The Cultural Studies ReaderIntroduction:

The second distinguishing characteristic of early cultural studies was that it

was an engaged form of analysis. Early cultural studies did not flinch from the fact

that societies are structured unequally, that individuals are not all born with the

same access to education, money, health care etc., and it worked in the interests

of those who have least resources. In this it differed not only from the (apparently)

objective social sciences but from the older forms of cultural criticism, especially

literary criticism, which considered political questions as being of peripheral

relevance to the appreciation of culture. For cultural studies, culture was not an

abbreviation of a high culture assumed to have constant value across time and

space. Another founding text of cultural studies, Raymond Williamss Culture and

Society, 17801950 (1958), criticized the consequences of uncoupling culture

from society, and high culture from culture as a whole way of life, although

Williams also conceded that it was through this uncoupling that modern culture

acquires its particular energy, charm and capacity to inform.

Adding to that matthew arnold culture The Best Which has Been Thought and Saidhttp://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/matthew-arnold-on-learning-the-best-which-has-been-thought-and-saidCultural studies has been, as we might expect, most interested in how groups with least

power practically develop their own readings of, and uses for, cultural products

in fun, in resistance, or to articulate their own identity.

Morley divides

the possibilities of decoding Nationwide into three categories: first, an acceptance

of the preferred reading, second, flat opposition to it (mainly, as it turned out, by

being extremely bored by it); and third, negotiation with it. His fieldwork findings

were somewhat unexpected, though: there was no clear correlation between the

socio-cultural position of the groups and their response to the program