In its general sense, "cultural studies" refers to an investigation or analysis of culture; however, in a more specialized sense, it refers to a certain method of research on culture first propounded by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The approach adopted by the center was distinguished by its interdisciplinary nature, combining a range of approaches including feminism, Marxism and semiotics. In the first section of the paper, the author provides an account of the formation of cultural studies and proceeds to answer the question: What is the contribution of literary criticism to cultural studies? In the second section, considering the general trend in cultural studies to reach beyond the conventional boundaries between the high and popular art, the author analyses two Iranian television commercials, drawing on psychoanalytical, sociological and semiotic concepts. The author also argues that an analogy can be drawn between TV commercials and the short story genre.