CULT132-18S2 (C) Semester Two 2018

Cultural Studies: Reading Culture

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 16 July 2018
End Date: Sunday, 18 November 2018
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Friday, 27 July 2018
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Friday, 12 October 2018

Description

An introduction to Cultural Studies, emphasising aspects of the field that are most pertinent to English Studies: the textuality of culture, cultural history, and cultural value and taste.

This course is an introduction to Cultural Studies.  The focus is on the textuality and readability of culture, looking at how our everyday life is a constant exercise in encoding and decoding our cultural environment, including elements that are commonly thought to be ‘natural’.  While the course reads many different types of cultural ‘texts’ – including television programmes, films, advertising campaigns, theatrical performances, print publications, websites, museums, zoos and tourist enterprises – it does so with the aim of explaining in accessible ways the theories and concepts that characterize cultural studies as a field.

Topics for 2018 include the following: how to ‘read’ culture; ideology; nature and culture; sex and gender; subculture; digital culture; environments and ‘things’; humans and (other) animals; extinction and survival; popular culture; good taste and bad taste; and sentiment and nostalgia.

(Image: "Mona" by Incase, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.)

Learning Outcomes

  • In this course you will learn:
  • awareness of the ways in which cultural texts may be produced and received in different times and places;
  • knowledge of the debates surrounding competing notions of ‘culture’, ‘cultural value’ and ‘taste’;
  • improved capacity to think about the processes by which cultural phenomena carry the values and anxieties of the societies from which they emerge;
  • understanding and ability to make use of various concepts and methods integral to cultural studies analysis.

Restrictions

Equivalent Courses

Course Coordinator / Lecturer

Erin Harrington

Lecturer

Philip Armstrong

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage 
Take-Home Test 25%
2000 Word Essay 35%
Take-Home Test 40%

Textbooks / Resources

All readings will be provided online.

Course links

Library portal

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $746.00

International fee $3,038.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Humanities .

All CULT132 Occurrences

  • CULT132-18S2 (C) Semester Two 2018