Cultural Text Studies - An Introduction

Cultural Text Studies is a research project initiated by the Department of Languages, Culture and Aesthetics at Aalborg University. The present intro­duct­ory volume launches a series of themed monographs which will be edited by researchers at the Dept., occasionally aided by friends and associates from other programmes. The purpose of the series is to be a forum for the publication of results of research in the broadly defined area of cultural text.This interdisciplinary field of research springs from an emergent interest in both studying texts culturally and in studying culture as text. Thus it is cultural text studies in the sense that the object of study consists of all readable cultural phenomena which are regarded as texts in a much more broadly defined sense than in the traditional field of literary studies. Yet it is also cultural text studies, in the sense that, while the approach is cultural as opposed to, say, formalist, the work often entails an intense engagement with texts and close readings thereof. CTS – An Introduction is a volume authored by present and past members of the English programme’s teaching staff in the fields of culture, literature and media studies. The essays range widely in terms of the period, genre, and medium of the texts investigated. Focus areas include Victorian literature and art; high modernism, especially approached from the point of view of a centre/margin discourse; and finally postmodernist aesthetics and its embedded move from literary into cultural studies, as witnessed by essays on world music, shoes, Hollywood, the post-ironic, the de-territorialized, and the post-human condition as cultural texts.