Performing Culture presents a detailed and probing account of cultural studies' changing fixations with theory, method, policy, text, production, audience and the micro-politics of the everyday. John Tulloch encourages academics and students to take seriously the need to break down the separation between high and low cultural studies. Tulloch's case studies show that the performance of cultural meanings occurs in forms as diverse as The Royal Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare and Chekhov productions and our everyday work and leisure encounters. Drawing upon anthropological and dramatic studies of performance, the book emphasizes that academic research also performs cultural meaning. A central feature of the book is i

Cultural Reading

Cultural reading

The third generation [of reception studies] resumes an interest in the programmes and programming, but not as texts studied in isolation from their usage as an element of everyday life. Furthermore, it adds a neglected layer of reflexivity to the research on the ‘reception’ of media messages by addressing the audiences' notions of themselves as the ‘audience’. (Alasuutari, 1999)

The notion of performing culture implies an audience that receives the performance. As Judith Butler says, the ‘effects of performatives, understood as discursive production, do not conclude at the terminus of a given statement or utterance. … They continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors' most precious intentions’ (Butler, 1993: 240–1). In a different, anthropological approach, Brown argues ...

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