Methods and Popular Objects
- Autumn 2019
Syllabus Description:
Schedule of readings:
Works not included in the books ordered for the class are available as pdfs on the “Files” page of the course Canvas site; see the link at the left border of the site. Works available online have links included in the schedule below. You are not expected to have read suggested works. I am likely to refer to them in class, and they are primarily intended as extra reading for students with research interests in these particular areas.
Week 1.
September 25: Introduction
Week 2. Theorizing commodification and cultural objects
September 30: Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Lawrence Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society,” available online through the UW library site:
https://www-jstor-org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/stable/2165941
Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art”
Suggested only: Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
October 2: Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular”
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” available online through the UW library site: https://www-jstor-org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/stable/466409?sid=primo&origin=crossref&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia”
Suggested only: Ernst Bloch, selections from The Utopian Function of Art and Literature
Suggested only: Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other”
Suggested only: Michael Warner, excerpt from Letters of the Republic
Week 3. The Birmingham School and articulation theory
October 7: Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies, Anyway?”
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”
From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Cultural Studies:
“Marxism without Guarantees”
“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies”
October 9: From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues on Cultural Studies:
“New Ethnicities”
“What is this Black in Black Popular Culture?”
“On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall”
Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, chapter 1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, excerpt from A Thousand Plateaus
Suggested: Jasbir Puar, “Queer Times, Terrorist Assemblages”
Suggested: Alexander Weheliye, “Assemblages”
Suggested: Paul Gilroy, “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism”
Week 4.
October 14: Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, chapters 2-5
October 16: Transformations of everyday life and problems of critique
Michel De Certeau, “’Making Do: Uses and Tactics,” chapter 3 in The Practice of Everyday Life
Rita Felski, “Introduction” to New Literary History 33. 4, special issue on “Everyday Life”; available online at https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v033/33.4felski.html
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, chapter 1
Suggested: Meghan Morris, “Banality in Cultural Studies”
Week 5.
October 21: Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, chapter 9, “Nation, Hegemony, and Culture”; and chapter 12, “The Disciplined Mobilization of Everyday Life”
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control”
Eva Cherniavsky, “After Bourgeois Nationalism”
Suggested: Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”
October 23: Genre fiction
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, chapters 1 and 4
Farah Mendelsohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, “Introduction”
Steven Shaviro, “Thinking Like a Philosopher”
Sami Schalk, “Introduction,” to Bodyminds Reimagined
Eugene Thacker, “Clouds of Unknowing,” from In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1
Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life”
Sofia Samatar, “The Red Thread”
Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother”
Suggested: Neil Gaiman, “A Study in Emerald”
Suggested: Ray Bradbury, “Way Up in the Middle of the Air”
Suggested: Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things,” chapter 1 in Vibrant Matter
Suggested: Gwyneth Jones, “Metempsychosis of the Machine”
Suggested: Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” available online at https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/new_centennial_review/v003/3.2eshun.html
Week 6.
October 28: Janice Radway, “The Readers and Their Romances” and “The Act of Reading the Romance,” chapters 2 and 3 in Reading the Romance
John G. Cawelti, “The Study of Literary Formulas”
Nalo Hopkinson, “Shift”
Rachel Swirsky, “Eros, Philia, Agape”
Suggested: Janice Radway, “The Ideal Romance: The Promise of Patriarchy,” chapter 4 in Reading the Romance
October 30: Fan fiction and fan culture
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, chapters 2, 5, and 6
Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding”
Constance Penley, “Feminism, Psychoanalysis and the Study of Popular Culture”
Suggested: http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Weight_Collected
Week 7.
November 4: Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, chapter 3
Selections from Coppa, ed., The Fanfiction Reader
Andre M. Carrington, “Dreaming in Color: Racial Revisions in Fan Fiction,” chapter 6 of Speculative Blackness
Suggested: Leslie Fish, “Shelter” and “Poses,” available online at
http://ksarchive.com/viewuser.php?uid=174
November 6: Selections from Coppa, ed., The Fanfiction Reader
Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”
Katie Forsyth, selected fan fiction available at http://liquidfic.org/katie.html or
http://archiveofourown.org/users/wordstrings/pseuds/wordstrings
Not Literally Productions, “Sorted This Way,” available online at "Sorted This Way" — A Lady Gaga parody by Not Literally Productions
Draco and the Malfoys, “Potions Yesterday,” available online at Potions Yesterday - Draco and the Malfoys
Week 8.
November 11: No class; Veteran’s day
November 13: Popular music and subculture studies
Selections from Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
Angela McRobbie, “Settling Accounts with Subculture”
Songs available on Youtube:
Crass, “Do They Owe Us a Living”
Manic Hispanic, “Mommy’s Little Cholo”
Two Nice Girls, “I Spent My Last Ten Dollars on Birth Control and Beer”
George Clinton, “If Anybody Gets Funked Up (It’s Gonna Be You)”
Janelle Monae, “Dance Apocalyptic” and “Electric Lady”
Suggested: Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, chapter 6
Suggested: Mark Anthony Neal, “’You Remind Me of Something’: Toward a Post-Soul Aesthetic”
Suggested: John Storey, “Words and Music: Making Plain Talk Dance”
Suggested: Simon Frith, “The Cultural Study of Popular Music”
Suggested: George Lipsitz, “Cruising Around the Historical Bloc: Postmodernism and
Popular Music in East Los Angeles”
Week 9.
November 18: Film and TV
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Afterthoughts”
Kaja Silverman, “Suture”
John Ellis, “Broadcast TV as Cultural Form,” “Broadcast TV as Sound and Image,” and “The Broadcast TV Viewer,” chapters 7, 8, and 10 from Visible Fictions
Mark B.N. Hansen, “Introduction,” in New Philosophy for New Media
Lisa Nakamura, “Introduction: Digital Racial Formations and Networked Images of the Body,” in Digitizing Race
Suggested: Milly Buonnano, chapter 1, “The Age of Television,” and chapter 2, “Theories of the Medium,” in The Age of Television: Experiences and Theories, available online through the UW library site at https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/lib/washington/reader.action?docID=327868
Suggested: John Ellis, “The Third Era of Television: Plenty,” in Seeing Things
Suggested: Ien Ang, “Politics of Empirical Audience Research” and “Ethnography and Contextualism in Audience Studies,” chapters 2 and 4 in Living Room Wars
Suggested: Lynne Joyrich, “Networking: Interlacing Feminism, Postmodernism, and Television Studies,” chapter 7 in Re-Viewing Reception
November 20: Eva Cherniavsky, “Beginning without End: Derealizing the Political in Battlestar Galactica”
Selections from Battlestar Galactica (2004-2010), viewed in class
Week 10.
November 25: Comics and graphic novels
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
Winsor McCay, selections from Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend
George Herriman, selections from Krazy Kat
Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Davis, “Murder the Husband, Murder the Story”
November 27: No class; Thanksgiving holiday
Week 11.
December 2: Superhero comics/Technoculture studies
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Charles Hatfield, “Jack Kirby and the Marvel Aesthetic”
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Lisa Nakamura, “Cyberrace”
Suggested: Ramzi Fawaz, “Introduction: Superhumans in America,” from The New Mutants
Suggested: N. Katherine Hayles, “Toward Embodied Virtuality,” chapter 1 in How We Became Posthuman
Suggested: Lev Manovich, “The Language of Cultural Interfaces”
December 4: Interactive fiction and gaming
Alexander Galloway, “Allegories of Control”
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “Introduction: Games in the Age of Empire”
Ed Chang, “Gaming as Writing, Or, World of Warcraft as World of Wordcraft,” available online at http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/gaming_issue_2008/Chang_Gaming_as_writing/
Emily Short, “Galatea”; available online at
http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/short__galatea.html
or http://pr-if.org/play/galatea/
Suggested: Nick Montfort, “The Pleasure of the Text Adventure”
Suggested: Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “Games of Multitude”
Suggested: Lev Manovich, “Navigable Space,” from The Language of New Media