Cultural Studies Questions and Answers

Q: Raymond Williams' Culture and Society, 1780-1950, catalogues five key words that bear witness to a general change in ways of thinking of life, the social, political and economic institutions and their relations to learning, education and the arts. These are ................. .

The five words are Industry, Democracy, Class, Art and Culture.In the introduction to Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), Raymond Williams says that a group of words that came into common English use, or took on new meanings, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries records a general change in thinking. He names five as the key words: industry, democracy, class, art and culture.The other sets mix in words Williams did not choose for that list. 'Base' and 'superstructure' are Marxist terms he discussed elsewhere; 'enlightenment', 'feudalism', 'reform' and 'regulation' are not among the five.

Q: Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the organising principles of the brahmanical social order and are closely interconnected. The conceptualised term for exploring this relationship as used by feminist historians like Uma Chakravarti is ................. .

The term is Brahmanical Patriarchy.Uma Chakravarti used 'Brahmanical patriarchy' in her 1993 essay on early Indian society and later in Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens (2003) to describe a system in which the control of women's sexuality, especially upper-caste women's, is the means by which caste purity and the caste hierarchy are maintained. The term names the interlocking of caste and gender that the stem describes.Intersectionality is Kimberle Crenshaw's broader term for overlapping oppressions, coined in an American context, not the specific concept for the Brahmanical order. 'Structured sexuality' and 'organised reproduction' describe pieces of the mechanism but are not the conceptual term used by these historians.

Q: Green studies is another name for ................... .

Green studies is another name for ecocriticism.Ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature and the natural environment. In Britain it is often called 'green studies', a label Peter Barry gives as its alternative name in Beginning Theory, while 'ecocriticism' is the American term, from the 1990s work of Cheryll Glotfelty and others.Postcolonial criticism studies colonialism and its aftermath, cultural studies the whole range of popular and everyday culture, and feminist criticism the representation of women and gender. 'Green' points to the environment, which only ecocriticism takes as its subject.

Q: Frederic Jameson's view that third world texts are necessarily national allegories has been critiqued by Aijaz Ahmad primarily by which of the following arguments ?

Ahmad's main argument was the non-viability of a homogenous notion of the 'Third World'.In 'Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory' (1987), reprinted in In Theory (1992), Aijaz Ahmad replied to Fredric Jameson's essay on third-world literature. He argued that there is no single 'Third World' with one kind of experience and one kind of literature; the countries grouped under the label differ hugely in history, class and language, so no rule about all their texts can hold.Ahmad did not claim that allegory is alien to these literatures, that nationalism is purely Western, or that their texts are religious or melodramatic. His case was against the category itself.

Q: Richard Hoggart is associated with ................... .

Richard Hoggart is associated with cultural studies.Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), a study of working-class life and the effect of mass entertainment, is one of the founding texts of British cultural studies, and in 1964 he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, later directed by Stuart Hall.Dadaism was an early twentieth-century anti-art movement and modernism the broader movement in the arts of that period; Hoggart wrote about neither. Gender studies developed separately, from feminist scholarship.

Q: A key figure of the so-called Frankfurt School that relocated under threat from the Nazis, who explored culture through combining Marxist and psychoanalytic theories and argued that commodity culture is a form of mass deception, is :

The thinker is Theodor Adorno.Adorno was a leading member of the Frankfurt School (the Institute for Social Research), which moved abroad when the Nazis came to power. With Max Horkheimer he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose chapter 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' argues that mass-produced culture manipulates people into passive conformity. He drew on both Marx and Freud.Nietzsche died in 1900, long before the School. Bourdieu and Foucault were French thinkers outside the Frankfurt School.

Q: Raymond Williams refers to William Cobbett, in Culture and Society, 1780-1950, who believed that the working people must be in charge of their own educational movements. Which English novel is mentioned by Williams, in this context, as having a similar position ?

The novel is Dickens's Hard Times.In the Cobbett section of Culture and Society, Williams writes that Cobbett's position on popular education is very much that of Dickens in Hard Times. Hard Times attacks an education of mere facts cut off from the way people live, and Cobbett wanted working people to control their own educational movements.Gaskell's North and South is about masters and men in a Northern mill town, Gissing's The Unclassed is a late-Victorian novel of slum life and the literary world, and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is a twentieth-century novel of a miner's family. None of them is the novel Williams sets beside Cobbett's view of education.

Q: The term dialectical materialism is associated with .................... .

Dialectical materialism is associated with Karl Marx.Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism: it adapts Hegel's dialectic to a materialist view in which material and economic conditions, through the conflict of opposites, drive historical change. Marx and Engels developed the ideas, and the term was later used to name their philosophy.Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were founders of British cultural studies, and Colin MacCabe is a film and literary critic; all were influenced by Marxism, but the term belongs to Marx's philosophy.

Q: The book Dominance Without Hegemony is authored by ............ .

Dominance Without Hegemony was written by Ranajit Guha.Guha, the founder of the Subaltern Studies group, published Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India in 1997. He argues that British rule in India rested on dominance (coercion) without the consent that would amount to hegemony.Gyanendra Pandey, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sumit Sarkar are historians associated with Subaltern Studies too, which makes them plausible distractors, but the book is Guha's. Chakrabarty is known for Provincializing Europe.

Q: A central focus of cultural studies is the social processes by which knowledge and skills are acquired that enable us to be members of a culture. This is known as .............. .

The process is Acculturation.In cultural studies, acculturation names the social processes through which we learn the knowledge, skills and values that make us members of a culture. It is close to socialisation and stresses that culture is acquired, not inherited.Agency is the capacity of individuals to act and make choices; authenticity concerns claims to be genuine or original; and urbanisation is the growth of towns and cities. None of these names the learning of a culture.

21.

Raymond Williams' Culture and Society, 1780-1950, catalogues five key words that bear witness to a general change in ways of thinking of life, the social, political and economic institutions and their relations to learning, education and the arts. These are ................. .

A.Land, Enlightenment, Feudalism, Merit, Culture
B.Capital, Base, Superstructure, State, Culture
C.Nature, Reform, Religion, Regulation, Culture
D.Industry, Democracy, Class, Art, Culture

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2024, SET Exam - 2024,

Answer: D

The five words are Industry, Democracy, Class, Art and Culture.

In the introduction to Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), Raymond Williams says that a group of words that came into common English use, or took on new meanings, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries records a general change in thinking. He names five as the key words: industry, democracy, class, art and culture.

The other sets mix in words Williams did not choose for that list. 'Base' and 'superstructure' are Marxist terms he discussed elsewhere; 'enlightenment', 'feudalism', 'reform' and 'regulation' are not among the five.

Discuss in Forum

22.

Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the organising principles of the brahmanical social order and are closely interconnected. The conceptualised term for exploring this relationship as used by feminist historians like Uma Chakravarti is ................. .

A.Intersectionality
B.Brahmanical Patriarchy
C.Structured Sexuality
D.Organised Reproduction

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2024, SET Exam - 2024,

Answer: B

The term is Brahmanical Patriarchy.

Uma Chakravarti used 'Brahmanical patriarchy' in her 1993 essay on early Indian society and later in Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens (2003) to describe a system in which the control of women's sexuality, especially upper-caste women's, is the means by which caste purity and the caste hierarchy are maintained. The term names the interlocking of caste and gender that the stem describes.

Intersectionality is Kimberle Crenshaw's broader term for overlapping oppressions, coined in an American context, not the specific concept for the Brahmanical order. 'Structured sexuality' and 'organised reproduction' describe pieces of the mechanism but are not the conceptual term used by these historians.

Discuss in Forum

23.

Green studies is another name for ................... .

A.Eco Criticism
B.Postcolonial Criticism
C.Cultural Studies
D.Feminist Criticism

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2024, SET Exam - 2024,

Answer: A

Green studies is another name for ecocriticism.

Ecocriticism studies the relationship between literature and the natural environment. In Britain it is often called 'green studies', a label Peter Barry gives as its alternative name in Beginning Theory, while 'ecocriticism' is the American term, from the 1990s work of Cheryll Glotfelty and others.

Postcolonial criticism studies colonialism and its aftermath, cultural studies the whole range of popular and everyday culture, and feminist criticism the representation of women and gender. 'Green' points to the environment, which only ecocriticism takes as its subject.

Discuss in Forum

24.

Frederic Jameson's view that third world texts are necessarily national allegories has been critiqued by Aijaz Ahmad primarily by which of the following arguments ?

A.The non-viability of a homogenous notion of the 'Third World'.
B.The concept of allegory is alien to third world literatures.
C.Nationalism is a western concept.
D.Most third world texts are either religious or melodramatic.

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2024, SET Exam - 2024,

Answer: A

Ahmad's main argument was the non-viability of a homogenous notion of the 'Third World'.

In 'Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory' (1987), reprinted in In Theory (1992), Aijaz Ahmad replied to Fredric Jameson's essay on third-world literature. He argued that there is no single 'Third World' with one kind of experience and one kind of literature; the countries grouped under the label differ hugely in history, class and language, so no rule about all their texts can hold.

Ahmad did not claim that allegory is alien to these literatures, that nationalism is purely Western, or that their texts are religious or melodramatic. His case was against the category itself.

Discuss in Forum

25.

Richard Hoggart is associated with ................... .

A.Dadaism
B.Modernism
C.Gender Studies
D.Cultural Studies

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2024, SET Exam - 2024,

Answer: D

Richard Hoggart is associated with cultural studies.

Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), a study of working-class life and the effect of mass entertainment, is one of the founding texts of British cultural studies, and in 1964 he founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, later directed by Stuart Hall.

Dadaism was an early twentieth-century anti-art movement and modernism the broader movement in the arts of that period; Hoggart wrote about neither. Gender studies developed separately, from feminist scholarship.

Discuss in Forum

26.

A key figure of the so-called Frankfurt School that relocated under threat from the Nazis, who explored culture through combining Marxist and psychoanalytic theories and argued that commodity culture is a form of mass deception, is :

A.Friedrich Nietzsche
B.Theodor Adorno
C.Pierre Bourdieu
D.Michel Foucault

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2025, SET Exam - 2025,

Answer: B

The thinker is Theodor Adorno.

Adorno was a leading member of the Frankfurt School (the Institute for Social Research), which moved abroad when the Nazis came to power. With Max Horkheimer he wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose chapter 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' argues that mass-produced culture manipulates people into passive conformity. He drew on both Marx and Freud.

Nietzsche died in 1900, long before the School. Bourdieu and Foucault were French thinkers outside the Frankfurt School.

Discuss in Forum

27.

Raymond Williams refers to William Cobbett, in Culture and Society, 1780-1950, who believed that the working people must be in charge of their own educational movements. Which English novel is mentioned by Williams, in this context, as having a similar position ?

A.Charles Dickens, Hard Times
B.Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
C.George Gissing, The Unclassed
D.D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2025, SET Exam - 2025,

Answer: A

The novel is Dickens's Hard Times.

In the Cobbett section of Culture and Society, Williams writes that Cobbett's position on popular education is very much that of Dickens in Hard Times. Hard Times attacks an education of mere facts cut off from the way people live, and Cobbett wanted working people to control their own educational movements.

Gaskell's North and South is about masters and men in a Northern mill town, Gissing's The Unclassed is a late-Victorian novel of slum life and the literary world, and Lawrence's Sons and Lovers is a twentieth-century novel of a miner's family. None of them is the novel Williams sets beside Cobbett's view of education.

Discuss in Forum

28.

The term dialectical materialism is associated with .................... .

A.Karl Marx
B.Richard Hoggart
C.Raymond Williams
D.Colin McCabe

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2025, SET Exam - 2025,

Answer: A

Dialectical materialism is associated with Karl Marx.

Dialectical materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism: it adapts Hegel's dialectic to a materialist view in which material and economic conditions, through the conflict of opposites, drive historical change. Marx and Engels developed the ideas, and the term was later used to name their philosophy.

Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were founders of British cultural studies, and Colin MacCabe is a film and literary critic; all were influenced by Marxism, but the term belongs to Marx's philosophy.

Discuss in Forum

29.

The book Dominance Without Hegemony is authored by ............ .

A.Gyanendra Pandey
B.Dipesh Chakrabarty
C.Ranajit Guha
D.Sumit Sarkar

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2025, SET Exam - 2025,

Answer: C

Dominance Without Hegemony was written by Ranajit Guha.

Guha, the founder of the Subaltern Studies group, published Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India in 1997. He argues that British rule in India rested on dominance (coercion) without the consent that would amount to hegemony.

Gyanendra Pandey, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Sumit Sarkar are historians associated with Subaltern Studies too, which makes them plausible distractors, but the book is Guha's. Chakrabarty is known for Provincializing Europe.

Discuss in Forum

30.

A central focus of cultural studies is the social processes by which knowledge and skills are acquired that enable us to be members of a culture. This is known as .............. .

A.Agency
B.Acculturation
C.Authenticity
D.Urbanization

Exam Year(s)

MH SET - 2025, SET Exam - 2025,

Answer: B

The process is Acculturation.

In cultural studies, acculturation names the social processes through which we learn the knowledge, skills and values that make us members of a culture. It is close to socialisation and stresses that culture is acquired, not inherited.

Agency is the capacity of individuals to act and make choices; authenticity concerns claims to be genuine or original; and urbanisation is the growth of towns and cities. None of these names the learning of a culture.

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