What is Cultural Criticism:

Term

Definition

Culture

1. The practice of everyday life and how it relates to to popular, folk, urban, mass, etc.
2. Not necessarily *high society*
3. Culture acts as a kinetic force, in continual evolution. It should NOT be perceived as a solid entity, but a set of interactive cultures.

Cultural Criticism

1. The understanding of social, political, historical, and artistic contexts in which a given text was written. Also, the critic examines the conditions the literature was written in, circulated to the public and subsequently responded to by both the critics and the public.
2. Cultural critics define the reasons, usually political, why a certain aesthetic or cultural product is more valued than others. In doing so, they examine value hierarchies that have been established within such categories as class, race, nation origin, gender, sexuality, feminism, etc.
3. Cultural critics recognize that sometimes disheartening but always dynamic synergy between cultural forms and the culture8s consumers.
4. The established philsophy of a society fills individual perception, sense of self, and ultimately sense of reality. This deffinetly affects the production of literature.

Marxism

1.Is the background of Cultural criticism.
2. It is the individual perception that is bound to culture.
3. It analyzes the historical events and eras (like the industrial revolution) and their impact on human attitudes and consciousness.
4. The Marxist approach was later opposed by humanists who rejected intellectual arrogance that views the vast majority of people as victims of ideology.