Which two of the following essays have proved particularly productive in the disciplinary practices of Cultural Studies?

(A) Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
(B) Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
(C) Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”
(D) Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding”

Choose the most appropriate answer from the options given below:

Correct option is C

Explanation:
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/decoding” are foundational essays in the field of Cultural Studies.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”:
Introduces the concept of the male gaze, exploring how visual media reflects and reinforces gendered power dynamics.
Central to feminist film theory and cultural analysis.
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding”:
Hall's model analyzes how audiences interpret media messages differently, depending on cultural background and ideology.
A key text in media and communication studies.

Information Booster:
Cultural Studies emphasizes the interplay of media, culture, and ideology.
Examines how power dynamics are embedded in everyday cultural practices.
Laura Mulvey:
Laura Mulvey outlines her goals in the "Introduction" to her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," using psychoanalytic theory "as a political weapon" to reveal how "the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form".  Although she admits that other film theorists have written about psychoanalysis and cinema, she contends that these works have not included "the importance of the representation of the female form" in narrative cinema. Mulvey uses Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan's theories to examine how this portrayal reinforces male domination while simultaneously offering "visual pleasure." Mulvey identifies phallocentrism with Freud's psychoanalytic paradigm and the patriarchal ideals it embodies, explaining that "it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world." According to psychoanalysis, a woman's "actual lack of a penis" means that she represents nothingness and lack, giving her sexual opposite, man, the opposite qualities of subjectivity and presence. The absence of women gives men power, but it also instills in them a persistent fear of being castrated. Jacques Lacan created terminology like "the symbolic order" and "the Name of the Father and the Law" to denote the ideological systems that make up society and its subjects, mapping ideas from structural linguistics onto these psychoanalytic theories.
“Visual Pleasure” critiques Hollywood’s patriarchal narrative structures. 
Stuart Hall:
Known as the father of British Cultural Studies.
His theory bridges communication and societal structures, emphasizing media’s ideological functions. According to traditional wisdom, the essay marks a shift towards structuralism in Hall's and the CCCS's research, enabling us to consider some of the key theoretical advancements at Birmingham. With an emphasis on the communication processes involved in televisual discourse, the article questions some of the most widely held beliefs about the creation, dissemination, and consumption of media messages in order to put out a novel theory of communication. Essentially, Hall contends that communication is systematically corrupted and that the message provided is rarely (if ever) the same as the one received, in contrast to the traditional view of media messages as static, transparent, and unchanging throughout the communication process.

Additional Knowledge:
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”:
Focuses on defamiliarization (ostranenie), a concept central to Russian Formalism.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”:
Explores psychological concepts related to fear and familiarity.