Popular Culture

Rene Magritte, This is Not a Pipe

Use this page to find web sources and books on the critical theories and frameworks (with a focus on Cultural Theory) used in analyzing pop culture. Also listed on the attached subpage are issues that often arise in the critical study of pop culture (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc). The books listed provide more comprehensive lists of theories, analysis techniques, and movements.

• Richard Hoggart
• Raymond Williams
• E.P. Thompson
• Stuart Hall
• Louis Althusser
• Antonio Gramsci
• Pierre Bourdieu
• Ashis Nandy
• Donna Haraway
• Edward Said
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Homi Bhabha
• Cornel West
• The Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jürgen Habermas)
• Frederic Jameson

• Semiotics          [communication via signs and symbols]
• Hermeneutics    [theories of interpretation]
• Deconstruction   [texts as arenas of contested meanings}
• Criticism
• Criticism--History
• Criticism--History--20th century
• Symbolism
• Visual communication
• Cultural Theory
• Discourse analysis
• Language and languages--Philosophy
• Literary criticism and cultural theory
• Politics and culture
• Postmodernism
• Postmodernism (Literature)
• Popular culture--Philosophy
• Structuralism (Literary analysis)
  
  

• Cultural Politics.net's site on Textual Analysis--Links, bibliographies

Includes semiotics, rhetorical analysis, ideological analysis, and psychoanalytic approaches. These types of analysis seek to get beneath the surface (denotative) meanings and examine more implicit (connotative) social meanings. These textual analysis approaches often view culture as a narrative or story-telling process in which particular "texts" or “cultural artifacts” (i.e., a pop song or a TV program) consciously or unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at play in the society.

See also, Cultural Politics.net's sites on Historical, Audience, and Production analyses

Antonio Gramsci's theory of "hegemony" refers to the way that dominant groups in society develop a "intellectual and moral leadership" that allows them to win the consent of subordinant groups. Hegemony sees popular culture as a site of ideological struggle between dominant and subordinate classes and cultures.