In fact, there is no model to follow. At best, researchers base their work on their own interpretations of various purported meanings of cultural imperialism. How then can they be sure that they are all measuring or studying the same phenomenon when almost every other researcher has developed his or her own definition and interpretation of cultural
Another distinction which has had a strong impact on the study of culture is the understanding of culture as practice or culture as a system of symbols and meanings. As Hall stresses, culture is about meaning and as such “permeates all of society.” Representations, practices, values and identities have cultural meanings that are discursively constructed and tap into previous cultural discourses to be meaningful. Critical intercultural communication casts light on ways in which meanings echo cultural knowledge and are therefore difficult to identify and question – even for researchers themselves, hence a strong emphasis placed on reflexivity. The importance of “cultural resonance” has also been pointed out by scholars examining media
New Criticism rejected the importance of cultural and historical context of a text and focused on the merits of a literary work which were supposed to exist independently from both its intended audience and the author’s intentions. While New Critics conceived of a literary work as a world-in-itself with intrinsic values to be interpreted just by intrinsic criteria and free from extrinsic relations to the author or the environing world, the New Historicists’ attempts to determine the extrinsic factors such as the literary and non-literary texts read by the author of a given text are directed at exploring the relationship between a text and its attendant circumstances, cultural, social, political, etc, which brought the literary work into being. In other words, since a literary text is a social and cultural construct shaped by more than one consciousness, the best way to appreciate it is through the culture and society that propagated it. New Historicism also rejects the privileging of canonical works by the New Criticism as well as the Structuralism and considers marginal, fragmentary and seemingly insignificant texts worth reading because it views texts as part of a variegated, and
One of the bigger challenges among cultural history is how we responds to issues that we perceive to be a loaded subject. For instance, if an individual was trying to spread the importance gay marriage at a mainly catholic event, it would be difficult for the speaker to have an engaged audience whom is willing to fully participate. The importance of cultural history cannot be overstated, it’s programmed from within all of us as American citizens and is what makes us all rhetorically unique. Conflict that surrounds the individual’s cultural values is another hurdle that is made up of cultural history. This challenge goes deeper than the loaded biases that we can concur, instead it speaks to the very values that we perceive as a society.
Contextual criticism is used in text to gain a better understanding, along with more knowledge of the text. In “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles and “The Night Face up” by Julio Cortazar. Criticizing these texts contextual for their content will help the reader have intelligent and knowledgeable interpretation of the stories. Using historical events, life experience and looking at the dominant culture we can find the context of certain passages enhances and creates a more accurate reading experience. This validates that contextual criticism is vital to a accurate and more intelligent interpretation of a text.
In Stephen Greenblatt’s hermeneutical enterprise Poetics of Culture (1987), he proposes that since poetry and history are both forms of poiesis, a creative energy that inspires all imaginative human activities, a literary work must be contextualised in its sociohistorical environment to which it belongs and from which it acquires its meaning. The economic, political and socio-cultural conditions of a specific time frame serve to create the identity of the individuals that constitute a historical environment. The artistic representations of human lives and their interactions in a society capture the identity of an age. Its author is also shaped by the context in which he exists and by which his artistic creation is also fashioned. Hence, artistic creations are inseparable from the human lives and histories involved in their creation and consumption.
This particular study is unique in the sense that it differs sufficiently in its orientation and basic assumptions. There is a virtual famine of anthropological studies of mass media (Gans, 1974). A large portion of mass media, mass culture, mass communication and popular culture are founded on non-anthropological definition of culture that intermittently differ from the definition within this research. Our notion of visual entities as earlier said is characterized by critical assessments and evaluations of elite scholars. These studies often focus on the effects of mass media on society and adopt empirical methods.
Formalism and formalist critics believe that all that is needed to interpret a piece of literature art is in the work itself, through literary forms and techniques. New criticism however, is the revision of these texts once more, but doing so in isolation, separate from political and social preconceptions but still observing the literary form. • New formalism was a movement throughout the 1980s and 1990s in America. It was the resurgence of metred and rhymed poetry, and was very popular amongst the young generation of the time. The literature was more direct in the depiction of emotion and colloquial in diction.
3.1. The First Trope: The Intertextual Literary journalists share an intensified awareness of and strategic focus on and significance of intertextuality. There is a common consensus among them that a meaningful world can always be projected not through a process of mythos-making but rather through the operation of various versions of the same story in a certain text or the interaction of the text itself with other texts within it. Intertextuality has particularly permeated the theoretical framework of literary journalism. Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes are among the major critics who seek to give a thorough definition of the term, “intertextuality.” According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.
In other words, historicists examine texts according to the historical background of its period. In this sense, a text is regarded as a social reference and a document to the culture of people at that time. It is obvious that there are some different viewpoints about the two critic movements which I am going to indicate in this paper.