Culture As Text Text As Culture

Culture as Text, Text as Culture represents a novel, interdisciplinary analysis of textuality as it pertains to Cultural Studies. More specifically, the work examines how the analysis of texts has shaped the most vital contemporary debate of Cultural Studies: the recognition that all texts and their contexts are constructs. Building upon a Post-structural/Post-modern understanding of truth as a construct, Cultural Studies has long since acknowledged the ability of texts to express the time and culture of their origin. This work, however, expands this idea, demonstrating not only how a culture is preserved in a text, but how that text can in turn define its culture, even redefine its history. This compendium is structured around four of the most prominent contemporary topics of Cultural Studies: the relationship between historical and fictional writing, the ability of authors to recreate or redefine history, the relationship between language and image, and the ability for traditionally marginalized groups to reassert their place in history. The book presents articles from a large spectrum of disciplinary fields and civilizations in order to demonstrate how the application of Cultural Studies can unite seemingly disparate disciplines.

This book is a pioneering attempt within the university study of English as a foreign language to provide the discipline of culture studies (particularly the study of American/British civilization) with a theory and methodology of its own. Focusing on the anthropological concept of culture as belief systems, the author suggests that culture studies should be primarily concerned with the analysis of the interplay between language and ideology. Essentially interdisciplinary, the field is conceived as a philological, text-oriented study of culture.

Wherever we look today, popular culture greets us with “texts” that make implicit arguments; this book helps students to think and write critically about these texts. The World Is a Text teaches critical reading, writing, and argument in the context of pop-culture and visual examples, showing students how to “read” everyday objects and visual texts with basic semiotics. The book shows how texts of all kinds, from a painting to a university building to a pair of sneakers, make complex arguments through their use of signs and symbols, and shows students how to make these arguments in their own essays. This new edition is rich with images, real-world examples, writing and discussion prompts, and examples of academic and student writing. The first part of the book is a rhetoric covering argumentation, research, the writing process, and adapting from high-school to college writing, while the second part explores writing about specific cultural topics. Notes, instruction, and advice about research are woven into the text, with research instruction closely tied to the topic being discussed. New to the updated compact edition are chapters on fashion, sports, and nature and the environment.

Originally published in 1991, this is the first book-length exploration of post-structuralist discourse theory in archaeology. It tackles the most basic problem of historical and archaeological analysis - the relationship between text and artefact – in an analysis of prehistoric art fusing theory and the practice of interpretation to create a fresh framework for understanding the relationship between past and present. Focusing on a collection of rock carvings from northern Sweden, the author shows how alternative conceptualizations of the material from structuralist, hermeneutic and structural-Marxist frameworks substantially alter our understanding of their meaning and significance. Engaging readers in an interpretive process, this book is for specialists in archaeology, anthropology, art history and cultural studies.

The contemporary fields of the study of culture, the humanities and the social sciences are unfolding in a dynamic constellation of cultural turns. This book provides a comprehensive overview of these theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking reorientations. It discusses the value of the new focuses and their analytical categories for the work of a wide range of disciplines. In addition to chapters on the interpretive, performative, reflexive, postcolonial, translational, spatial and iconic turns, it discusses emerging directions of research. Drawing on a wealth of international research, this book maps central topics and approaches in the study of culture and thus provides systematic impetus for changed disciplinary and transdisciplinary research in the humanities and beyond – e.g., in the fields of sociology, economics and the study of religion. This work is the English translation by Adam Blauhut of an influential German book that has now been completely revised. It is a stimulating example of a cross-cultural translation between different theoretical cultures and also the first critical synthesis of cultural turns in the English-speaking world.

Nation, Culture, Text: Australian Cultural and Media Studies is the first collection of cultural studies from Australia, selected and introduced for an international readership. Participating in the `de-centring' of cultural studies - considering what perspectives other than the European and the American have to offer - the contributors raise important issues about the role of a national tradition of critical theory, and about the cultural specificity of theory itself. A key theme is the place of the postcolonial nation within contemporary cultural theory - particularly those aspects of contemporary theory which see the category of contemporary theory which see the category of the nation as either outdated or suspect. The writers tackle subjects ranging from the televising of the Bicentennial to the role of policy in film, television and the heritage industry, from the use of video technologies with remote Aboriginal communities to the role of ethnography in cultural studies.

This is a collection of specially commissioned essays exploring the interface between words and images in the Roman world.

In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.