Professional Documents
Culture Documents
THEORIES OF POPULAR
CULTURE PART I
OBJECTIVE
Critical Assessment
-The School is criticized to fail to provide an empirical proof for its theories and the
obscure and inaccessible language in which its ideas have been expressed.
- The Schools analysis of capitalism as a society which has achieved stability is not
consistent with the sociology and history of capitalist societies.
- The Schools distinction of false and true needs has also been heavily criticized. How
can true needs be recognized?
- The School emphasizes the authoritarian and repressive potential of popular culture.
In contrast to the Schools perspective is Water Benjamins emphasis on the democratic
and participatory potential of popular culture.
STRUCTURALISM AND
SEMIOTICS
Background of Structuralism
- Historical background of structuralism is the construction of the physics of man based
on the principle of verum factum, what man understands as true (verum) and that he
has made himself (factum) are one and the same. Men have created themselves and the
world of civil society and their principles are to be found in their own minds. to be
human, is to be a structuralist.
- A structure has the idea of wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation.
Structuralism and the Influence of Ferdinand de Saussure
- Structuralism is a theoretical approach which studies literary texts as though those
texts have the same sort of structure as language
- The rise of Structuralism was always connected to Ferdinand de Saussure. In its later
development, structuralism was influenced by the Russian Formalists (Vladimir I.
Propp, Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Tomasjevsky, Juri
Tynyanov), the Prague school (Louis Hjelmslev, Nikolay Troubetskoy), the structural
linguists (Claude Levi-Strauss), and the Parisian Structuralists (A.J. Greimas, Tzvetan
Todorov, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette).
Continued
- Ferdinand de Saussures concepts of language:
Diachronic vs synchronic study of language
Langue vs parole
Signifier vs signified
Sintagmatic vs paradigmati
Models
- Claude Levi-Strauss
- Roman Jakobson
- A.J. Greimas
- Tzvetan Todorov
- Roland Barthes
Semiotics
- Roland Barthes
- Charles Sanders Peirce