A Brief Remark about Cultural Studies, An Academic Analysis of Text (A Case Study on KOMPAS’sEnglish Advertisement of Job Vacancies) G. Fajar Sasmita Aji Abstract The rapid development of CULTURAL STUDIES as a “newdiscipline” is closely related to the progress of postmodernism. It mayeven be considered the real product of the era. Postmodernism opens the paradigm of mini narratives instead of grand narratives, and cultural studies applies the paradigm that “culture” is not an abbreviation of “high culture”. Text, for cultural studies, is an object ofdiscussion, and consequently it’s not merely written, because anything can be te xt. Cultu ra l studie s cons iders cultura l tex t to be mode ofrepr esentation, in w hich cultura l studies sees its form and me ani ng make sense only when there is an examination of its intersections in all complexity. Text is the product of a complex interaction of production, response, and reception. The phenomenon that one ofKOMPAS’s issues includes the English-language advertisement of job vacancies proves that for this daily newspaper globalization, in which English is the identity, is the par adig m. So me meanings play the roles: English funct ions no t as the language of communication, but as the identity of globalization (Gra msci’s hegemony). Ac cording to Fo ucault, the rela tion of pow er and knowledge takes place between the sender and the receiver of the advertisement. Ke y w ord s : cultural studies, postmodernism, representation For some Indonesian people “cultural studies” may be a new phenomenon, though for the world it has been well known for several decades. The term is even disturbing and, perhaps, confusing, because “cultural studies” takes a singular form of verb and it has no appropriate Indonesian translation for the term. This discipline is new because, beside the fact that the current development of the world’s cultural studies only started in 1980, there is still a problem as to whether cultural studies is a methodological academic discipline or not 1) However, considering cultural studies as a new and popular phenomenon in the study of literary criticism, this paper will briefly present the discussion around this field of study. This article is also completed by demonstrating how the practice of cultural studies is applied within a discussion that will focus on the English written text of job vacancy Vol. 9 No. 3 – February 2006
