L680/C601 9977   BOSE (#6)
Special Topics in Literary Study and Theory

1:00p – 3:45p T

Cross-listed in the English Department and the Cultural Studies
Program, this course meets the core requirement for the Cultural
Studies Ph.D. minor, but it is also open to any interested students.
This version of the course will trace the historical trajectory of
Cultural Studies from its founding in 1963 by Richard Hoggart, the
first director of the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, to its
contemporary manifestations. Hoggart initially conceptualized
Cultural Studies as a response to the conservatism of British
literary studies. Cultural Studies was to be an interdisciplinary
venture, combining sociology, anthropology, history, and, crucially,
literary analysis. Over the course of the next several decades, the
discipline became more theoretical and overtly political, concerned
with the role of the state in policing communities, the relationship
between hegemony and mass media, and on aspects of working class and
other resistant subcultures.

As an interdisciplinary venture, Cultural Studies necessarily has
many associations. For some, it immediately conjures the Birmingham
School, which revitalized British Marxism through its pioneering
studies of everyday life, cultural criticism, and post-industrial
Britain. For anthropologists, Cultural Studies is associated with
ethnographies, fieldwork, and the study of collective life. For
those in Fine Arts, Cultural Studies has articulated visual culture
with postmodern and historicist readings. In History, Cultural
Studies has shaped the ways in which scholars study ideological
changes in race, gender, and ethnicity over time. For media critics
and sociologists, Cultural Studies has resulted in sustained
attention to mass culture. These intellectual developments suggest
that an account of the field should consider Cultural Studies, in
the words of Stuart Hall, as “a set of unstable formations” and
methodologies rather than as a unified theoretical approach.

Taking Hall’s formulation as a guide, we will explore what the
term “culture” has meant for scholars, asking what it means to say
that we study a particular text or object (a work of literature, a
political speech, a visual icon, a legal code, etc.) as an artifact
of culture and as a key to understanding a social formation. Our
course readings will be eclectic, drawing upon cultural criticism,
literary history, Marxist theory, studies of popular culture and
political insurgency, and even contemporary journalism. All of these
works broach issues common to contemporary cultural studies in their
concern with the forces behind the production and circulation of
cultural artifacts (films, television programs, romance novels,
advertising) and their meanings; the creation or maintenance of
cultural hierarchy; the cultural construction of race, ethnicity,
and gender; the visual and spatial dimensions of everyday
experience; and the relationship between private and public spheres.

I am still in the process of finalizing our readings, but sample
texts that we will cover include: Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches
and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics; Frantz
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Raymond Williams, Marxism and
Literature; Selections from Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula
Treichler, Cultural Studies; David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen,
Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies; and an
assortment of articles.

Students should expect to write weekly response papers on the
readings and our class discussions, make one oral presentation, and
produce a twenty-page seminar paper.