On Gramsci And Birmingham School

Popular culture, one of the universal cultural phenomena, is taken more seriously. In fact, it has been regarded as one of the social structures in the modern society. For popular culture, western theorists took systematical and deep research from different perspectives, so not only different theoretical schools were formed such as, Leavisim, Frankfurt School, Culturalism and Structuralism, and so on, but also many relative theoretical writings were published---Mass Civilization and Minority Culture by F. R. Leavis, Culture and Society by R.Williams, Cultural Studies: Two P-aradigms, Encoding/Decoding by Stuart Hall, Understanding Popular Culture by John Fisk and so forth. To some extent, we can say popular cultural studies is one of the most attractive and most influential theoretical trends and it will deeply affect the process of academia.Before turning to Gramsci's cultural hegemony, popular cultural studies depreciated popular culture or complemented it, so cultural studies hadn't been developing fluently. Under this situation, Stuart Hall who worked in Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies of Birmingham (CCCS) for ten fifteen years, hoped to find another theory which can avoid the limitations of the two modes to motivate the development of cultural studies. At last, Hall found Gramsci's cultural hegemony that made the western popular cultural studies walk out the predicament and known by the whole world. Therefore the purpose of the thesis is to examine how cultural hegemony affected western popular cultural studies, especially the Birmingham School.The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the schools of popular cultural studies before turning to Gramsci, examining all schools'points of view and explaining the predicament. The second part is about the connotation of cultural hegemony. The third part, the main one of the whole thesis, concerns how cultural hegemony affects Birmingham School. In this part, the thesis mainly talks about Hall and Fisk their relative theories. In the end, the thesis summarizes all western popular cultural studies schools; meanwhile explains the problem of applying cultural hegemony theory faced by Chinese popular cultural studies.Although the cultural hegemony is not perfect, it will be studied from the west to the east all the time and will be the mirror of popular cultural studies.