124010 VO Introduction to Cultural Theories (2025W)

This lecture course will introduce students to the field of Cultural Theories. Together, we will explore the most important theoretical models and perspectives of the fields of British Cultural Studies, Semiotics, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, Gender, Sexuality, Race, Class, Disability, and the Nonhuman in lecture sessions. These investigations will be grounded in practical examples focused on, but not limited to, cultural practices, visual culture and popular media (film, television, advertisements, music, computer games, digital media, memes, fashion, subcultures, lived cultures, etc.). By this process, students will be provided with the critical tools (theoretical, analytical, historical) necessary to analyze and evaluate cultural practices, phenomena and media for what it reveals about:
(1) the processes of meaning making in the production and consumption of cultural artifacts and practices
(2) the inter-related dynamics of representation, knowledge, power, and subjectivity; and
(3) the intersectional social categories of race, gender, class, ability, and the nonhuman.

Here is a list of some of the most central theorists we will discussed in detail:
Matthew Arnold, F. R. Leavis, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, John Storey, Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey, Jackie Stacey, Marx/Engels, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Ferdinand de Saussure, Vladimir Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Will Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Vito Russo, Slavoj Žižek, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Donna Haraway, Katherine N. Hayles, Val Plumwood.

Here is a list of some of the most central concepts we will discussed in detail:
High/Low/Mass/Popular/Lived Cultures; The Politics of Taste; Ideology; Discourse; Semiotics; Articulation; The Structure of Feeling; Aura; The Society of the Spectacle; Postmodernism and Pastiche; Simulacra, Simulation and Hyperrealism; Convergence/Participatory Culture; Post-Media; The Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego; The Real, The Imaginary, and The Symbolic; The Male Gaze; Base/Superstructure; Interpellation and The Problematic; Hegemony; Denotation, Connotation, Myth; Gender Essentialism, Patriarchy, Heteronormativity; Orientalism; Animal Studies, Eco-Criticism, Cyborg Studies, Posthumanism; Disability Studies.