The Making And Spreading Of British Cultural Studies

Taking the new history as its methodology, reviewing the mainland China's cultural studies as its starting point, constructing a disciplinary history for cultural studies as its problematics, this thesis investigates the development of British cultural studies with Birmingham School its focus, arguing that cultural studies is a multi- or anti-disciplinary subject designed to uncover the relationship between cultural and power, and gets its driving force from the cultural reality and the disciplinary construction as well. The thesis gives prominence to some historically influential cultural theorists, intending to emphasize British cultural studies'characteristics of developing through debates, and propose an effective and practical approach to comb and construct the history of cultural studies as a discipline.The British New Left, which resulted from the unexpected changes of the world situation in 1956, and the New Left movement such as CND and the Adult Education movement produced the social and political factors lending an impetus to or catalyzing the making of British cultural studies. Critically inheriting the Culture and Civilization Tradition and Leavisism, the left Leavisists represented by Raymond Williams fashioned the paradigm of culturalism, the essential precondition for the making of British cultural studies. The articulation of the political pursuit and the academic foundation was finally housed in CCCS; as such, cultural studies began its history as a discipline. Although Richard Hoggart's swaying resulted in CCCS's being unstable in development, British cultural studies with CCCS its focus, nonetheless, achieved its pinnacle during Hall's age for CCCS'turn to linguistics and the accompanying culturalism v. structuralism debate and the importation of the post-structuralism as well. Faced with the failure of the ideology-centered criticism traditions in the 1970s, British cultural studies developed a Gramsci project, which turned out to have witnessed cultural studies'global spreading and its heterogeneous changes in the meantime.With the investigation and integration of the political, social, cultural and thinking factors driving the development of British cultural studies, their entangledness and articulation in particular, the thesis has proven that cultural studies as a disciplinary practice has got a history not only with'an absolute beginning', but also enjoying'an uninterrupted continuity'. The thesis, thus, can not only help the mainland Chinese scholars to have a correct understanding of cultural studies, but also benefit those ambitious to construct a history for cultural studies as a discipline.