Cultural Studies and Theory

What is Cultural Studies, and how is it related to Critical Theory? Cultural Studies works centrally with many of the theories of interpretation and response that have developed in literary studies; but Cultural Studies and/or Theory will deploy these theories to understand non-literary modes of cultural production (for example, music, art, television, fashion, advertising, or visual culture), with special attention to any given cultural mode’s embeddedness in a particular social, historical, sexual, and/or economic context.

Which is to say two things right off the bat: Cultural Studies works with a much wider range of ‘non-canonical’ objects than is usually studied in English courses; and Cultural Studies approaches turn attention away from a critical apparatus that looks primarily for artistic production’s ‘enduring values’ or its thematic ‘meaning’ (approaches that tend to cut off cultural productions from their immediate socio-historical contexts).

And this is where Theory comes in: what may seem like the everyday ‘lightness’ of the objects within Cultural Studies inquiry is more than offset by the theoretical heavy lifting necessary to say something compelling about their place in a larger socio-economic system. You’d think that much less critical apparatus would be required to study YouTube videos than to study Moby-Dick, but that’s probably the first thing that Cultural Studies wants to challenge through its linkages to Theory: the objects themselves may be everyday, but that’s precisely why they require such a lot of theoretical inquiry to understand how they function. For Cultural Studies to work, it has to take the ‘detour of Theory’ precisely in order to tell us something valuable about our everyday lives.

Possible courses for the Cultural Studies and Theory cluster: