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British and Irish Cultural Studies - Lecture Notes and Mock Exams
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Notes and mock exam example for the course British and Irish Cultural Studies.
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Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams were both important figures of British Culturalstudies and was established in 1960s as one of the first centers in the world for
cultural studies.
1. Stuart Hall
born in Jamaica in 1932 – attended Jamaica College and studied literature
at Merton College, Oxford.
sociologist and interdisciplinary work – Culture studies brought people
from all sorts of branches/disciplines together (historians, sociologists, literature,
political science merged together) to work on concepts.
Particularly interest in media and its interaction with culture itself and how
it shapes culture in many ways. How science and structures used to
communicate it.
1970s (1972-1979) Director of Birmingham’s innovative center for
contemporary cultural studies (CCCS) – founded in 1964 by Richard
Hoggart
Died in London 2014
3 main components of mass communication according to Stuart Hall
Dominant Preferred Code
- message is encoded in its intended way
- Consumer is located inside the dominant group
Negotiated Code
- mixture of accepting and rejecting parts of the message
- while the viewer understands the message, he must not agree with it
- context dependent
Oppositional Code
- viewer can understand the meaning BUT does not know the context
- decoding in a wrong way
Encoder and Decoder
Encoder (Sender)
has a framework of knowledge, relations to the production and a
technical infrastructure that they understand and put this message in (any
sort of media)
The message they want to make is being encoded by using these 3 things
aka their knowledge of the world
Then it is sent out as a program as some sort of meaningful discourse
(e.g. news)
The receiver then decodes it (the meaning) but they have their own
framework of knowledge, relations to the production and technical
infrastructure which then could lead due to a discrepancy between the
, view of the world of the receiver and sender can lead to a different
understanding/a different end-result than was intended – not understanding
the message at all.
Encoder = Produces the Message
Decoder = Receives and decodes the Message
Possible to give feedback to the Sender
Noise that goes to the message external interference
What does Stuart Hall mean when he talks of representation and re-presentation?
Representation = Stands in for something
Emphasis of visual representation
Context dependent: meaning of a certain picture varies as the surrounding
changes
Re-presentation = to make something appear/present again – to give it
meaning
2. Raymond Williams
Born 1921 in Wales, Trinity college Cambridge, member of British communist party,
fought in Normandy (soldier), MA in 1946, influenced of Birmingham center of
contemporary cultural studies, Championed Open University which was set up in
1969 (Fern-Uni = Online Course/Programs on TV) and everyone can go to them and
is also a research university, Culture and Society as his first publication, Joined Plaid
Cymru in 1970s, Died 1988 in England
Cultural Materialism with regard to cultural studies
= politicized form of histography (process connected to politics)
Historical Context = what was happening at the time the text was written
Theoretical Method = incorporating older methods of theory- Structuralism
etc.
Political Commitment = Incorporating non-conservative and non-Christian
frameworks such as feminist and Marxist theory
Textual analysis = building on theoretical analysis of mainly canonical texts
hat have become “prominent cultural icons”
Culture = all forms of culture (not just high culture) like pop music, tv, internet etc. in
context of Cultural Materialism
Materialism is ad odds with idealism. Idealists believe in the transcendent ability of
ideas while materialist believe that culture cannot transcend its material trappings
Material directly in focus/the thing itself
In this way, Cultural Materialism is an offshoot of Marxist criticism
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