Culture is a site of struggle, over meanings, values, history, and reality. This course introduces students to cultural studies as a conceptual, interpretive, and interdisciplinary approach to the role that culture plays in defining reality and to the possibilities for contesting those definitions. Through exploring the rituals and practices of culture that shape our perceptions of the world, often in ways we take for granted, the course seeks to develop a critical understanding of the relationships between individual and society, representation and reality, as well as theory and practice.

What is literature? Today the term literature embraces all things printed, from fiction to nonfiction to advertising (yes, even your junk mail), from highbrow to low. This course will take a comparative view of the term literature as well as its ideas, practices, and forms. Given that literature historically has been tied to writing, to print, or to the book, what does it mean to study literature today?in an age when the book (and possibly print itself) may be vanishing?

Culture and cultural conflict. Reading cultural theory/texts such as film, literature, music, fashion, commercial art, and built environment.

How can we read/understand different ways that literature is meaningful? Emphasizes practice in reading a broad spectrum of world literature, literary theory.

Introduction to the critical study of the visual in modernity, presented through sustained analysis of the cinema and cinematic codes. Emphases on formal film analysis and major film movements and conventions in the international history of cinema. Students develop a vocabulary for formal visual analysis and explore major theories of the cinema. *Students will not receive credit for CSCL 1201W if they have already taken SCMC 1201W, CSCL 1201V, SCMC 1201V, ARTH 1921W, CSCL 1921W, CSCL 1201 or SCMC 1201

What is history? How can we understand its meanings/uses? Emphasizes practice in reading cultural texts from various historical perspectives.

Close examination of widely varying musical forms and styles, "classical" and "popular," in relation to human subjectivity and configurations of culture, ideology, and power.

How discourse reproduces consciousness and persuades us to accept that consciousness and the power supporting it. Literary language, advertising, electronic media; film, visual and musical arts, built environment, and performance. Techniques for analyzing language, material culture, and performance. (previously 3173W)

Examines the status of "poetry" in several cultures of the Americas bringing together techniques of close reading and broad cultural inquiry.

What makes some jokes so funny? And why do we laugh? In this course, we will approach the topic of comedy from every angle. We will study theories and philosophies of humor, and will survey many different forms of the genre?film, television, viral web videos, internet memes, stand-up, improv, sketch comedy, absurdist theater, and political satire. And, of course, we will write and perform our own comedy in the classroom. By studying the history and formations of comedy, we will think about how jokes can help us change the rules of everyday life and imagine a new way forward.

We will study writings on television and specific TV shows from a variety of angles to understand the rise of American broadcast technologies, how race and class are crafted on TV, representations of gender and the home, postmodernity and late capitalism, the rise and demise and of taste, global television and the public sphere, the production of ?reality? in our present historical moment, and changes in televisual technologies. Throughout the course, we will also consider what constitutes television?the technology, the form, and the content?and learn to read these three facets of it concurrently.

Movements that emerge when a group of writers, filmmakers, artists, composers, or musicians puts forth a new definition of literature, film, art, or music?and sets in motion new relations (aesthetic and social) of word, image, sound. Manifestos?statements of position?that articulate or counter such definitions. Movements created by scholars or critics after the fact. Focuses on one or two related movements (e.g., romanticism and realism, surrealism and negritude, new wave and third cinema).

Historical/critical study of forms of modern sexuality (heterosexuality, homosexuality, romance, erotic domination, lynching). How discourses constitute/regulate sexuality. Scientific/scholarly literature, religious documents, fiction, personal narratives, films, advertisements.

Western representation of the human body, 1500 to present. Body's appearance as a site and sight for production of social and cultural difference (race, ethnicity, class, gender). Visual arts, literature, music, medical treatises, courtesy literature, erotica. (previously 3458W)

Historical/critical reading of figures (e.g., uncanny double, monstrous aberration, technological hybrid) in mythology, literature, and film, from classical epic to sci-fi, cyberpunk, and Web. (previously 3461)

In English, the word ?alien? designates both immigrants from other countries and beings from other worlds. Aliens of all sorts are everywhere; they tend to provoke fascination, fantasy, and for many, fear and anxiety. But the deeper philosophical significance of aliens says as much about us as it does about them. In this course, we will explore these questions through a range of novels, films, and artworks from the 1890s to the present day, with an emphasis on science fiction and American popular culture.

Readings in colonial/postcolonial literatures/theory from at least two world regions: Africa, the Americas, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific. Cultural/psychological dynamics and political economy of world under empire, decolonization, pre- vs. post-coloniality, globalization.

The cinema as a social institution with emphasis on the complex relations it maintains with the ideological practices that define both the form and the content of its products. Specific films used to study how mass culture contributes to the process of shaping beliefs and identities of citizens.

This course explores Global and Transnational Cinemas as alternative traditions to the dominant Hollywood-centered accounts of film history. Students will grapple with the historical, social, and political motivations of cinematic projects that critique traditions of national cinema, or that resist the hegemonic force of neocolonial cultural centers. Italian Neo-realism and the French New Wave will be examined as movements that challenge politics and mass culture. Third Cinema in Latin America and pan-African cinematic movements will be examined through their struggles with both colonialism and the rise of post-colonial dictatorships. Indian and Japanese cinemas of the 50s & 60s will mark out new possibilities of filmmaking and distribution. Finally, counter-hegemonic and experimental movements in U.S.-based film, such as the L.A. Rebellion and Fluxus, will allow students to understand how opposition to Hollywood style could exist within the very centers of cultural power while also reaching out to larger global communities.

Scientific and cultural theory concerning the organization of nature, human nature, and their significance for development of ethics, religion, political/economic philosophy, civics, and environmentalism in Western/other civilizations.

This course introduces students to influential thinkers in the field of critical theory, broadly conceived. Critical theory is similar to philosophy because it asks big questions that stretch the boundaries of human knowledge. But it is distinct in its focus on practical change?critical theory advocates for a more just and emancipated human world. Its key techniques are the diagnosis and critique of histories, systems, and ideologies of social power. Critical theory emerged from a group of Marxist intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s who were concerned about the rise of fascism, the staggering inequalities produced by industrial capitalism, the trauma of mass violence, and the numbing standardization of modern life. Since then, the field has expanded to encompass concerns about structural racism, gender inequality, the rise of neoliberalism, the expansion of modern carceral and mental health systems, and the ongoing inequities wrought by histories of slavery, colonization, and imperial conquest. Featured authors may include Sigmund Freud, W. E. B. Du Bois, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Patricia Hill Collins, Malcom X, Jackie Wang, Angela Y. Davis, Sheldon George, Alfredo Carrasquillo, Joshua Javier Guzman, Willy Apollon, Jean Rouch, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Saidiya Hartman, bell hooks, Édouard Glissant, Aurora Levins Morales, Michael Rothberg, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Christopher Pexa, Yuichiro Onishi, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lewis Gordon, and Barbara Christian.

Science and technology engaged through historical and cultural manifestations from film, literature, and YouTube to scientific and philosophical essays. Relations among humanities, science, economics, politics, philosophy and history. Psychiatry and drugs, food and agriculture, sexuality, religion and science, climate change.

The work of Sigmund Freud has withstood years of controversy to install itself as foundational to the way we understand the relationship between individual desires, social structures, and cultural practices. This is in part because Freud?s writings were not restricted to the domain of psychology. His writings also renewed grand philosophical questions in ways that dramatically transformed them. He asked: What is a human subject? What are the causes of her actions? What are the nature and motivations of her engagement with others? In the many decades since his early publications, Freud?s key concepts like the ego, the superego, the id, the unconscious, and the significance of dreams and jokes have had an enduring influence in Western culture. This course introduces students to a range of psychoanalytic writings from Freud?s early theories of mental structure and human development to contemporary applications, re-workings, and critiques of psychoanalysis. We will discuss concepts like the unconscious, sexuality, disavowal, repression, neurosis, melancholia, the pleasure principle and the death drive. By the end of the course, we will have developed a sense of the uses and limitations of psychoanalysis for understanding pressing global issues such as sexual identification and its formation, racism, neo-fascism, extreme political division, war and nationalism, climate change, and the destruction of democratic ideals. Authors read may include Melanie Klein, Franz Fanon, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, David Eng, Slavoj Zizek, Henry Stack Sullivan, Kalpana Sheshadri- Crooks and Margaret Mahler. Readings will be complemented with short stories, literary excerpts, film clips, as well as discussion of current political issues.

History/theory of 'close reading' (i.e., the most intense encounter between reader and text) exemplified through critical texts. Students perform close readings of various texts.

This course begins by asking what this strange thing we call literature is, this six-thousand year old form of writing that brings into existence, each time a work is read, a world that did not previously exist. Sometimes that world is one in which we long to live, sometimes it is dark and foreboding, all death and despair; sometimes we seek it out as an escape from our daily lives, sometimes we enter it to be able to better understand those same lives, to come back to them refreshed, not just emotionally but intellectually -- for if literature does involve an immersion in the not-actually-existent, a departure from the everyday world, it does so by engaging us from within the world and in such a way that it is able to recast our everyday world and make us think it in new ways. And literature does all this with that most everyday of things, language. By attending to the ways authors and scholars mobilise language?s expressive, analytic and conceptual resources, with this course we shall learn various methods of critically appreciating and engaging complex literature, while gaining insight into how the practices of literary criticism and theory relate to, and help us understand, the world in which we live, how language shapes and forms that world and literature?s unique place and role in that world and its forming.