Culture And Critique: An Introduction To The Critical Discourses Of Cultural Studies

by Surber,Jere Paul

• ISBN13: 9780813320472
• ISBN10: 081332047X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-11-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Written by philosopher Jere Surber,Culture and Critiquefamiliarizes students with both the broad and specialized meanings of cultural studies, providing detailed explanations of theoretical terms, critical strategies, and discursive traditions upon which it is based. In its broad and more theoretical sense, cultural studies indicates a range of modern discourses which, beyond disciplines and their particular theories, employ the notion of culture in a distinctive way and specify certain critical practices as appropriate for analyzing given cultural activities, products, and institutions. In its narrower sense, cultural studies is a recently developed type of discourse, first appearing in several British universities in the 1950s, which, while eclectically drawing on certain theoretical aspects of earlier forms of critical cultural discourse, orients itself toward the analysis and practical critique of concrete contemporary cultural distinctions based on economic and political inequities.A useful reference for reading works in cultural studies,Culture and Critiqueputs unfamiliar terms and ideas into historical perspective and explains how the founding texts of the discipline first appeared.

Author Biography

Jere Paul Surber is professor of philosophy and cultural studies at the University of Denver.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Theorizing Culture, Practicing Criticism	p. 1
The Critical Discourse of Liberal Humanism	p. 24
Hermeneutics: Interpretation and Critique	p. 48
The Materialist Critique of Culture	p. 67
Psychoanalysis and the Critique of Culture	p. 95
The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School	p. 128
Formalist, Structuralist, and Semiotic Analyses of Culture	p. 155
Poststructuralist and Postmodernist Discourses	p. 183
Conclusion	p. 228
Contemporary Cultural Studies	p. 233
Index	p. 285
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