ENGL 502 / IGS 501N (3)
ENGL 502 / IGS 501N (3)
METHODOLOGIES: CULTURAL THEORY: INTERDISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGIES
Instructor: Dr. Virginie Magnat
Department of Creative Studies
Office: 127, Arts Building
Phone: 250.807.8441
E-mail: virginie.magnat@ubc.ca
Course Description:
The goal of this course is to engage a diverse group of IGS students in current scholarly debates on cultural theory through the investigation of a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives focused on key epistemological and methodological questions.
The first half of the course introduces students to the genealogy of cultural theory and familiarizes them with the different theoretical lenses through which scholars in the humanities and social sciences examine notions of representation, authority, positionality, subjectivity, and agency. Weekly topics include:
- definitions and functions of culture;
- the genealogy of cultural theory: from classical sociology to cultural studies;
- Marxism, psychoanalysis, and aesthetic theory;
- language, semiotics, and representation;
- the performance of language and the dialogical emergence of culture;
- postmodern perspectives on cultural production.
In the second half of the course, students explore interdisciplinary methodologies through weekly seminars focusing on feminist, postcolonial, indigenous, reflexive, dialogical, and performative approaches to cultural research. Weekly topics include:
- theorizing gender and race;
- postcolonialism, the Other, and cultural anthropology;
- imagined communities: national, transnational, and global cultural processes;
- embodiment and agency: mimesis, tactility, sensuous scholarship;
- cultural studies: theory and praxis;
- interdisciplinary methodologies and Indigenous research.
Assignments:
· Participation in class discussions and weekly journal entries addressing the assigned readings and posted on WebCT prior to each class meeting.
15%
· Seminar presentation (three questions for discussion must be posted on WebCT two days prior to class meeting).
20%
· Midterm Essay relating at least three different assigned readings discussed in the first half of the course (1250 words).
20%
· Symposium: Oral Presentation of Methodological Approach (in preparation for Final Research Paper).
15%
· Final Research Paper (20-25 pages + Bibliography).
30%
(Note: Texts and assignments are subject to change.)
Texts:
Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas, David Inglis and John Hughson, ed. (2003),
and selected readings posted WebCT and/or compiled by the instructor in a course packet (available at the UBCO Bookstore) and/or on reserve at the UBCO Library.
Course Outline:
Week 1 What is culture?
David Inglis and John Hughson: “Culture is important; Culture is everywhere; Defining culture (Confronting Culture 1-6)
Bennett M. Berger: “Culture: Varieties of Usage/Cultural Studies/Cultural Pluralism/Culture and Ideology/Culture and Interests” (An Essay on Culture 14-44)
Week 2 A genealogy of cultural theory: from classical sociology to cultural studies
“Setting Up the Terrain: Classical Sociology and Culture” (CC 11- 37)
- Enlightenment and Romanticism
- ‘Culture’ and ‘Nature’
- Karl Marx
- Durkheim
“High German Seriousness: The Frankfurt School on Culture” (CC 38-63)
- Rethinking Marxism
- The culture industry
- The mass audience
- Art as compensation
Karl Marx: “Wage Labor and Capital” (Literary Theory 262-267)
Walter Benjamin: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
(Literary Theory 282-289)
Week 3 Marxism, psychoanalysis, and aesthetic theory
“Reading from Right to Left: Culturalism in England” (CC 88-111)
- Culture against society
- Richard Hoggart
- Cultural creativity
- Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams: “The Analysis of Culture” (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture 32-40)
Antonio Gramsci: “Hegemony” ((Literary Theory 277)
Kate McGowan: “Aesthetics” (Key Issues in Critical &Cultural Theory 29-52)
- The Sublime
- Estrangement
- Nietzsche
- Freud
Louis Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus” (Literary Theory 294-304)
Slavoj Žižek: “The Sublime Object of Ideology” (Literary Theory 312-325)
Week 4 Language, semiotics, and representation
“The Empire of Signs: The Semiotics of Culture” (CC 112-137)
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Saussure’s Legacy
- Roland Barthes and the semiotics of popular culture
Stuart Hall: “The Work of Representation” (Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices 15-36; 36-64)
James Clifford: “Partial Truths” (Writing Culture 1-26)
Week 5 The performance of language and the dialogical emergence of culture
Philip Auslander: “Mikhail Bakhtin” (Theory for Performance Studies 39-44).
Marvin Carlson: “Theater and Dialogism” (Critical Theory and Performance 313-323), and “The Performance of Language” (Performance: A Critical Introduction 56-69)
Henry A. Giroux: “Cultural Studies as Performative Practice” (Contesting Empire, Globalizing Dissent: Cultural Studies After 9/11 Chapter 12)
Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim: “Introduction” (The Dialogical Emergence of Culture 1-31)
Week 6 Postmodern perspectives on cultural production
“Phantasmagoria: Postmodernism and Culture” (CC 138-162)
- Postmodern style
- Derrida
- Baudrillard
- Hyperreality
Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis: “Postmodernism and Performance” (Drama/Theatre/Performance134-150)
Jean Baudrillard: “Symbolic Exchange and Death” (Literary Theory 488-508)
Jeremy Gilbert: “Cultural Studies and Anti-Capitalism” (New Cultural Studies 181-198)
Simon During: “The Nature of Culture” (Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction 208-213)
Week 7 Reading Break
Week 8 Theorizing gender and race
Seminar 1: The question of gender
Chris Weedon: “Feminism and the Principles of Poststructuralism” (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture 354-366)
Leonie Pihama: “Mana Wahine Theory: Creating Space for Mäori Women’s Theories” (Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action 360-374)
Oyèronké Oyewùmi: “Colonizing Bodies and Minds: Gender and Colonialism”
(The Invention of Women: Making African Sense of Western Gender Discourses 121-156)
Seminar 2: The question of race
Robert Stam: “Cultural Studies and Race” (A Companion to Cultural Studies 471-489)
Xavier Inda: “Race as a Kind of Speech Act” (Cultural Studies: A Research Volume 85-107)
bell hooks: “Postmodern Blackness” (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture 454-460)
Pepi Leistyna “White Ethnic Unconsciousness”
(Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action 270-282)
Week 9 Postcolonialism, the Other, and cultural anthropology
Seminar 3: The Other
Stuart Hall: “The Spectacle of the Other” (Representations 225-290)
LindaTuhiwai Smith: “Colonizing Knowledges” (Decolonizing Methodologies 58-77)
Ronald Niezen: “Paradigms of Postcolonial Liberation” (A World Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization 144-167)
Michael Dorris: “Indians on the Shelf” (The American Indian and the Problem of History 98-105)
Jennifer David: “Seeing Ourselves, Being Ourselves: Broadcasting Aboriginal Television in Canada” (Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action 193-197)
Seminar 4: Cultural anthropology
George E. Marcus: “The Unbalanced Reciprocity between Cultural Studies and Anthropology” (A Companion to Cultural Studies 169-186)
Thomas N. Headland: “A Dialogue Between Kenneth Pike and Marvin Harris on Emics and Etics” (Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate 13-27)
James Left: “Notes on the Epistemology of Anthropology” (Emics and Etics 127-142)
Week 10 Imagined communities: national, transnational, and global cultural processes
Seminar 5: Imagined communities - from the national to the transnational
Benedict Anderson: “Introduction; Cultural Roots; The Origins of National Consciousness; Memory and Forgetting” (Imagined Communities 1-46;187-206)
Stuart Hall: “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (Identity: Community, Culture, Difference 222-237)
Imre Szeman: “Cultural Studies and the Transnational” (New Cultural Studies 200-218)
Partha Chatterjee: “Whose Imagined Community?” (Internationalizing Cultural Studies 406-412)
Seminar 6: Culture in the age of globalization
Fredric Jameson: “Notes on Globalization as Philosophical Issue” (The Cultures of Globalization 54-77)
Hayden White in Dialogues On Cultural Studies (253-261)
Arif Dirlik: “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism” (Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action 29-55)
Dennis Altman: “The Globalization of Sexual Identities” (Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action 411-427)
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Week 11 Embodiment and agency: mimesis, tactility, sensuous scholarship
Seminar 7: Theorizing embodiment
Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “The Phenomenology of Perception” (Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life 133-149)
“In the French Style: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu” (CC 161-189)
Michel de Certeau: “The Practice of Everyday Life” (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture 516-527)
Margaret Lock and Judith Farquhar: “Philosophical Studies, or Learning How to Think Embodiment” (Beyond the Body Proper 107-111)
Seminar 8: Mimesis, tactility, sensuous scholarship
Walter Benjamin: “On the Mimetic Faculty” (Beyond the Body Proper 130-132)
Elin Diamond: “Introduction to Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (i-xvi)
Judith Butler: “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” (Cultural Theory and Popular Culture 255-270)
Michael Taussig: “Tactility and Distraction” (Beyond the Body Proper: 259-265)
Paul Stoller: “The Scholar’s Body” (Sensuous Scholarship ix-xviiii)
Week 12 Cultural studies: theory and praxis, interdisciplinary methodologies and Indigenous research
Seminar 9: Bridging the practice/theory divide
Stephen Crofts Wiley: “Death (An Assemblage)” (Cultural Studies: A Research Volume # 1 303-341)
Carlyne J. White, Judith Mogilka and P.J. Ford Slack: “Disturbing the Colonial Frames of Ethnographic Representation: Releasing Feminist Imagination on the Academy” (Cultural Studies: A Research Volume # 3 3-27)
Norman K. Denzin: “Trinh T. Minh-Ha: Framer Framed” (Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the Twentieth Century 72-82)
Norman K. Denzin: “Performance Texts” (Interpretive Ethnography 102-125)
Seminar 10: Indigenous research and performance ethnography
Sandy Grande: “Red Pedagogy: Indigenizing Inquiry, or the Un-Methodology” (Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge 133-143)
“Inner Angles: A Range of Ethical Responses to/with Indigenous and Decolonizing Theories” (Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research 145-168)
Norman K. Denzin: “The Call to Performance; The Language of Performance” (Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture 3-56)
Week 13 Research week
Class discussion of research projects
Ien Ang: “Who Needs Cultural Research?” (Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action 477-483)
Michael Denning: “What’s Wrong with Cultural Studies?” (Culture in the Age of Three Worlds 145-166)
Robert Stam and Ella Shohat “De-Eurocentricizing Cultural Studies: Some Proposals” (Internationalizing Cultural Studies 481-498)
Bibliography
Abbas, Ackbar, and John Nguyet Erni eds. Internationalizing Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Auslander, Philip. Theory for Performance Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
Berger, Bennett M. An Essay on Culture: Symbolic Structure and Social Structure. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995.
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus eds. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Denning, Michael. Culture in the Age of Three Worlds. London and New York: Verso, 2004.
Denzin, Norman K. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003.
- - - . Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21st Century. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,1997.
- - - , ed. Cultural Studies: A Research Volume. Vol. 5. London: Jai Press, 2000.
- - - , ed. Cultural Studies: A Research Volume. Vol. 3. London: Jai Press, 1998.
- - - , ed. Cultural Studies: A Research Volume. Vol. 1. London: Jai Press, 1996.
Denzin, Norman K., and Michael D. Giardian, eds. Ethical Futures in Qualitative Research: Decolonizing the Politics of Knowledge. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.
- - - . Contesting Empire, Globalizing Dissent: Cultural Studies After 9/11.
Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006.
Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
During, Simon. Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
Hall, Gary and Clare Birchall, eds. New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2006.
Hall. Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 2003.
Headland, Thomas N., Kenneth L. Pike, and Marvin Harris eds. Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. Frontiers of Anthropology. Vol. 7. London: Sage, 1990.
Inglis, David, and John Hughson, eds. Confronting Culture: Sociological Vistas. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Jameson, Frederic, and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.
Leistyna, Pepi, ed. Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Lock, Margaret, and Judith Farquhar, eds. Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the Anthropology of Material Life. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2007.
Martin, Calvin, ed. The American Indian and the Problem of History. Ed. Calvin Martin. Oxford UP, 1987.
McGowan, Kate. Key Issues in Critical and Cultural Theory. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education, 2007.
Miller, Toby, ed. A Companion to Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Niezen, Ronald. A World Beyond Difference: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Oyewùmi, Oyèronké. The Invention of Women: Making African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph Roach, eds. Critical Theory and Performance. U of Michigan P, 1992.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Rutherford, Jonathan. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2003.
Shepherd, Simon, and Mick Wallis, eds. Drama/Theatre/Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed Books, 1999.
Storey, John, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Harlow: Pearson Education, 2006.
Tedlock, Denis, and Bruce Mannheim, eds. The Dialogical Emergence of Culture. University of Illinois Press, 1995.
The goal of this course is to engage a diverse group of IGS students in current scholarly debates on cultural theory through the investigation of a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives focused on key epistemological and methodological questions.
Last reviewed 
12/22/2008 3:27:03 PM
