elitist understanding of culture and sees culture as something that belongs to everyone and that everyone belongs to. It is therefore something ordinary, nothing exclusive. The term ordinary almost makes it sound as if culture only belongs to those who are ordinary and no one else and he could have probably used other terms as reference, such as “Culture is.... normal; for everyone; ...”, but he did not, which suggests the aim to make people aware of the fact that in his opinion culture is even more different from the elitist view and that the educational elite is just as ordinary as the farmer next door. It is not just not elitist or non-exclusive, it is ordinary, a term with a fairly strong connotational meaning, which he was most likely aware of and used in favour of his own arguments.

8) Who is Stuart Hall? How does Stuart Hall’s concept of culture differ from that of Williams? Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica and after spending some time in Oxford, worked as the director of the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham and later on became a professor of sociology at open university. Even though Hall and Williams both suggest an

anthropological sense of culture, Hall, as a professor of sociology, focuses a lot more on this anthropological idea and is also very supportive of the theoretical approach in order to understand culture and define it as a scientific subject. Williams, on the other hand, as a professor of drama, seems to see culture as more ordinary and represented in arts, music and theatre as well as our everyday lives.

Stuart Hall (*1932) is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the

founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. He was President of the British Sociological Association 1995-1997.

For Hall, culture is not something to simply appreciate or study, but a “critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled”. He says that the Cultural Studies developed from a different matrix of interdisciplinary studies and disciplines, but there are different disciplinary roots in humanity and social sciences. Cultural Studies = identified with the first New Left (1956): questions: how to understand cultural change; how to describe it; how to theorize it; what are their impacts and consequences? he took questions of culture seriously (therefore hated at Oxford); his opinion: what happens to culture matters; opinion of others: culture takes care of itself Issues of a language are central for understanding the national culture: therefore we need a canon! Cultural Studies began its work in 1960s and 1970s; had to unmask the unstated presuppositions of humanist tradition; had to make an educational program, demystificate the role humanists play in relation to national culture. His concept of culture differs from William´s so far that Hall is more “innovative” (not as “conservative” as Williams, Hoggart). He included sub-cultural matters and media to his studies. He is furthermore credited for expanding...