Culture Theories

The basic essay style begins with an introduction that establishes your basic idea or argument, followed by several paragraphs that develop the ideas, followed by your conclusions that summarize your essay. Use the concepts listed below in an explicit way in your essay by underlining the concept when you use it and by including a definition of the concept to make clear how you are using the concept. Please do not merely define the concepts; apply them to your examples.

Topics of Essay #1:

Use this framework and be sure to apply basic concepts (in bold) as well as your selection from the concepts list below. The Culture theories of Marx/Engels, Gramsci, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas and Althusser, among others discuss culture, ideology and hegemony. Discuss how material and non-material culture are often laden with meaning, values, biases, and messages that advance relations of power and subordination. Summarize the theories from your readings. Apply the notion of hegemony to a contemporary culture form (e.g. arts, language, media, religion, politics, race/class/gendered/age-based subcultures). Add a critique from the theorists that view cultural meaning as constructed. That is, we construct culture; culture forms are produced, sent/ received (Debord) ,coded/encoded (Hall), so that human agency challenges hegemony.

Concepts:
Use the concepts in an explicit way. You cannot cover all of them, but be sure to present at least 5 of the following concepts and clustersmust be in your essay. Apply the theories to examples, rather than merely define the terms.
Ideology/Hegemony
Culture industries/ State Apparatuses
Culture Literacy
Culture & Social Creation
Culture Meaning and Symbols
Culture and commodity spectacles

Encoding/Decoding Culture
Culture Industries
Culture Producers/Consumers
Cultural Elites/Subcultures
Mass Culture/Public Sphere
Culture change and conflict