Courses :: CULS C701 Topic: Critiques of Everyday Life
This introduction to the interdisciplinary field and methods of cultural studies will be focused by an investigation into the quotidian and unrarefied domain of everyday life. Cultural critic Raymond Williams notes three different senses of the word “culture” in contemporary use: (1) a general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development; (2) a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general; and (3) the works and practices on intellectual and especially artistic activity. In this course we will explore the ways in which these three senses of “culture” are braided together, following first one, than another of these threads as we pursue the relationship between material cultural production and symbolic systems of meaning. Specifically, we will move between a specialized notion of late-capitalist popular culture, on the one hand, and an anthropological notion of a whole way of life, on the other. Indeed, one of the questions that this course will pursue is whether or not these two domains have more in common than is usually assumed, or even if the distinction can be maintained at all in a world shaped by transnational and global capital.
Our exploration into these questions will be focused by the notion of the everyday. Examining the terms and principles by which “culture” has been constituted as a realm of academic study and critique, we will ask what humanistic and social scientific academic study can—and cannot—tell us about the material and psychic domain of the everyday. The everyday is that largely taken-for-granted world where culture is lived, a sphere where agency and subjection exist in dialectical tension, where transnational flows of capital, commodities, and signs shape the ways in which people come to know and express themselves and their worlds. As the realm where culture is consumed, the everyday is where official knowledge confronts practical and unofficial knowledge, putting various theories to the test. By focusing our inquiry at the interface of “culture” and the “everyday” we will investigate the myriad ways that the everyday is constituted, managed, and administered, and subsequently how it is reimagined, remapped, and reinhabited. We will likely read work by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Michael Denning, Stuart Hall, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, Lauren Berlant, Laura Kipnis, Veena Das, Michel de Certeau, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Anna Tsing, Kathleen Stewart, Robin Kelley, James Scott, Lisa Lowe, and Paul Gilory.
Reading in this course will be heavy (usually a book a week, sometimes more) and often dense; however, no prior knowledge of critical theory or cultural studies is required or expected. Writing assignments will be somewhat lighter, combing informal responses papers with a longer final paper. Class will be a combination of discussion, lecture, and student presentations. This course is joint-listed between English and Cultural Studies and meets the core requirement for the Ph.D. minor in Cultural Studies. It is open to all interested students.
