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The prospect of [introducing]
cultural studies is a daunting task (or, at least, it should
be).
– J. Macgregor Wise, “Cultural Studies in Words
and Pictures”
C626 (Jointly-listed as CULS-C601 & ENGL-L680):
This course introduces you to cultural studies, a diverse
intellectual formation committed broadly to producing theoretically
informed and politically engaged scholarship. Because cultural
studies tends to shift in relation to specific geo-historical
conditions, intellectual problems, and political concerns,
many who are new to the field (and even some veterans, for
that matter) find it difficult to pin down. Indeed the question,
“What is cultural studies?” has been posed countless
times, yet rarely has it yielded satisfying or enduring answers.
There’s something about cultural studies that seems
to resist definitional closure, which indeed makes the task
of introducing the field, as J. Macgregor Wise observes, “daunting”
for all involved.
Rather than trying to settle once and for all what cultural
studies is, this course embraces the field’s elusiveness
by stressing its ongoing reconstitution in practice. Thus,
“What does cultural studies do?” will be our organizing
motif. What’s so important about this question is that
it enjoins us to take stock of specific formations of cultural
studies while remaining sensitive to its larger project. It
also encourages us to widen our frame of reference so as to
encompass the signifying systems, material coordinates, and
historical conjunctures out of which particular cultural studies
practices have emerged.
This is a course not only about cultural studies (its theories,
methods, key figures, debates, etc.), therefore, but also
about the field’s conditions of possibility. It proceeds
primarily through a close reading and detailed discussion
of primary works by scholars who’ve been at the forefront
of inventing—and reinventing—cultural studies
practice, with an eye towards situating their writings in
determinate contexts. The reading list likely will include
selections from Louis Althusser, Ien Ang, Tony Bennett, Homi
Bhabha, Charlotte Brunsdon, Judith Butler, James Carey, Kuan-Hsing
Chen, John Clarke, Rosalind Coward, Michel Foucault, John
Fiske, Jenny Garber, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Gramsci, Lawrence
Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Richard Hoggart, Angela
McRobbie, Toby Miller, Meaghan Morris, Janice A. Radway, Edward
Said, Jennifer Daryl Slack, Carolyn Steedman, E.P. Thompson,
and Raymond Williams, among possible others.
Although this class ostensibly is about cultural studies,
it is, in the end, really about the urgency of developing
rigorous intellectual work that can help us to respond more
effectively to the numerous political challenges—neoliberalism,
neo-conservatism, and globalization, to name only a few—of
our time. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, we shouldn’t
care less about cultural studies, what it is, and what it
does or doesn’t do.
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