Citation

Bertonneau TF. Acad. Quest. 2010; 23(4): 420-434.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, National Association of Scholars, Publisher Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12129-010-9196-5

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Popular culture courses first appeared in the college and university curriculum in social science and humanities departments in the late 1950s in response to the Frankfurt School critique of the postwar bourgeois order. The Frankfurt School critics, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, were in turn responding to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. As a discipline, "popular culture studies" (shortened in recent years to "culture studies") began as a disestablishmentarian enterprise pursued by activist intellectuals of left-liberal disposition. The names of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams are important as successors to the Frankfurt School figures and as contemporary cue-givers of the discipline. The scholar-radicals typically construed nineteenth-century civic custom--and even more so, twentieth-century bourgeois culture--as ideology, using the term in its Marxist sense as the expression of a false and fre...

Language: en