ENG 384: Reading Popular Culture
Course Schedule, Fall 07
Week One
R 8.23 Introduction: How and Why do We Study Popular Culture?
Week Two
Introduction to Culture and Cultural Studies
T 8.28: "What is Popular Culture?" (Storey 1-12), Arnold "Culture and Anarchy" (6)
R 8.30: "The 'Cultural and Civilization' Tradition" (13-26), Leavis "Mass Civilization and Minority Culture" (12)
Week Three
T 9.4: "Culturalism" (29-45)
R 9.6: Williams, "The Analysis of Culture" (32)
Response 1
Week Four
Introduction to Theoretical Methods
T 9.11: "Structuralism and Post-structuralism" (87-104), Barthes, "The World of Wrestling"
R 9.13: Wright, "The Structure of Myth & the Structure of the Western Film" (303)
Week Five
T 9.18: "Marxisms" (47-70), Marx and Engles "Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas" (68), "Base and Superstructure" (70)
R 9.20: Adorno "On Popular Music" (73), Storey "Rockin' Hegemony" (100)
Response 2
Week Six
T
9.25: "Gender and Sexuality" (106-128)
R 9.27: Rakow, "Feminist Approaches to Popular Culture" (199)
Paper 1 Due
Week Seven
T 10.2: Ang, "Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture" (189), Geraghty "Soap Opera and Utopia" (246)
R 10.4: hooks "Postmodern Blackness" (454), Gilroy "'Get Up, Get Into It, and Get Involved'" (52)
Response 3
Week Eight
T 10.9: No Class, Fall Break
R 10.11: Midterm
Week Nine
Media: Fiction
T 10.16: Spiegelman Maus I, Doherty "Art Spiegelman's Maus"
R 10.18: Maus I, Rothberg "We Were Talking Jewish"
Week Ten
Media: Film
T 10.23: Kubrick, Lolita (1962), Hatch "Fille Fatale"
R 10.25: Metcalf, "Lolita at 50", from The Annotated Lolita
Week Eleven
T 10.30: Levy, "Pigs in Training", Crain, "Childhood as Spectacle"
R 11.1: Giroux, "Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence",
Response 4
Week Twelve
Media: Television
T 11.6: Freaks and Geeks, from Fiske's Reading Television
R 11.8: Interview with Paul Feig, Long "Nightmare in the Mirror: Adolescence and the Death of Difference"
Paper #2 Due
Week Thirteen
Media: Music
T 11.13:Frith "The Value Problem in Cultural Studies", Sullivan "Upon this Rock"
R 11.15: Katz "Causes"
Response 5
Week Fourteen
Media: Advertising
T 11.20: Dove ads (Evolution, "Pro-Age"), Digital Retouching (browse images)
R 11.22: No Class, Thanksgiving
Response 6
Week Fifteen
Culture and Everyday Life
T 11.27: de Certeau "The Practice of Everyday Life" (516), Highmore, "Figuring the Everyday"
R 11.29: Gibian, "Shopping Center Spaces", Eisenbeis, "Mall of the Wild", Morris "Things to do with Shopping Centres"