Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Cultural studies has been among the most influential, and certainly one of the more controversial, of the new, interdisciplinary, theoretical fields to emerge out of the humanities and social sciences from the 1970s onwards. It has had an effect on the theoretical orientation and research methodologies of a wide range of associated and cognate disciplines. In this volume alone, the significance of the cultural studies influence is noted in relation to film studies, television studies, media studies, literary studies, and communications studies. Many of the core theoretical movements to have arisen within the humanities since the 1970s-structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism, for example – have been most vigorously prosecuted through cultural studies projects, while its focus on particular categories of analysis (audiences, for instance) has permeated many other fields. The interdisciplinary reach of cultural studies has often been appropriative, and the field has derived its eclectic mix of methodologies and theoretical insights from history, anthropology, cultural geography, film theory, sociology, continental philosophy, and literary theory, to name just a few. At the same time as it has developed its critical and theoretical agendas in the way one might identify with an emerging discipline, cultural studies has also resisted calling itself a discipline. Instead it ... log in or subscribe to read full text