Cultural Theory: An Introduction

Abstract

About this Book. Preface -- What is Culture? What is Cultural Theory? 1. Culture in Classical Social Theory. 2. Culture and Social Integration in the Work of Talcott Parsons. 3. Culture as Ideology in Western Marxism. 4. Culture as Action in Symbolic Interactionism, Phenomenology, and Ethnomethodology. 5. The Durkheimians: Ritual, Classification, and the Sacred. 6. Structuralism and the Semiotic Analysis of Culture. 7. The Poststructural Turn. 8. Culture, Structure, and Agency: Three Attempts at Synthesis. 9. British Cultural Studies. 10. The Production and Reception of Culture. 11. Culture as Text: Narrative and Hermeneutics. 12. Psychoanalytic Approaches to Culture and the Self. 13. The Cultural Analysis of Postmodernism and Postmodernity. 14. Postmodern and Poststructural Critical Theory. References.