ABSTRACT
Cultural studies theory focuses on the production and consumption of meaning. This chapter highlights the visual as a legitimate focus of examination within cultural studies and focuses on the visual image by emphasizing cultural theoretical concerns image, representation, and viewer response. Williams insisted on thinking about an 18th-century painting or a 19th-century novel from a much broader range of cultural practice. He spoke of cultural formation, emphasizing that “cultural texts should never be seen as isolated but always as part of a shared practice of making meaning involving everyone in a particular culture” Cultural studies analysts may examine the types of audience decoding through ethnographic methods, using in-depth interviews, often over time, to determine how people actively make sense of media images and discourse, social experience, and themselves. Cultural studies analysts also work in a manner similar to literary critics, but the “texts” they examine are media discourse and visual images.
