Elective

CLIT7024 Advanced Cultural Studies: Context, Culture, Critique

This course serves as an advanced introduction to Cultural Studies. Cultural studies is an inter-disciplinary mode of scholarship that seeks to produce critical but useful knowledge. It is based first of all in a radical contextualization that presumes an ability to situate texts, people, and problems within a certain historical and social framework that draws on various forms of ‘theory’ or ways of seeing. As a mode of inquiry it foregrounds not a particular genre or medium or discipline like literature or film or, say, sociology, but particular problems and issues that matter or have mattered in history. What matters, and to whom, is a large and open question that must be addressed. But within cultural studies there is a commitment to culture as “ordinary” and “common” as opposed to merely esoteric or aesthetic or privileged or individualized. Cultural studies draws on the textual and semiotic skills from literary, film, and media studies but it does not confine itself to texts. It seeks instead to ground itself in something variously called “culture,” everyday life, lived experience, social reality, political or group struggle, the historical present, and so on: these too are all terms that must be scrutinized; but they also point to the essentially social and ‘real’ world that cultural studies seeks to understand and intervene in.

This course will introduce the above template for doing cultural studies, through both theoretical and practical readings. It will read theoretical or methodological texts. It will also offer one or several case studies or examples, classic or contemporary, of ‘achieved’ or actual cultural studies. Cultural studies is in fact not easy to do but is or should always be worthwhile or useful to someone or something. Literary or cinematic or other texts may also be used to illustrate the problems and methods of cultural studies.

Pre-requisite: CLIT7005 Approaches to Literary and Cultural Studies