UGC NET (English): 100 Questions & Answers of Unit – VII: Cultural Studies
UGC NET (English): 100 Questions & Answers of Unit – VII: Cultural Studies
Unit – VII: Cultural Studies
1. What academic movement emerged at the University of Birmingham, focusing on popular culture and power dynamics? British Cultural Studies (Birmingham School of Cultural Studies).
2. Who is considered one of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies and author of The Uses of Literacy (1957)? Richard Hoggart.
3. Which British cultural theorist wrote Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)? Raymond Williams.
4. Who wrote the foundational essay 'Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms' and served as a highly influential director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies? Stuart Hall.
5. What Marxist concept, popularized by Antonio Gramsci, refers to the cultural and ideological dominance of a ruling class over society? Cultural Hegemony.
6. According to Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model, what are the three positions from which an audience can decode a media text? The dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional Positions.
7. What Frankfurt School concept describes mass media? Culture Industry.
8. Which two Frankfurt School philosophers coined the term 'Culture Industry'? Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
9. What term did Walter Benjamin use to describe the loss of uniqueness, authenticity, and ritualistic power of an artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction? Aura.
10. Who wrote the influential cultural critique Mythologies (1957), decoding everyday French cultural signs and myths? Roland Barthes.
11. What Italian semiotician and novelist wrote A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader? Umberto Eco.
12. What structuralist anthropologist wrote Mythologiques and applied structural methods to cultural analysis and kinship? Claude Levi-Strauss.
13. Who wrote the postmodern philosophical work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)? Jean-François Lyotard.
14. How did Jean-François Lyotard famously define postmodernism? Incredulity toward metanarratives.
15. Which French theorist coined the term 'hyperreality' and wrote Simulacra and Simulation? Jean Baudrillard.
16. What term does Baudrillard use to describe signs and symbols that replace reality with a simulation that has no original referent? Simulacra.
17. Who wrote the seminal post-colonial text Orientalism (1978)? Edward Said.
18. What theoretical framework examines the cultural, political, and psychological impacts of European colonial rule on colonized societies? Post-colonialism.
19. Which feminist cultural theorist wrote The Second Sex (1949), establishing the foundation for modern gender studies? Simone de Beauvoir.
20. What famous statement did Simone de Beauvoir write that shaped feminist distinction between sex and gender? 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.'
21. Who wrote the foundational feminist text Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990) and introduced the concept of gender performativity? Judith Butler.
22. What term does Judith Butler use to describe gender as a series of culturally constructed acts rather than an innate biological essence? Performativity.
23. Who wrote the ecocritical and cultural study The Environmental Imagination? Lawrence Buell.
24. What branch of cultural studies examines human-animal relationships and animal representation in literature and culture? Critical Animal Studies (or Zoopoetics).
25. Who coined the term 'intersectional' to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics intersect and overlap? Kimberle Crenshaw.
26. Which British cultural theorist wrote There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987), examining race and racism in British politics? Paul Gilroy.
27. What concept did Paul Gilroy introduce to describe the hybrid cultural identity of people moving across the Atlantic diaspora? The Black Atlantic.
28. Who wrote the post-colonial cultural study Location of Culture (1994), introducing hybridity and mimicry? Homi K. Bhabha.
29. What term does Homi Bhabha use to describe the ambivalent colonial relationship where the colonized adopts the colonizer's culture imperfectly? Mimicry.
30. What term does Bhabha use for the ambivalent, in-between space where cultural meaning and cross-cultural exchanges are negotiated? The Third Space.
31. Who wrote the subaltern studies text Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
32. What term does Raymond Williams use to describe the active, changing meanings, values, and experiences of a living culture? Structure of feeling.
33. Who wrote The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), exploring how ordinary people consume and subvert dominant cultural spaces? Michel de Certeau.
34. What French sociologist wrote Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)? Pierre Bourdieu.
35. What term does Pierre Bourdieu use for non-financial social assets, such as education, speech, and style, that promote social mobility? Cultural capital.
36. What term does Bourdieu use for the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that individuals acquire through their social life? Habitus.
37. Who wrote the feminist cultural study Reading the Romance (1984), analyzing female readership and agency? Janice Radway.
38. What British cultural studies scholar pioneered audience reception studies through works like Nation and Family and studies on television? David Morley.
39. Which media theorist coined the phrase 'the medium is the message' in Understanding Media (1964)? Marshall McLuhan.
40. What concept did Marshall McLuhan use to describe how electronic media interconnects the global population into a single community? The Global Village.
41. Who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), critiquing how television trivializes public discourse? Neil Postman.
42. What German sociologist wrote about the 'public sphere' and its transformation through mass media? Jurgen Habermas.
43. What term did Habermas use to describe the realm of social life where private individuals can assemble and debate public matters freely? The Public Sphere.
44. Who wrote the landmark eco-feminist text The Death of Nature (1980)? Carolyn Merchant.
45. What critical framework investigates the cultural production and historical representation of male homosexualities and queer identities? Queer Theory.
46. Which queer theorist wrote Epistemology of the Closet (1990)? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
47. Who wrote the influential essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), introducing the concept of the 'male gaze'? Laura Mulvey.
48. What term does Laura Mulvey use to describe how visual arts and media structure the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective? The Male Gaze.
49. Who wrote the cultural history study Discipline and Punish (1975), analyzing the history of the prison and surveillance? Michel Foucault.
50. What Foucaultian concept describes an architectural prison design that enables constant surveillance without inmates knowing if they are watched? Panopticon.
51. How does Foucault define the relationship between power and knowledge? They are inextricably linked; power produces knowledge, and knowledge reinforces power {Power/Knowledge (Savoir Pouvoir)}.
52. Who wrote The History of Sexuality (Originally published in 1976 as Histoire de la Sexualite), arguing that sexuality is a socially constructed discourse? Michel Foucault.
53. Which cultural theorist wrote Simulacra and Simulation and analyzed the Gulf War as a mediated hyperreal event? Jean Baudrillard.
54. What is a Pastiche? A Work of art, literature or music that deliberately copies the style of another artist, period or work- or mixes various distinct styles together.
55. Who wrote the foundational postmodern cultural study Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)? Fredric Jameson.
56. Who popularized the term 'Nostalgia mode'? Fredric Jameson
57. Who wrote the pioneering feminist history study A Room of One's Own (1929)? Virginia Woolf.
58. What term describes the study of signs, symbols, and communication systems in culture, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure? Semiology.
59. Who wrote the semiotic analysis collection Mythologies, exploring wrestling, toys, and soap powders? Roland Barthes.
60. What cultural studies movement analyzes the political, economic, and cultural dominance of media conglomerates and globalization? Cultural Imperialism.
61. Who wrote Culture, Media, Language (1980) as a collaborative project from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies? Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis
62. What term refers to the process by which mainstream culture absorbs, commodifies, and neutralizes counter-cultural subcultures? Incorporation (or Commodification).
63. Who wrote Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), analyzing British youth subcultures like punks, mods, and teddy boys? Dick Hebdige.
64. According to Dick Hebdige, how do subcultures communicate rebellion and identity? Through style, bricolage, and symbolic code-breaking.
65. What does the term 'Diaspora' refer to in literature? It refers to both a group of people displaced from their ancestral homeland and the body of [written works] produced by authors living outside their native countries
66. Who wrote Imagined Communities (1983), arguing that nations are socially constructed symbols imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group? Benedict Anderson.
67. What three characteristics does Benedict Anderson use to define a nation? Imagined, limited, and sovereign.
68. Who wrote the post-colonial cultural critique The Location of Culture? Homi K. Bhabha.
69. What term does Arjun Appadurai use to describe the five dimensions of global cultural flow (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes)? Scapes
70. Who wrote Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)? Arjun Appadurai.
71. What cultural theory examines the intersection of technology, human bodies, and cybernetics? Cyborg theory.
72. Who wrote the influential feminist essay 'A Cyborg Manifesto' (1985)? Donna Haraway.
73. What term does Donna Haraway use to challenge traditional boundaries between human, animal, and machine? Cyborg.
74. Who wrote The Second Sex? Simone de Beauvoir.
75. What critical approach examines the representation of social classes, economic exploitation, and capital in cultural texts? Cultural Marxist Criticism.
76. Who coined the term 'Cultural Materialism' in literary and cultural theory? Raymond Williams.
77. Who is known as the founder of 'New Historicism'? Stephen Greenblatt.
78. What term does Stephen Greenblatt use to describe the reciprocal circulation of social energy and cultural artifacts in early modern texts? New Historicism (or Cultural Poetics).
79. Who wrote The Order of Things (1966), examining epistemes and the historical shifts? Michel Foucault.
80. What term does Foucault use to describe the historical unconscious or system of rules that determines what can be thought in a given era? Episteme.
81. Who wrote Madness and Civilization (1961)? Michel Foucault.
82. What sociological term refers to popular culture consumed widely by the masses, traditionally contrasted with high culture? Mass Culture.
83. Who wrote the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935)? Walter Benjamin.
84. What school of critical theory combined Marxist analysis with psychoanalysis, originating at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt? The Frankfurt School.
85. Who wrote Eros and Civilization (1955), attempting to synthesize Freud and Marx? Herbert Marcuse.
86. What term did Herbert Marcuse use to describe modern capitalist society as one that suffocates revolutionary potential through consumer goods? One-Dimensional Man.
87. Who wrote One-Dimensional Man (1964)? Herbert Marcuse.
88. What cultural movement emerged in the late 20th century celebrating fragmentation, irony, pastiche, and the rejection of grand truths? Postmodernism.
89. Who wrote The Philosophy of the Enlightenment? Ernst Cassirer
90. What term describes the commodification of local cultures and traditions for global tourism and consumption? Cultural Commodification.
91. Who coined the term 'McDonaldization of Society' to describe the standardization of social life inspired by fast-food chains? George Ritzer.
92. Who wrote Black Skin, White Masks (1952)? Frantz Fanon.
93. What psychoanalytic concept does Frantz Fanon use to examine the internalization of racial inferiority among colonized people? Epidermalization of inferiority.
94. Who wrote The Wretched of the Earth (1961)? Frantz Fanon.
95. What approach in cultural studies analyzes food, fashion, music, and daily rituals as meaningful cultural texts? Everyday Life Studies.
96. Who wrote Mythologies, analyzing soap powders, steak and chips, and plastic as modern bourgeois myths? Roland Barthes.
97. What term describes the mixing of different cultural genres, styles, or motifs to create new hybrid forms? Bricolage.
98. Who introduced the concept of 'bricolage' into anthropology and cultural theory? Claude Levi-Strauss.
99. What academic field studies the environmental impacts, representations, and cultural ethics of human-nature interactions? Environmental humanities.
100. What core objective defines the primary mission of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline? To investigate how culture is embedded in everyday life, power relations, political structures, and social inequalities.
Unit – VII: Cultural Studies
1. What academic movement emerged at the University of Birmingham, focusing on popular culture and power dynamics? British Cultural Studies (Birmingham School of Cultural Studies).
2. Who is considered one of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies and author of The Uses of Literacy (1957)? Richard Hoggart.
3. Which British cultural theorist wrote Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)? Raymond Williams.
4. Who wrote the foundational essay 'Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms' and served as a highly influential director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies? Stuart Hall.
5. What Marxist concept, popularized by Antonio Gramsci, refers to the cultural and ideological dominance of a ruling class over society? Cultural Hegemony.
6. According to Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model, what are the three positions from which an audience can decode a media text? The dominant-hegemonic, negotiated, and oppositional Positions.
7. What Frankfurt School concept describes mass media? Culture Industry.
8. Which two Frankfurt School philosophers coined the term 'Culture Industry'? Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
9. What term did Walter Benjamin use to describe the loss of uniqueness, authenticity, and ritualistic power of an artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction? Aura.
10. Who wrote the influential cultural critique Mythologies (1957), decoding everyday French cultural signs and myths? Roland Barthes.
11. What Italian semiotician and novelist wrote A Theory of Semiotics and The Role of the Reader? Umberto Eco.
12. What structuralist anthropologist wrote Mythologiques and applied structural methods to cultural analysis and kinship? Claude Levi-Strauss.
13. Who wrote the postmodern philosophical work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)? Jean-François Lyotard.
14. How did Jean-François Lyotard famously define postmodernism? Incredulity toward metanarratives.
15. Which French theorist coined the term 'hyperreality' and wrote Simulacra and Simulation? Jean Baudrillard.
16. What term does Baudrillard use to describe signs and symbols that replace reality with a simulation that has no original referent? Simulacra.
17. Who wrote the seminal post-colonial text Orientalism (1978)? Edward Said.
18. What theoretical framework examines the cultural, political, and psychological impacts of European colonial rule on colonized societies? Post-colonialism.
19. Which feminist cultural theorist wrote The Second Sex (1949), establishing the foundation for modern gender studies? Simone de Beauvoir.
20. What famous statement did Simone de Beauvoir write that shaped feminist distinction between sex and gender? 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.'
21. Who wrote the foundational feminist text Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity (1990) and introduced the concept of gender performativity? Judith Butler.
22. What term does Judith Butler use to describe gender as a series of culturally constructed acts rather than an innate biological essence? Performativity.
23. Who wrote the ecocritical and cultural study The Environmental Imagination? Lawrence Buell.
24. What branch of cultural studies examines human-animal relationships and animal representation in literature and culture? Critical Animal Studies (or Zoopoetics).
25. Who coined the term 'intersectional' to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics intersect and overlap? Kimberle Crenshaw.
26. Which British cultural theorist wrote There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987), examining race and racism in British politics? Paul Gilroy.
27. What concept did Paul Gilroy introduce to describe the hybrid cultural identity of people moving across the Atlantic diaspora? The Black Atlantic.
28. Who wrote the post-colonial cultural study Location of Culture (1994), introducing hybridity and mimicry? Homi K. Bhabha.
29. What term does Homi Bhabha use to describe the ambivalent colonial relationship where the colonized adopts the colonizer's culture imperfectly? Mimicry.
30. What term does Bhabha use for the ambivalent, in-between space where cultural meaning and cross-cultural exchanges are negotiated? The Third Space.
31. Who wrote the subaltern studies text Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
32. What term does Raymond Williams use to describe the active, changing meanings, values, and experiences of a living culture? Structure of feeling.
33. Who wrote The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), exploring how ordinary people consume and subvert dominant cultural spaces? Michel de Certeau.
34. What French sociologist wrote Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979)? Pierre Bourdieu.
35. What term does Pierre Bourdieu use for non-financial social assets, such as education, speech, and style, that promote social mobility? Cultural capital.
36. What term does Bourdieu use for the deeply ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that individuals acquire through their social life? Habitus.
37. Who wrote the feminist cultural study Reading the Romance (1984), analyzing female readership and agency? Janice Radway.
38. What British cultural studies scholar pioneered audience reception studies through works like Nation and Family and studies on television? David Morley.
39. Which media theorist coined the phrase 'the medium is the message' in Understanding Media (1964)? Marshall McLuhan.
40. What concept did Marshall McLuhan use to describe how electronic media interconnects the global population into a single community? The Global Village.
41. Who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), critiquing how television trivializes public discourse? Neil Postman.
42. What German sociologist wrote about the 'public sphere' and its transformation through mass media? Jurgen Habermas.
43. What term did Habermas use to describe the realm of social life where private individuals can assemble and debate public matters freely? The Public Sphere.
44. Who wrote the landmark eco-feminist text The Death of Nature (1980)? Carolyn Merchant.
45. What critical framework investigates the cultural production and historical representation of male homosexualities and queer identities? Queer Theory.
46. Which queer theorist wrote Epistemology of the Closet (1990)? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
47. Who wrote the influential essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' (1975), introducing the concept of the 'male gaze'? Laura Mulvey.
48. What term does Laura Mulvey use to describe how visual arts and media structure the world from a masculine, heterosexual perspective? The Male Gaze.
49. Who wrote the cultural history study Discipline and Punish (1975), analyzing the history of the prison and surveillance? Michel Foucault.
50. What Foucaultian concept describes an architectural prison design that enables constant surveillance without inmates knowing if they are watched? Panopticon.
51. How does Foucault define the relationship between power and knowledge? They are inextricably linked; power produces knowledge, and knowledge reinforces power {Power/Knowledge (Savoir Pouvoir)}.
52. Who wrote The History of Sexuality (Originally published in 1976 as Histoire de la Sexualite), arguing that sexuality is a socially constructed discourse? Michel Foucault.
53. Which cultural theorist wrote Simulacra and Simulation and analyzed the Gulf War as a mediated hyperreal event? Jean Baudrillard.
54. What is a Pastiche? A Work of art, literature or music that deliberately copies the style of another artist, period or work- or mixes various distinct styles together.
55. Who wrote the foundational postmodern cultural study Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)? Fredric Jameson.
56. Who popularized the term 'Nostalgia mode'? Fredric Jameson
57. Who wrote the pioneering feminist history study A Room of One's Own (1929)? Virginia Woolf.
58. What term describes the study of signs, symbols, and communication systems in culture, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure? Semiology.
59. Who wrote the semiotic analysis collection Mythologies, exploring wrestling, toys, and soap powders? Roland Barthes.
60. What cultural studies movement analyzes the political, economic, and cultural dominance of media conglomerates and globalization? Cultural Imperialism.
61. Who wrote Culture, Media, Language (1980) as a collaborative project from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies? Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis
62. What term refers to the process by which mainstream culture absorbs, commodifies, and neutralizes counter-cultural subcultures? Incorporation (or Commodification).
63. Who wrote Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), analyzing British youth subcultures like punks, mods, and teddy boys? Dick Hebdige.
64. According to Dick Hebdige, how do subcultures communicate rebellion and identity? Through style, bricolage, and symbolic code-breaking.
65. What does the term 'Diaspora' refer to in literature? It refers to both a group of people displaced from their ancestral homeland and the body of [written works] produced by authors living outside their native countries
66. Who wrote Imagined Communities (1983), arguing that nations are socially constructed symbols imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group? Benedict Anderson.
67. What three characteristics does Benedict Anderson use to define a nation? Imagined, limited, and sovereign.
68. Who wrote the post-colonial cultural critique The Location of Culture? Homi K. Bhabha.
69. What term does Arjun Appadurai use to describe the five dimensions of global cultural flow (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, ideoscapes)? Scapes
70. Who wrote Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996)? Arjun Appadurai.
71. What cultural theory examines the intersection of technology, human bodies, and cybernetics? Cyborg theory.
72. Who wrote the influential feminist essay 'A Cyborg Manifesto' (1985)? Donna Haraway.
73. What term does Donna Haraway use to challenge traditional boundaries between human, animal, and machine? Cyborg.
74. Who wrote The Second Sex? Simone de Beauvoir.
75. What critical approach examines the representation of social classes, economic exploitation, and capital in cultural texts? Cultural Marxist Criticism.
76. Who coined the term 'Cultural Materialism' in literary and cultural theory? Raymond Williams.
77. Who is known as the founder of 'New Historicism'? Stephen Greenblatt.
78. What term does Stephen Greenblatt use to describe the reciprocal circulation of social energy and cultural artifacts in early modern texts? New Historicism (or Cultural Poetics).
79. Who wrote The Order of Things (1966), examining epistemes and the historical shifts? Michel Foucault.
80. What term does Foucault use to describe the historical unconscious or system of rules that determines what can be thought in a given era? Episteme.
81. Who wrote Madness and Civilization (1961)? Michel Foucault.
82. What sociological term refers to popular culture consumed widely by the masses, traditionally contrasted with high culture? Mass Culture.
83. Who wrote the essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935)? Walter Benjamin.
84. What school of critical theory combined Marxist analysis with psychoanalysis, originating at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt? The Frankfurt School.
85. Who wrote Eros and Civilization (1955), attempting to synthesize Freud and Marx? Herbert Marcuse.
86. What term did Herbert Marcuse use to describe modern capitalist society as one that suffocates revolutionary potential through consumer goods? One-Dimensional Man.
87. Who wrote One-Dimensional Man (1964)? Herbert Marcuse.
88. What cultural movement emerged in the late 20th century celebrating fragmentation, irony, pastiche, and the rejection of grand truths? Postmodernism.
89. Who wrote The Philosophy of the Enlightenment? Ernst Cassirer
90. What term describes the commodification of local cultures and traditions for global tourism and consumption? Cultural Commodification.
91. Who coined the term 'McDonaldization of Society' to describe the standardization of social life inspired by fast-food chains? George Ritzer.
92. Who wrote Black Skin, White Masks (1952)? Frantz Fanon.
93. What psychoanalytic concept does Frantz Fanon use to examine the internalization of racial inferiority among colonized people? Epidermalization of inferiority.
94. Who wrote The Wretched of the Earth (1961)? Frantz Fanon.
95. What approach in cultural studies analyzes food, fashion, music, and daily rituals as meaningful cultural texts? Everyday Life Studies.
96. Who wrote Mythologies, analyzing soap powders, steak and chips, and plastic as modern bourgeois myths? Roland Barthes.
97. What term describes the mixing of different cultural genres, styles, or motifs to create new hybrid forms? Bricolage.
98. Who introduced the concept of 'bricolage' into anthropology and cultural theory? Claude Levi-Strauss.
99. What academic field studies the environmental impacts, representations, and cultural ethics of human-nature interactions? Environmental humanities.
100. What core objective defines the primary mission of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline? To investigate how culture is embedded in everyday life, power relations, political structures, and social inequalities.