Den kulturella cirkeln

Cultural Studies och litteraturvetenskapen

Abstract

In recent years Cultural Studies has spread throughout the world, transforming Departments of Literature into particular Departments of Cultural Studies. In this article I attempt to examine the importance of Cultural Studies through an analysis of my own development as a scholar and teacher. In the beginning of my career in the early eighties, I was attracted to Cultural Studies becaise of its serious treatment of popular culture. The cultural circuit, a cornerstone in the methodology practiced at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, implied a challenging new way in which to study the relationship between texts and culture, focusing on different readings employed by different, lived cultures. However, there's an important link missing in the cultural circuit, namely the historical dimension. In order for Cultural Studies to become the necessary new paradigm for the study of literature, replacing the older humanist and modernist paradigms, it must also take into consideration the historical canonization of culture, focusing its study on high and popular culture, not only on contemporary cultural phenomena and marginalized subcultures. In this way Cultural Studies can challenge not only old paradigms in the study of literature, but in other areas of humanistic and social studies as well.