Cross-listed with the Cultural Studies program, this course meets the core requirement for the Ph.D. minor in Cultural Studies, but it is also open to any other interested students. This version of the course will begin with an introduction to the interdisciplinary Cultural Studies movement, which will be defined in terms of both methodology and objects of study. In this part of the course we will pay special attention to changing definitions of “culture,” especially challenges to hierarchies of cultural value, of “high” and “low,” which result from the increasing importance of popular media and from anthropological work on everyday life as symbolically significant. The second section of the course will examine the theoretical foundations of cultural studies, tracing some of the major influences on the development of the theory of articulation associated with Stuart Hall and the British Cultural Studies movement, such as Marxist theories of hegemony and ideology critique, the challenge to Marxism posed by the new social movements (feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, post-colonial theory), and Foucault’s post-structuralist discourse analysis and other redefinitions of textuality. The third section of the course will turn to the tension between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, and will consider some exemplary types of cultural studies projects (including but not limited to textual analysis, reception studies, and ethnography). The course will end by turning to three emergent contemporary concerns within cultural studies: the effects of globalization and post-Fordist economic formations, technoculture studies of new electronic media, and the changing status of the university and especially the humanities.

Assignments will probably include 2-3 essays, as well as some shorter projects.

The readings will include a course packet, containing essays or chapters probably drawn from this list: Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Lawrence Grossberg, Michael Warner, Kobena Mercer, Meaghan Morris, Angela McRobbie, Cornel West, Gayatri Spivak. and Homi Bhabha.

Other readings for the course will be drawn from this list:
David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies
Pat Brantlinger,Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America
Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish or The History of Sexuality
Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies
David Held and Anthony McGrew, The Global Transformations Reader
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins
David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, eds., The Cybercultures Reader or Jenny Wolmark, ed., Cybersexualities