Introduction to Cultural Studies

Fall Semester

Meeting Times: TBA

Location: TBA

Office: TBA

Office Hours: TBA

Instructor: Sandra Zito, Ph.D.

Email: sandraxzito@gmail.com

Course Description: This course introduces students to the history and politics of the study of culture, interdisciplinary analysis, engaged criticism, and movements for social and economic justice from the early twentieth century to the present. This class explores the origins of the turn to the interdisciplinary study of culture and the influence of Marxism, structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminism on the study of culture, from the Frankfurt School and the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies to anti-colonialist, feminist and critical race theories.

Student Learning Objectives:

By the end of class students should be able to:

· Explain the origins of the turn to the interdisciplinary study of culture, changes to the field throughout history, and what difference it makes to understanding culture, politics, power relationships and social and economic justice and transformation

· Define key concepts in the interpretation of the politics of culture from the perspective of different disciplines

· Summarize individual scholars’ contributions to defining key concepts and stakes involved within the debates on the interpretation of culture

· Compare and contrast interpretations of culture from different disciplines and theories

· Synthesize the main debates over the interpretation of culture from an interdisciplinary perspective

· Produce an original interdisciplinary interpretation of a cultural text from an interdisciplinary perspective

Required Texts:

Course Reader

Course Assignments:

Class Participation 10%

Attendance 10%

1-page Weekly Response Papers 20%

Mid-term Exam 30%

Final Exam 30%

Course Expectations and Requirements: This class will be a combination of lectures, small group work, class discussion, weekly response papers, and exams. Small group work and class discussion will revolve around the assigned reading for the day, so please bring the reading with you to each class and be prepared to discuss it. The mid-term and final exam will draw from the readings and lectures and will be composed of defining keywords/concepts and answering several short essay questions. Questions to help frame your reading of the texts in this class include: “How is culture defined by the scholar?”; “What time period was the writing produced and where?”; “What discipline is the scholar trained in?”; “How is the relationship between culture, economy, society, the state, gender, race, and/or class defined?” Of course, you are encouraged to develop your own questions to pose to each scholar as well.

Weekly Response Papers: The weekly response papers are informal reflective essays on the assigned readings for the week. The purpose of the essays is to aid your thinking about the readings in relationship to the lectures and course content. You are encouraged to write your personal thoughts and reactions to the scholar’s main argument in relationship to its contribution to the history and politics of the study of culture and to compare and contrast the readings throughout the semester. Suggested questions to guide your informal essays are “What is the main argument?”; “Why do I agree or disagree with the main argument?”; “What confuses me about the argument?”; “What do I find compelling about the argument?”; What evidence does the author use to support their argument?” This list is not exhaustive and you may respond to the readings however you like, as long as the writing clearly demonstrates that you have done the reading.

***Syllabus Subject to Change***

Weekly Schedule:

Week 1: Introduction to the Interdisciplinary Study of Culture: Interwar Germany and the Emergence of Critical Theory and Engaged Criticism

Jay, Martin. “The Creation of the Institut fur Sozialforschung and its First Frankfurt Years,” in The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923-1950 (1996)

Week 2: Western Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: The Frankfurt School

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944)

Week 3: Mass Culture as Mass Deception or Mass Revolutionary Potential

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (1968); (essay originally written 1936)

Week 4: Anticolonialism and the Interpretation of Culture: Existentialism, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Culture

Fanon, Franz. “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Week 5: French Trends: Structuralism and The Study of Culture in Anthropology

Levi-Straus, Claude. “Structural Analysis in Linguistics and Anthropology,” in Structural Anthropology (1963)

Week 6: Postwar France: Semiotics and the Study of Culture

Barthes, Roland. “The World of Wrestling”; “Soap-powders and Detergents,” and “The Blue Guide,” in Mythologies (1957) (and as many of the essays as you like)

Week 7: British Postwar Working Class Culture and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies: Literature and Culture

Williams, Raymond. “Culture” in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1967)

Week 8: The Birmingham School and the Study of Mass Media

Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding,” in Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. (originally written 1980)

Midterm Exam

Week 9: The Birmingham School and Subcultural Resistance to Cultural Hegemony

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture and the Meaning of Style (1979)

Film: Wild Style (Charlie Ahearn, 1983)

Week 10: The Birmingham School: Media, Popular Music Culture, and Race, Class, and Nation

Gilroy, Paul. “Lesser Breads without the Law,” and “Diaspora, Utopia and the Critique of Capitalism,” in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987)

Week 11: Feminism, Science, Patriarchy and Cultural Representation in the United States

Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36.” in Social Text 11 (Winter 1984/85)

Field Trip: American Museum of Natural History

Week 12: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Popular Culture in the United States

hooks, bell. “Eating the Other,” and “Is Paris Burning?” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992)

Film: Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990)

Week 13: Popular Culture, Race and Ethnic Studies in the United States

Lipsitz, George. “Cruising Around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles,” and “The Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counternarrative in Black New Orleans,” in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990)

Week 14: Globalization, Neocolonialism, or American Empire, and Culture

Hannigan, John. “The Global Entertainment Economy,” in David Cameron and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Street Protests and Fantasy Parks: Globalization, Culture, and the State (2002)

Film: Life and Debt (Stephanie Black, 2001)

Week 15: Diasporas and Transnational Cultural Studies

Shukla, Sandhya. “Little Indias, Places for India Diasporas,” in India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of America and England (2003)

Final Exam: Date TBA