Screen Theory And British Cultural Studies

Screen Theory and British cultural studies have experienced a complicated relationship of confrontation and interaction, which has had profound influences over their respective development of the both. Nowadays, when the discursive power of cultural studies is ever increasing, Screen Theory has comparatively been neglected, and the complicated path the two had gone through together has been blurred in today's different discursive context. Therefore this paper intends to re-theorize the developmental path and major characteristics of Screen Theory, and clarify the complicated interactive relationship between Screen Theory and cultural studies and the theoretical changes that the two experienced in 1970s, seeking to restore the original appearance of Screen Theory and its relationship with British cultural studies without being interfered by the interpretation of other discourses in other times.This paper basically outlines three parts. The first part dates back to the common historical conditions, social background and theoretical background, etc. that are shared in the engendering and development of Screen Theory and cultural studies, which intends to clarify the background meaning of the radical social changes in 1950s Britain, the crisis in Marxism, the "culturalist" Marxism and new leftist cultural criticism, the "New Left Movement", the introduction of European theories, the uprising of British Structuralist semiology, the influence of French film theory/filmic semiology, and the developmental structure of British theoretical circle, etc. for the theoretical formation and development of Screen Theory and cultural studies.The second part of the paper systematically generalizes the theoretical characteristics and major achievements of Screen Theory, discussing its main political and theoretical tendency and theorizing its Structuralist/post-Structuralist leftist ideological/semiological/psychoanalytical patterned "Textual Analysis" tradition and feminist psychoanalysis tradition, which focuses on the evolution and developmental process of the "Textual Analysis" method and the complicated path that Screen Theory went through from a "text-centric" Structuralism to the post-Structuralist psychoanalysis, and the continuous interference and formative meaning of Feminism.The third part clarifies the complicated relationship between Screen Theory and cultural studies, summarizes the mutual influences on and changes in both Screen Theory and cultural studies in the three phases: 1. the confrontation between Screen Theory's "Structuralism" and cultural studies' "Culturalism", 2. the confrontation between Screen Theory's "Structuralism"+ "post-Structuralism" and cultural studies' "Structuralism" + "Gramscism", 3. the confrontation between Screen Theory's "post-Structuralism" and cultural studies' "Gramscism" + "political transformation", and discusses within this framework the complicated path of the development and evolution of Screen Theory and cultural studies during 1970s and early 1980s.The meaning of the effort of this paper partly lies in its attempt to systematically theorize Screen Theory in an unbiased way, so as to clarify its development, contributions and meaning, and partly lies in its attempt to offer a clearer understanding of the impact upon and changes in cultural studies when it shared a common tract with Screen Theory during 1970s, so as to provide some new information about some of the core issues and the historical development and theoretical changes in cultural studies.