Imaginative resistance: The rise of cultural studies as political practice in Britain (Great Britain).

摘要

Cultural studies has by now become largely institutionalized as an influential approach to theorizing and studying the mass media. However, most accounts of cultural studies' conflicted origins tend to be superficial or overly simplistic. This dissertation seeks to rectify that situation by offering an in-depth intellectual history of the early development of cultural studies as it evolved in Britain, with special attention to the significance of developments in cultural studies for media studies. The emphasis is upon the rise of cultural studies as a self-conscious political project heavily grounded in ideal modes of resistance.; The study focuses on both the biographies and influences of cultural studies' main 'founders' and disseminators, including Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall, as well as the social, political and economic contexts within which their ideas took shape. The stress is upon the dialectic between conditions and consciousness in the formation of new ideas about culture. The study strives to explain, in empirical detail, how such ideas coalesced, diverged and spread. It examines influences upon cultural studies from Romanticism; literary criticism, especially the work of F.R. Leavis; the adult education movement; and the British New Left, stressing throughout the way in which the imagination is called to the fore in the struggle to resist the negative impacts of capitalist modernity. A detailed description of the founding of the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies is included, with special attention paid to the transition in the 1960s from 'socialist humanist' concerns to a more abstract theoretical orientation, exemplified initially in the embrace of structuralism and later post-structuralist theory.; The thesis concludes with the argument that while cultural studies historically and appropriately seeks to offer a non-reductionist approach to culture, stressing the mutually determining matrix of relationships between the material and the ideal, much of its political potential as an intellectual project has been attenuated through too much neglect of actual material circumstances. If cultural studies is to realize its value for media research in particular, scholars in the field must strike a better balance between the study of the production, dissemination and reception of cultural products.