Butter From Panem to the Pandemic: An Introduction to Cultural Studies

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0496-8
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 191 Seiten

Reihe: narr STUDIENBÜCHER LITERATUR- UND KULTURWISSENSCHAFT

Today, virtually all BA programs in English at German universities place a strong focus on Cultural Studies. However, textbooks that introduce first-year students to the subject are rare, and the few existing ones are too complicated or not comprehensive enough. By contrast, this textbook introduces the key theories and concepts of Cultural Studies systematically and thoroughly. It puts particular emphasis on their application, aiming to enable students to do their own analyses of cultural artefacts and practices. The author draws on many examples, mostly taken from American culture, but in each chapter, he applies the ideas introduced to The Hunger Games franchise and the coronavirus pandemic to show how different theories can lead to very different interpretations of the same phenomenon. Each chapter ends with exercises that allow students to apply what they have learned.

Michael Butter ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte an der Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Butter, Michael

Leseproben

1 Introduction
This book has grown in equal parts out of fascination and frustration. It is the result of fascination because “The Introduction to Cultural Studies,” a central part of the English curriculum at German universities, is one of my favorite classes to teach. It is fun because of the sheer range of material one can cover in a single session: from Shakespeare to Shakira, from conspiracy theories to haute couture, and from shopping habits to the ways in which people use their smartphones on the subway. In fact, it was the possibility to go beyond literature, to study film and popular culture that lured me away from German and into English and American Studies when I was a student. Even more importantly, as I explain in more detail below, more than any other class I have ever taught, “The Introduction to Cultural Studies” has the potential to change students’ lives and help them see the world differently.   However, this book is also the result of frustration. As I quickly learned when I first taught the class, there is no good comprehensive textbook that introduces beginning students to the relevant concepts and ideas. Don’t get me wrong. There are quite a few very good introductions to different aspects of Cultural Studies, for example, to visual culture, material culture, or questions of gender, race, or class. (If you have no idea what some or any of these things are, don’t worry. It’s exactly the goal of this book to introduce you to them thoroughly and in a good order.) But books designed to introduce Bachelor students to Cultural Studies as a whole don’t do that very well. They either assume that you already know things that most of you don’t know when you enroll in an introductory class, or they are not systematic enough. Others leave out some important concepts but go into too much detail with regard to others. And most of them are written in a style that is way too complicated for beginning students. Moreover, most existing introductions are not very good when it comes to teaching you how to apply these concepts in your own analyses.   For me, however, this is the most important task of such an introduction. It is not enough to understand the concepts that are important in Cultural Studies. You also need to be able to work with them. It is not very likely that you will be called upon to explain how race and class are related in an abstract fashion in a seminar in a few semesters’ time. It is far more likely that your task will be to analyze how they are related in a specific text, case study, or cultural practice. Knowing which concepts to apply to a “text” (I explain in chapter 1 why I put this word in quotation marks here) or practice and how to apply them, then, is what you need to learn in order to do well in your studies.   As you probably know already, learning – and especially learning how to do something – requires active engagement and exercising. Just listening to a lecture or reading a book won’t do. When I teach “The Introduction to Cultural Studies” at my home university, my lecture is accompanied by tutorials. The tutorials are led by advanced students and provide a space for beginning students to discuss what they have learned in the lecture and to practice its application. I also interrupt my lectures roughly every twenty minutes to allow students to ask questions or do small tasks. For example, I ask them to work with their neighbor or in small groups and apply a concept I have just introduced to an image, a short text, or a movie clip.   Obviously, it is impossible to include such interactive elements in a book. But there are questions for self-study for you at the end of each chapter, and I hope you will make use of them. Sometimes these are very open questions or questions that ask you to draw on your personal experience. In these cases, it’s obviously impossible for me to provide a model answer. But other questions are more specific, asking you, for example, to interpret a song or think about a specific phenomenon. In these cases, I have model answer ready. For each of these questions, I have recorded a short video that you find on the publisher’s YouTube channel (@narrfranckeattemptoverlag228). In fact, there is a playlist for this book. In an ideal world, you would read a chapter, take a shot at answering the questions and only then check out the answers. I am not sure, though, that we are living in an ideal world.   While the interactivity this book can provide is limited by factors beyond my control, I have intentionally set limits to what I am covering in it. If you are already an advanced student who is using this book to refresh your memory of certain things or to revise for an exam, you will most likely shake your head repeatedly because you feel that I have left out too many important concepts or that I have simplified others too much. This will be even more true if you are an instructor who is considering this book for a class of yours. Believe me – I am very much aware of the many important concepts, theories, and terms that I have omitted. And sometimes the decision what would make the cut and what wouldn’t was pretty hard. But this book is an introduction to Cultural Studies, and I wanted to take the idea of the introduction seriously. Not everything can and should be taught in an introduction. What this book teaches you is the tip of the iceberg, and many things will remain hidden under the surface of the water. If this sounds a bit ominous, let’s use another image. Think of this introduction as the foundation on which you will build in the future, in particular in the classes you will take in the next semesters. (And maybe, if you are an instructor, this book will help you to cover more than before because you can build on it in your lecture or seminar.)   Accordingly, the theories, concepts, and terms that I introduce in this book are the ones that I consider absolutely essential for Cultural Studies. Obviously, opinions can differ with regard to what is essential and what isn’t. This is why the subtitle of this book is “An Introduction to Cultural Studies.” I have chosen the indefinite article intentionally because this book is merely one possible way to introduce you to the topic. In order to do so, I draw on many different examples – mostly, but not exclusively from American culture –, but there are two examples to which I return again and again: The Hunger Games novels (2008-10) and the films (2012-15) based on them, and the Coronavirus pandemic. This is why the title of the book is “From Panem to the Pandemic.” Panem is the fictional country where the story of The Hunger Games series is set. The Hunger Games have been my prime example ever since I first taught this class more than a decade ago. Many students already know the novels or at least the films before they enroll in my class, and those who don’t usually enjoy reading and watching them. The novels and the films are also quite complex and contradictory and thus can be meaningfully analyzed with many different concepts and theories. (Throughout this book, I will assume that you know the first film. If you don’t know it yet, please watch it.) The last two times I taught the class I used the coronavirus pandemic as my other major example. Not only because it affected all our lives so much or because it delayed the writing of this book considerably, but mostly because it allows me to demonstrate how the insights of Cultural Studies enable us to make sense not only of fictional stories but of real-life events.   Modelled on a one-semester lecture course, this book contains twelve chapters, including the introduction and the conclusion. Chapters 2 to 8 discuss the different elements of the “circuit of culture,” an excellent model to understand culture that Paul du Gay and his co-authors introduced in their book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. (This is the book I have been using mostly in my classes, but, as it was published in 1997, it is by now outdated. It also does not explain all concepts equally well and doesn’t do an ideal job when it comes to teaching students how to apply the concepts.) These chapters introduce the basic concepts of Cultural Studies – representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation –, which du Gay and his colleagues think of as forming a circuit to capture how the elements all influence each other (more on models in general below). Chapters 9 to 11 put spotlights on specific aspects of culture, for example, space or memory but also visual or popular culture. They discuss how the concepts introduced in the first part help us make sense of these specific aspects and introduce additional concepts that have been specifically developed for understanding them. Chapter 12 concludes our journey with a short reflection on the politics of Cultural Studies.   In this introductory chapter I address a few central questions to get us started. I begin with the key question: What is culture? Cultural Studies is, obviously, all...