Syllabus
* 1st Lecture. Introduction à Content & structure & assessment & resources & key concepts * Independent study for next session: Select one of the following groups of concepts and provide a brief definition of each of them:
1. Culture, popular culture, subculture, everyday life, consumption
2. Discourse, identity, Ideology
3. Power, hegemony
4. Representation, text, agency, canon,
5. Symbolic economy - symbolic order
6. Encoding/decoding - dominant vs. negotiated vs. oppositional reading positions
7. Diaspora, subaltern, globalization, multiply identities, modern/post-modern subject, * Support reading for next session and independent study: Williams, R. (1982)“Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” 1973, New Left Review I. In <http://www.newleftreview.org/?issue=81> & London: Verso,
1980. Rpt. as Culture and Materialism. London: Verso,
2005. Pp. 31-49. Williams, R. (1983) Keywords. London: Fontana. O’Sullivan, T. et al. (1994) Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London/New York: Routledge. Šmejkalová, J. (2007) “An Interview with Ann Gray”, Media Studies 1:4. <http://syndikat-novinaru.cz/medialni-studia/> * 2nd lecture What is Media & Cultural Studies? Concepts & Ideas & Origins & Inspirations: Birmingham and Beyond & ‘God fathers’ * Independent study for next session: Watch and/or read & discuss one of the following products Czech Cold-War or post Cold War culture: * Films: The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (1965) Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky) by Jiří Menzel (1967) The Firemen's Ball (Hoří, má panenko) by Miloš Forman (1967) and/or any of Forman’s films! Kolya (Kolja) by Jan Svěrák (1996) Cosy Dens (Pelíšky) by Jan Hřebejk (1999) * Fiction and non-fiction: Any text (in translation) by one of the following author: Milan Kundera (The Joke) Josef Škvorecký (The Miracle Game) Bohumil Hrabal (I Served the King of England) Václav Havel (The Garden Party/Zahradní slavnost, 1963; The Power of the Powerless: <http://vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML> Jáchym Topol (City Sister Silver, Catbird Press,
2000) * Support reading for next session and independent study: Curran, J. and Myung-Jin Park, eds. (2000), De-Westernizing Media Studies. Routledge. Recommended: “Beyond globalization theory”, Pp 3-18. Bren, Paulina.
2010. The Greengrocer and his TV. The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. Ithaka and London: Cornell University Press. Jussi Parikka <http://jussiparikka.net/> Bruno Latour <http://www.bruno-latour.fr/> * 3rd lecture De-westernizing Media & Cultural Studies; Cold War culture and what came after? Current Trends - new materialism & media archaeology * Final Essay - instructions and guidance
Annotation
There is no question that print represents historically one of the earliest tools of duplicating and mediating words and images. To the extent that - as it has been argued - the printing press was an agent of socio-political change.
(Eisenstein, 1979) It revolutionized Western culture by creating an entirely new symbolic environment that would fill Renaissance Europe with new information and abstract ideas, and later on established the first mass media environment. In recent decades, paper and print have adapted to the changing technologies and became even more than ever before integrated into the development of contemporary media landscape.
This course is designed to introduce students to the analytical terms and research methods, as well as interpretive strategies employed in contemporary media and cultural studies in order to support their capacity to analyse and conceptualize critically the transformation of print and books in contemporary media environment. Among the questions addressed are the following ones: Can a process of contesting a society’s media representations produce significant social change? How does the central project of British Cultural Studies relate to orthodox
Marxist scepticism? Moreover, what is the methodological legacy of British cultural studies in the process of studying and researching democratization and commercialization of culture in former socialist countries of East and Central Europe after the end of the Cold War? There is a special focus on interdisciplinary approaches which allow examining the ways in which cultural processes are produced, distributed, consumed, and responded to.
Students are to investigate varied dimensions of cultural production and reception; learn to comprehend them in their broader social, aesthetic, ethical, and political contexts. The course also aims at introducing the ideas of key scholars who have shaped the development of the field, including Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Richard
Hoggart, Ann Gray, Paul Gilroy, Ien Ang, John Fiske; key figures upon whom CS has drawn (Karl Marx, Theodore
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci); and those who – more or less independently - advanced some of its key impulses and challenges (Judith Butler, Edward Said, Robert Darnton).
The course is suitable for both, international/Erasmus students as well as the domestic ones who need to master the appropriate conceptual frameworks and linguistic competence that would facilitate their study abroad.