This chapter includes a basic overview of historical developments (e.g., the development of the two major schools, Frankfurt and Birmingham and the move of cultural studies to the US), some discussion of the basic premises of the theories (e.g., Bakhtin, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Gramsci, Foucault, Freud, Kristeva, Lacan, and Williams) and then a general history of popular culture studies in US universities.
The section on popular culture and aspects
of popular culture limits itself to the discussion of six popular culture
products or sub-topics. The actual study
of popular culture encompasses a wide range of cultural productions from the
inscriptions on grave-stones, to regional foods, to the current news coverage
on the war in Iraq. The introduction to
this section includes a sense of the diversity of the field of popular
culture studies and offers a rational for the selection of the specific
topics.
Each sub-section includes a general history focusing on the period from about 1950 to the present and some of the theoretical approaches to these specific genres/media of popular culture. What is considered popular culture is actually a market or commercial culture that is directed towards the youth, and a youth market capable of consuming such cultural productions as music, film, literatures, etc. did not emerge until the 1950s; this is the reason for focusing on the 1950s as a starting point, though some earlier history will be given for background.
