ABSTRACT
Cultural studies has the air of a subject created on a dare. What, someone might have asked, if we studied popular media, like film, magazine and television, with techniques borrowed from structural linguistics, using words that few people understand and arriving at conclusions that totally contradict everyone’s expectations? Then, with a nod to postmodernism, we tell everyone our conclusions are not true? One might be tempted to suggest that the subject would be regarded as esoteric, if not inconsequential. Not so: cultural studies has become a most influential approach to the study of popular culture, blending Marxist structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism and other schools together in a heady mixture. In this chapter, I will try to make sense of a subject that is trying to make sense of everyone else. Its sheer bravura in this respect demands scholarly attention, though, as I will show later, much of cultural studies’ success owes more to mannerism than meaning.
