AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES

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Working Syllabus: Spring 2002

Prof. Christopher P. Wilson

As a term that traverses many fields, "cultural studies" calls up many associations. In some quarters, the immediate association is with the so-called Birmingham School, the variant (and critique) of British marxism which pioneered modern studies of everyday life, cultural criticism, and post-industrial Britain. And yet, in anthropology, cultural studies can refer to ethnographies and field work, the study of collective life; in Fine Arts, to the new postmodern and historicist readings of visual culture; in History, the study of temporal change in attitudes about race, gender, or ethnicity; in media criticism and sociology, the study of mass culture. Any meaningful accounting of cultural studies, then, must take measure of what, in the words of Stuart Hall, has always been a "set of unstable formations" and approaches rather than a unified theoretical platform.

The approach of this introductory course will be to examine how cultural studies has been manifested, modified, or challenged in the domain of U.S. literary and cultural history--in what has been traditionally (and loosely) labeled American Studies. To begin with, then, we mean to explore what the analytical term "culture" has meant: for instance, what it means to say that we study a given text or object (a work of literature, a political speech, a visual icon, a legal code, a built environment) as an artifact of culture, as a key to social and/or cognitive ways of knowing or seeing or behaving. We will explore how American Studies has responded to the presence of such seminal thinkers as Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz, bell hooks, Antonio Gramsci, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Meaghan Morris, Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Pierre Bourdieu, Stuart Hall and others.  Moreover, the course will reflect two emphases currently marking the field:  the need to identify the "disciplinary effects" of cultural studies (in our case, for instance, what it means to do cultural studies in a graduate program in English), and the call for analysis which is more historical (than strictly contemporary) in focus.

The course readings, then, will be eclectic:  drawing upon cultural criticism, literary history, studies of popular culture, even contemporary journalism.   But all of these works broach issues common to contemporary cultural studies:

• forces behind the production and circulation of cultural artifacts (e.g. films, regional fiction, romance novels, advertising) and their meanings;
• the creation or maintenance of cultural hierarchy and distinctions of taste and value;
• the cultural construction of race, ethnicity, and gender;
• the visual and spatial dimensions of everyday experience;
• and the relationship of private and public spheres.

• Janice Radway, Reading the Romance
• John Gregory Dunne, Monster
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing  (please wait to purchase until later in the semester)
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz
• Sheila Croucher, Imagining Miami
• John Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic

Plus, somewhat shorter selections will come from the following texts, which have also been ordered for your convenience:
 
• Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints
• Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters
• John Storey, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader

Requirements of the course:
 

1. Attendance and Class Participation (25%)
2. 2 Papers:  one 4-5 page discussion of a critical essay and one 8-10 page research essay, teaching plan, or theoretical essay ( 25% and 50% respectively).   Any PhD students enrolled will be asked to write a somewhat longer second essay.
3. Depending on class size, one oral presentation at the start of the class, perhaps in tandem with another presenter (not graded as such, but part of your overall participation grade)
4. The viewing of two films ("Up Close and Personal" and "Double Indemnity")

For your first paper assignment, clickhere
 

Note: Ph.D. students may be required to read some materials from the standard recommended lists below; please check carefully under each week's listings.  (CR1) designates material in the first class reader, (CR2) the second (both arealways placed on Reserve by O'Neill librarians) and (R) designates material only on Reserve, sometimes in a different form.

Prologue:  The Questions of Cultural (and American) Studies

Tues. January 15    Opening Week: Introduction

If you'd like an overview of the intersection of cultural studies with traditional forms of American Studies, you could look at George Lipsitz, "Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen:  Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies" (1990)  in Lucy Maddox, ed. Locating American Studies (R).  The essay by Nina Baym in the same volume, "Melodramas of Beset Manhood:  How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors" (1981) also gives, in criticizing them, a very good summary of "classic" culture-based readings of American literature.  The claim that American Studies was an indigenous form of "cultural studies" all along has been made by Michael Denning, in "Culture and the Crisis:  The Political and Intellectual Origins of Cultural Studies in the United States" (R), from Cary Nelson, ed. Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies.  Or, if If you'd like a critical assessment of American Studies which does a decent job in summarizing it, and that discusses the relationship of the movement to Gramsci, Williams, and others in cultural studies, you might try Giles Gunn's Chapter 7 in The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (R).  Doctoral students are asked to read at least one of these essays this week, preferably more.

To look at the range of scholarship in the field of American Studies, one of the best places to look is a bibliographic essay by TV Reed on cultural theory and American Studies, with many helpful links

There are many comparable courses on line as well.  See, for instance:

• A Graduate Syllabus in 'Approaches to American Culture" from the current President of the ASA, Prof. George Sanchez
• A course called "Theorizing America" from Prof. Barry Shank, currently the book review editor at American Quarterly
• Internet Resources in American Studies
• American Studies Crossroads Project

 Required Readings:

• Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe's Footprints, pp. 1-11, 22-33, 34-44; pp. 44-67 optional.
• Raymond Williams, "Culture is Ordinary" (CR1) and (R), in essay form
• Richard Johnson, "What is Cultural Studies, Anyway?"  (CR1) and (R), in essay form
• Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" (CR1) and (R), in The Interpretation of Cultures. For an on-line version of this essay, click here

• Louis Sass, "Anthropology's Native Problems"  (CR1)
• Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies" in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (R)
• The Giles Gunn chapter listed above
• On reserve, a summary of cultural studies scholarship from Choice by Robert Kieft, entitled simply "Cultural Studies:  Part I" (R)

• Culture and Cultural Studies links, with on-line texts
• A syllabus which takes a historical approach to the movement of British cultural studies
• A site devoted to cultural studies discussion list, with useful syllabus links
• Cultural Studies Central

John Gregory Dunne, Monster

Please also see the video "Up Close and Personal" before our discussion on this day (R).

Recommended:  You might want to look at the PBS "Frontline" documentary's transcript, "The Monster That Ate Hollywood."  If so, click here.

Tues. Feb. 5   No Place Like Home
 

• Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Please read only up to the end of Chapter 4, and then read the conclusion)

Ph.D. students are required to read theentireRadway volume.  If you'd like, you can also see my reflection on Radway's work in Lucy Maddox, ed.Locating American Studies (R), and Radway's "Ideological Seams" essay, listed below.

Region, Race, Cultures and the Canon