-- Matthew Arnold, 1869
Roll over Beethoven.
-- Chuck Berry, 1958
Literary and Historical Roots
- Matthew Arnold, excerpts from Culture and Anarchy.
- Lawrence Levine, excerpts from “Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America”
Early Syntheses
- Richard Johnson, "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text, Winter 1986/87, pp. 38-80
- Raymond Williams, “The Growth of the Reading Public,” from The Long Revolution
- E. P. Thompson, Preface from The Making of the English Working Class
- Raymond Williams, . "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" in Mukerhi and Schudson (eds.), Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, 1991, (Originally from New Left Review (November-December 1973, 82)).
- Marshall Sahlins, “La Pensée Bourgeois: Western Society as Culture,” in Mukerhi and Schudson (eds.), Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, 1991, pp. 278-290 (originally from Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason, 1976, pp. 166-178).
- Raymond Williams, “Culture,” from Marxism and Literature, 1978.
Possible books to review: Williams’ Long Revolution; E.P. Thompson Making of the English Working Class; Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Basic Books, New York, 1974).