Chapter 1 – What is popular culture?
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture is an introduction in that it tries to be accessible in terms of subject matter, but it is also an introduction in the sense that it introduces something new. That is to say, although all the work discussed here has a previous existence, it is not a body of work that previously existed as a tradition of cultural theory and popular culture. The originality of this book is to bring this work together as a way of understanding popular culture and the discourses around popular culture.
Before You Read
Warm Up
Watch the video “Popular Culture Explained in Two Minutes”
How does it explain popular culture?
How does this explanation relate to what you read in the textbook Cultural Theory and Popular Culture?
How is that video an example of popular culture itself?
Preliminary Questions
Chapter 1 of the textbook Cultural Theory and Popular Culture raises important questions about fundamental issues we live by and experience daily. Some of the questions are listed below to give you an idea of specific problems this textbook follows and invites you to consider. Answer those questions so that you can self-assess and check your own understanding and compare your answers with the explanation in the book as you read Chapter 1.
- What is ‘culture’?
- What is ‘popular culture’?
- Do you think that the terms ‘culture’ and ‘popular culture’ are easy to fix or define? Or, are both terms somewhat elusive?
- Do the concepts seem to point to other terms? If so, what are these? Do some terms appear more important than others? If so, why do you think this is?
- Is Chapter 1 really setting out to stabilize what is meant by culture or fix what is understood when we think of popular culture?
- Does Chapter 1 point to a single definition of ‘culture’ or ‘popular culture’? Or did your initial reading suggest that a range of debates and a diversity of competing concepts and meanings are being underlined?
- What does Chapter 1 point to as significant when considering the meaning of these terms?
After You Read: Important Ideas
Chapter 1 introduces a number of key notions (further explained in Glossary) that showcase distinctions between popular culture and culture. The notions include postmodernism, class, ideology, hegemony, meaning or signification, text, context, highbrow, lowbrow, taste, and mass culture, and they shape the understanding of popular culture or culture that gain new bearing when considered critically and through the prism of cultural theory.
Check your grasp of those notions and problems related to popular culture based on how they have been presented in Chapter 1.
Quiz 1.1
Consider which of the following can be defined as popular culture (Choose one answer: true or false)
Quiz 1.2
Choose one or more answer(s)
Important Names
Reading Chapter 1, you have come across theorists some of whom are familiar and some of whom are new. Use the following flashcards to learn or revisit details about those theorists, their prominent ideas and their work. Think about how those tiny details explain the theorists’ theoretical motivation and influence.
Raymond Williams
Karl Marx
Louis Althusser
Pierre Bourdieu
Bertolt Brecht
Roland Barthes
Complementary Materials
<Insert Icon 4 here> This is an audio version of Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses | Louis Althusser (On The Reproduction of Capitalism) [link]. Listen to the material and think about Althusser’s cultural parlance. How is it reflective of the language used for theorizing cultural problems?
<Insert Icon 5 here> Perhaps the study of popular culture and its theoretical contexts is new to you. Some aspects of this novelty may entail certain challenges and call for more information. Here is an article On Signs and Meaning in Culture [link], which may help you better understand the idea of sign and meaning formation in culture.
Further Considerations
Think back to the way Chapter 1 presents popular culture as approached by cultural studies. How different is this approach from what you expected? What new perspectives, information and ideas has it added to your understanding of popular culture? Does the study of popular culture presented in Chapter 1 resonate with other approaches you are familiar with?