ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, I delineated aspects of my method and model of cultural studies and in the rest of the book will apply it to concrete studies, to doing cultural studies. In the previous chapter, I introduced the concept of diagnostic critique which uses history and social theory to analyze cultural texts and uses cultural texts in turn to illuminate historical trends, conflicts, possibilities, and anxieties.1 My conceptions of a contextual cultural studies and the notion of diagnostic critique will be illustrated in this chapter, first, by study of some horror and fantasy films that articulate the social anxieties of working-and middle-class people in an era of economic insecurity in the United States and elsewhere. In Chapter 2,1 interrogated how Hollywood films transcoded the political discourses of the era, while the studies in this chapter will probe the anxieties of ordinary people in the terrain of everyday life during the same period. Cultural studies can thus use its methods to probe events, discourses, and social trends on both the macro and micro level, engaging both the defining political trends and events of the era, as well as the texture and travails of everyday life.
