British Cultural Studies: The Challenges Of British Cultural Studies

At the peak of its popularity, cultural studies experiences a great international resonance (Nelson, Treichler, & Grossberg, 2011, p.2). This innovative academic discipline penetrates various social and political layers, addressing numerous challenges of the today’s reality. Originated in the second part of the twentieth century, British cultural studies stands apart the diverse cultural theories, establishing its own approaches and standards. British Cultural Studies emerged from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at The University of Birmingham (founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart). It was meant to be radical, to ‘rupture’ the usual areas of traditional academia, although now it has been safely reabsorbed back into the system.

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Developing the discipline, researchers pursue the aim of explaining people the current events, suggesting techniques of thinking, successful ways of living and communicating in the society, and supplying the tools for the opposition.This branch of knowledge involves various methodological techniques, such as textual, content, and phonemic analyses, semiotics, deconstruction, ethnography, interviews, psychoanalysis, rhizomatics, and survey research (Nelson et al., 2011, p.2). They all provide the complete picture of the contemporary

First, the new-born social level of the lower middle classes were to be recognized as the representatives of the top British education. Second, the innovative curriculum was to be provided in all British Universities, suggesting placing the English literature in the central position in the education system (Leavis,2009, p.85). However, the First World War led to the popularization of the nihilism in the British society that damned urgent replacing of accents in the mass culture (Lewis, 2009, p.87). Modernism and the ideas about the absence of God provoked setting two branches in the shsh culture. The first comprised irrational mystics, while the other one dealt with individuals realizing their mechanical existence, inevitable death, and the meaningless of their life. The Second World War and the cultural postmodernism fostered the strong necessity of rethinking the major postulates of the cultural aims and principles that led to originating of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 (Lewis, 2009,