Page 57 - Decoding Culture
P. 57

50  DECODING CULTURE
           understanding have varied hugely, and while the expression 'lin­
           guistic turn' may articulate a common interest, it has not brought
           with it any final agreement on the theories and methods essential
           to the proper study of language. What it did bring, however, was
           an extraordinary invention and intellectual excitement to the chal­
           lenge of understanding the workings of language.
             It was in this context that in the later  1960s the youthful disci­
           pline  of  cultural  studies  was  casting  about  for  an  innovative
           approach  to  culture,  and  in  such circumstances it is  hardly  sur­
           prising that the topic of language came to the fore. The 'linguistic
           turn' was well established, cultural phenomena clearly used lan­
           guage and were themselves language-like, and the emergent focus
           of cultural studies on the ways in which meaning was constructed
           in different cultural forms  had  an  obvious  affinity with  at least
           some  approaches  to  analysing  language.  But  which  approach
           would best serve the ambitions of the nascent discipline? With a
           bewildering variety from which  to  choose,  it was  initially by no
           means obvious where effort should be directed. However, as the
           decade  progressed  it became  increasingly  apparent to  English­
           speaking  scholars  that  a  dominantly  French  movement  -
           structuralism - had a provocative contribution to make to thinking
           about language, communication and  culture. The anthropologist
           Claude Uvi-Strauss - of whom more later - had played a vital role
           in carrying word of structuralism to an  audience  beyond  linguis­
           tics,  and  other  French  scholars  were  also  attracting  attention
           outside their own  country.  In the pages of the  French journal
           Communications, for instance, Barthes,  Bremond and  Greimas
           were applying structuralist methods to narrative forms, and in film
           studies especially  (notably through the work of Christian  Metz)
           there was  a growing interest in the  methods  of semiology - the
           science of signs.
             In the  beginning,  though,  there  was  much  confusion  about





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