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Universität Potsdam

Subcultures creating culture

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

The purpose of this work is to apply the methods of textual semiotics to subcultures, in particular to the little known glam subculture. Subcultures have been the main research field of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, known for its interdisciplinary approach, and for its focus on the creative aspects of subculture. Hebdige, in particular, introduced many semiotic elements in his work, as the aberrant decoding after Eco and the cultural creativity via bricolage after Lévi-Strauss. His definition of subculture as symbolic resistance has been criticized by the following post-subcultural researchers for its abstractness and lack of cohesion. Semiotics eventually have been expelled from the set of tools used in sociology for the analysis of subcultures. Nowadays, the studies on subcultures have a strong ethnographic focus. Due to terminological proliferation and a descriptive approach, it is difficult to compare them on a common basis. Textual semiotics, through the concept of semiosphere developed by Lotman, allows to go back to the intuitions of Hebdige, organizing the semiotic elements already present in his work into a wider system of interpretation. The semiosphere offers a coherent theoretical horizon as a basis for further analysis, and a new methodological perspective focusing on the cultural. In this thesis for the first time the work of Lotman is applied to the study of a subculture.

Degree

thesis:*
Level thesis:degree_level
thesis.doctoral
Grantor dc:publisher
Universität Potsdam
Year
2016

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Persello, Mara
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Kimminich, Eva

Subjects

dc:subject × 12

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • CC-BY-NC - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell 4.0 International

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:kobv.de-opus4-uni-potsdam:10489

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Universität Potsdam - Diss
Base URL
publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/oai
Last updated
2026-07-24
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Persello, Mara. Subcultures creating culture. thesis.doctoral thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2016. https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/10489