Communication 6345
Contemporary Cultural Studies
Spring 2002

Prof. Gil Rodman
Office Hours: Tu, Th 5-6p and by appointment
CIS 3040 // 974-3025 // gbrodman@mindspring.com
course description and objectives

The past decade or so has seen the "cultural studies" label used to describe an ever-expanding range of books, journals, conferences, courses, job descriptions, and academic programs. In spite (because?) of the widespread use of the term, there's also widespread confusion as to just what "cultural studies" really is. From the very beginning, the range of intellectual projects that has traveled under the cultural studies banner has been too diverse to make simple and straightforward definitions of the field possible. While cultural studies isn't completely unbounded, it also doesn't have a clearly identifiable center: there is no single object of study, no body of theory, and no methodological paradigm that defines cultural studies neatly or completely.

What this means for this course is that we won't be able to map out all of the issues and subjects that currently occupy the attention of cultural studies scholars, though we will give detailed attention to some of the most important of these. We won't be able to examine cultural studies' tangled and fractious history in its entirety, but we will trace out enough of that history to sketch out a rough map of the current shape and state of the field. And we won't be able to fix cultural studies' current trajectories with absolute precision, but we will engage the question of where cultural studies might -- and should -- head in the future. The best way to think of this course, then, is not so much as a source of definitive answers, but as an opportunity to wrestle with productive and important questions.
required course materials
  1. Books
    All five titles are available at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia, Tampa (253-2638, inkwoodbks@aol.com).

  2. Photocopied essays
    The non-book readings for the class will be copied and distributed through a cooperative photocopying "tree": a method that's proven in the past to be a cheaper, quicker, and more efficient way for the whole class to get the non-book readings than a coursepack. We will set up the rotation for this system during our first meeting.

  3. Reliable, regular access to e-mail
    Our weekly discussions will spill over into (and be informed by) a course listserv that will require regular participation on your part. If you don't already have an e-mail account, you will need to make use of the free accounts and open-use computer labs provided by Academic Computing (LIB 608).
papers

Choose one of the following two options:
  1. One (1) 25-30 page research paper on a cultural studies related topic, due by 11 or 18 April. Those choosing this option need to submit a 1-2 page proposal for the project no later than 14 February. Ideally, the finished product should be suitable -- at least in terms of its subject matter -- for submission to a conference or a refereed journal. We will workshop these papers as a class on 25 April and/or 5 May.

    Precise dates for completing and workshopping these papers will depend on how many people choose this option. Until the actual numbers come in, you should use the earliest of the dates above as your presumed timetable.

  2. Three (3) 8-10 page critical response papers. The due dates for these papers are:

    paper # due date course sections
    1 21 February 17 January - 14 February
    2 28 March 21 February - 21 March
    3 25 April 28 March - 18 April

    You are free to write on whatever topic(s) you like from the material covered during the course sections associated with each paper. These essays should be thoughtful, critical engagements with the course material in question; they should not be mere summaries of the readings or regurgitation of our in-class/online conversations.

    N.B.: I will assume that anyone who hasn't turned in a research paper proposal by 14 February has opted to do the three shorter papers instead.
listserv

In the interests of expanding everyone's networking horizons in (hopefully) productive fashion, we will share this listserv with the members of a graduate seminar in cultural studies being taught by John Macgregor Wise at Arizona State University West.

The primary purpose of the list is to provide an additional forum for discussion of the issues raised by the assigned readings and our weekly sessions. Prompts intended to spur on the dialogue will be posted semi-regularly; just how often these appear, however, will depend largely on how active the list is on its own.

Given that listservs tend to evolve in amorphous and chaotic fashion, there will be no formal bookkeeping procedures used to assess your contribution to the list. As a rough guideline, I would estimate that ten substantial (i.e., more than a paragraph long) posts per person over the course of the semester would constitute a reasonable contribution to the discussion.

Occasionally, the list may be used to make course-related announcements (e.g., "please add the collected works of Marx to next week's reading") or to pass word on about other cultural studies related topics that may be of interest to the class (e.g., calls for papers, upcoming conferences, recently published articles and books, etc.). So check your e-mail often.

Full details on how to access the list will be made available on a separate handout.
grading policy

Those of you who've had classes with me before know that I'm not a big fan of grades at the graduate level. Presumably, your main reason for being here is that you have a genuine desire to learn something about cultural studies, not whether you can maintain a 4.0 GPA. Assuming you show up for class consistently, participate in our discussions (both in class and online) in a regular and meaningful fashion, and complete the assigned papers satisfactorily, you should get an A. That being said, in cases where people are clearly slacking off, I reserve the right to go deeper into the alphabet when I fill out my final grade sheet (and I've actually done so in the past). Under such unfortunate circumstances, your grade will be calculated as follows:
Attendance/in-class participation 15%
Listserv participation 10%
Paper(s)  
     Option 1 (research paper) 75%
     Option 2 (three short papers) 25% each
miscellaneous

The first version of this course that I taught involved a listserv -- CULTSTUD-L -- that has since gone on to be a publicly accessible discussion list with more than 1000 subscribers from over 40 countries around the world. You're more than welcome to join this listserv in addition to the official course list, but are under no formal obligation to do so. If you're interested, you should read the list's FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) first to (1) find out how to subscribe and (2) learn the basic rules of conduct for the list. The FAQ is available online at::

http://www.cas.usf.edu/communication/rodman/cultstud/faq.html

[Should you join the larger list, please remember that this is not the course list and that it would be Very Bad Form to confuse the two by posting course-specific messages to CULTSTUD-L.]
N.B. -- Readings taken from the required texts are coded as follows:
10 January
Introduction and overview

17 January
Defining cultural studies
CST&P -- "An Introduction to Cultural Studies"
BIABH -- "The Circulation of Cultural Studies"
BIABH -- "Cultural Studies: What's in a Name (One More Time)"
CS -- Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg, "Cultural Studies: An Introduction"
WICS -- Johnson, "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?"
WICS -- Nelson, "Always Already Cultural Studies: Academic Conferences and a Manifesto"
WICS -- Frow and Morris, "Australian Cultural Studies"
Bérubé, "Pop Goes the Academy: Cult Studs Fight the Power"
Hall, "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis in the Humanities"
Morris, "A Question of Cultural Studies"

24 January
Historicizing and placing cultural studies
BIABH -- "The Formations of Cultural Studies: An American in Birmingham"
BIABH -- "Where Is the ‘America' in American Cultural Studies?"
CS -- Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"
CS -- Steedman, "Culture, Cultural Studies, and the Historians"
WICS -- Williams, "The Future of Cultural Studies"
WICS -- Sparks, "The Evolution of Cultural Studies . . ."
WICS -- Hall, "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"
Schwarz, "Where Is Cultural Studies?"
Ang, "Doing Cultural Studies at the Crossroads: Local/Global Negotiations"
Wright, "Dare We De-centre Birmingham?: Troubling the ‘Origin' and Trajectories of Cultural Studies"
McNeil, "De-centring or Re-focusing Cultural Studies: A Response to Handel K. Wright"

31 January
Disciplining and defending cultural studies
BIABH -- "Introduction: ‘Birmingham' in America?"
D&D -- Nelson and Gaonkar, "Cultural Studies and the Politics of Disciplinarity: An Introduction"
D&D -- Dominguez, "Disciplining Anthropology"
D&D -- Grossberg, "Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies: The Discipline of Communication and the Reception of Cultural Studies in the United States"
D&D -- Gray, "Is Cultural Studies Inflated? The Cultural Economy of Cultural Studies in the United States"
WICS -- Rooney, "Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies"
WICS -- Pfister, "The Americanization of Cultural Studies"
Morley, "So-Called Cultural Studies: Dead Ends and Reinvented Wheels"
Morris, "Truth and Beauty in Our Times"
Morris, "The Truth Is Out There . . ."
Rodman, "Subject to Debate: (Mis)Reading Cultural Studies"

7 February
Detour through theory I
CST&P -- "Questions of Culture and Ideology"
CST&P -- "Culture, Meaning, Knowledge: The Linguistic Turn in Cultural Studies"
BIABH -- "Strategies of Marxist Cultural Interpretation"
Williams, "Culture Is Ordinary"
Williams, Keywords [selections]
Hebdige, "From Culture to Hegemony"
Hall, "On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview With Stuart Hall"
Slack, "The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies"
Hall, "Encoding/Decoding"
Hall, "Reflections Upon the Encoding/Decoding Model"

14 February
Detour through theory II
RESEARCH PAPER PROPOSAL DUE
CST&P -- "A New World Disorder?"
CST&P -- "Enter Postmodernism"
CST&P -- "Issues of Subjectivity and Identity"
Bérubé, "Just the Fax, Ma'am: Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter"
Grossberg, "Mapping Popular Culture"
Seigworth, "Sound Affects"
Deleuze and Guattari, "Rhizome"
Seigworth and Wise, "Deleuze and Guattari in Cultural Studies"
Wise, "Home: Territory and Identity"

21 February
Race, ethnicity, and nation
PAPER #1 DUE
CST&P -- "Ethnicity, Race, and Nation"
CS -- Chabram-Dernersesian, "I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don't Want to Be a Man: Writing Us -- Chica-nos (Girl, Us)/Chicanas -- Into the Movement Script"
CS -- Gilroy, "Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism"
CS -- hooks, "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination"
CS -- Wallace, "Negative Images: Towards a Black Feminist Cultural Criticism"
D&D -- Valaskakis, "Indian Country: Negotiating the Meaning of Land in Native America"
D&D -- Berlant, "The Face of America and the State of Emergency"
WICS -- Diawara, "Black Studies, Cultural Studies: Performative Acts"
WICS -- Hall, "Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies"
Gilroy, "The Crisis of ‘Race' and Raciology"

28 February
Gender, sexuality, and feminism
CST&P -- "Sex, Subjectivity, and Representation"
CS -- Crimp, "Portraits of People With AIDS"
CS -- Mani, "Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning"
CS -- Martin, "Body Narratives, Body Boundaries"
CS -- Kipnis, "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler"
CS -- Warner, "Spectacular Action: Rambo and the Popular Pleasures of Pain"
D&D -- Treichler, "How to Use a Condom: Bedtime Stories for the Transcendental Signifier"
WICS -- Franklin, Lury, and Stacey. "Feminism and Cultural Studies: Pasts, Presents, Futures"
WICS -- Long, "Feminism and Cultural Studies"
Stabile, "‘A Garden Inclosed Is My Sister': Ecofeminism and Eco-Valences"

7 March
NO CLASS

14 March
NO CLASS -- SPRING BREAK

21 March
Popular culture, mass media, and technology
CST&P -- "Television, Texts and Audiences"
CST&P -- "Youth, Style and Resistance"
BIABH -- "Wandering Audiences, Nomadic Critics"
CS -- Penley, "Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture"
CS -- Brunt, "Engaging With the Popular: Audiences for Mass Culture and What to Say About Them"
WICS -- Fiske, "British Cultural Studies and Television"
WICS -- Morris, "Banality in Cultural Studies"
Radway, "Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects"
Sterne, "A Machine to Hear forThem: On the Very Possibility of Sound's Reproduction"
Wise, "Intelligent Agency"

28 March
Everyday life, lived experience, and cultural space
PAPER #2 DUE
CST&P -- "Cultural Space and Urban Place"
CS -- Clifford, "Traveling Cultures"
CS -- Fiske, "Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life"
CS -- Frith, "The Cultural Study of Popular Music"
Seigworth, "Everyday Life Is Always Somewhere Else"
Hebdige, "Redeeming Witness: in the Tracks of the Homeless Vehicle Project"
Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television"
Morris, "Things to Do With Shopping Centers"
Grossberg, "From Media to Popular Culture to Everyday Life"
Neumann, "The Nostalgic Theater of the West"
Wise, "Communications: From SDI to NII Through the MSI"

4 April
NO CLASS

11 April
The university, cultural institutions, and pedagogy
RESEARCH PAPER DUE (group 1)
BIABH -- "Bringing It All Back Home: Pedagogy and Cultural Studies"
CS -- Bennett, "Putting Policy Into Cultural Studies"
CS -- Giroux, "Resisting Difference: Cultural Studies and the Discourse of Critical Pedagogy"
CS -- Radway, "Mail-Order Culture and Its Critics: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Commodification and Consumption, and the Problem of Cultural Authority"
D&D -- Appadurai, "Diversity and Disciplinarity as Cultural Artifacts"
Nelson and Watt, "Between Meltdown and Community: Crisis and Opportunity in Higher Education"
Henderson, "Communication Pedagogy and Political Practice"
Striphas, "The Long March: Cultural Studies and Its Institutionalization"
Striphas, "Banality, Book Publishing, and the Everyday Life of Cultural Studies"
Morris, "Publishing Perils, and How to Survive Them: A Guide for Graduate Students"
Michaels, "Bad Aboriginal Art"

18 April
Public policy, public intellectuals, and the public sphere
RESEARCH PAPER DUE (group 2)
CST&P -- "Cultural Politics and Cultural Policy"
CS -- Grover, "AIDS, Keywords, and Cultural Work"
CS -- West, "The Postmodern Crisis of the Black Intellectuals"
D&D -- Penley, "From NASA to The 700 Club (With a Detour Through Hollywood): Cultural Studies in the Public Sphere"
D&D -- Hanchard, "Cultural Politics and Black Public Intellectuals"
Bérubé, "Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism"
Bérubé, "Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Selling Out"
Graff, "Academic Writing and the Uses of Bad Publicity"
Moran, "Cultural Studies and Academic Stardom"
Morris, "Politics Now (Anxieties of a Petty-Bourgeois Intellectual)"

25 April
Catch-up and/or Workshops for final papers (group 1)
PAPER #3 DUE

2 May
Workshops for final papers (group 2)

3 May
Potluck
Bibliography of photocopied articles

Ang, Ien. 1998. Doing cultural studies at the crossroads: Local/global negotiations. European Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1): 13-31.

Bérubé, Michael. 1994. Bite size theory: Popularizing academic criticism. In Public access: Literary theory and American cultural politics, 161-178. New York: Verso.

Bérubé, Michael. 1994. Just the fax, ma'am: Or, postmodernism's journey to decenter. In Public access: Literary theory and American cultural politics, 119-135. New York: Verso.

Bérubé, Michael. 1994. Pop goes the academy: Cult studs fight the power. In Public access: Literary theory and American cultural politics, 137-160. New York: Verso, 1994.

Bérubé, Michael. 1998. Cultural criticism and the politics of selling out. In The employment of English: Theory, jobs and the future of literary studies, 216-242. New York: New York University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Rhizome. In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 3-25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilroy, Paul. 2000. The crisis of "race" and raciology. In Against race: Imagining political culture beyond the color line, 11-53. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Graff, Gerald. 1992. Academic writing and the uses of bad publicity. South Atlantic Quarterly 91(1): 5-17.

Grossberg, Lawrence. 1991. From media to popular culture to everyday life. Reprinted (1997) in Dancing in spite of myself: Essays on popular culture, 270-284. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. Mapping popular culture. In We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture, 69-87. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972-79, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Love, and Paul Willis, 128-138. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Hall, Stuart. 1986. On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry 10(2): 45-60.

Hall, Stuart. 1990. The emergence of cultural studies and the crisis in the humanities. October 53: 11-23.

Hall, Stuart. 1994. Reflections upon the encoding/decoding model. In Viewing, reading, listening: Audiences and critical reception, ed. Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis, 253-274. Boulder: Westview.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. From culture to hegemony. In Subculture: The meaning of style, 5-19. New York: Methuen.

Hebdige, Dick. 1993. Redeeming witness: In the tracks of the Homeless Vehicle Project. Cultural Studies 7(2): 173-223.

Henderson, Lisa. 1994. Communication pedagogy and political practice. Journal of Communication Inquiry 18(2): 133-152.

McNeil, Maureen. 1998. De-centring or re-focusing cultural studies: A response to Handel K. Wright. European Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1): 57-64.

Michaels, Eric. 1988. Bad aboriginal art. Art and Text 28: 59-73.

Moran, Joe. 1998. Cultural studies and academic stardom. International Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1): 67-82.

Morley, David. 1998. So-called cultural studies: Dead ends and reinvented wheels. Cultural Studies 12(4): 476-497.

Morris, Meaghan. 1988. Things to do with shopping centers. Reprinted (1998) in Too soon too late: History in popular culture, 64-92. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Morris, Meaghan. 1989. Politics now (anxieties of a petty-bourgeois intellectual). In The pirate's fiancée: Feminism, reading, postmodernism, 173-186. New York: Verso.

Morris, Meaghan. 1997. "‘The truth is out there . . .'" Cultural Studies 11(3): 367-375.

Morris, Meaghan. 1998. Publishing perils, and how to survive them: A guide for graduate students. Cultural Studies 12(4): 498-512.

Morris, Meaghan. 1998. Truth and beauty in our times. In Our cultural heritage, ed. John Bigelow, 75-87. Canberra: The Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Morris, Meaghan. 1997. A question of cultural studies. In Back to reality?: Social experience and cultural studies, ed. Angela McRobbie, 36-57. New York: Manchester University Press.

Morse, Margaret. 1990. An ontology of everyday distraction: The freeway, the mall, and television. In Logics of television: Essays in cultural criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp, 193-221. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nelson, Cary, and Stephen Watt. 1999. Between meltdown and community: Crisis and opportunity in higher education. In Academic keywords: A devil's dictionary for higher education, 1-14. New York: Routledge.

Neumann, Mark. 1999. The nostalgic theater of the West. In On the rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon, 17-62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Radway, Janice. 1988. Reception study: Ethnography and the problems of dispersed audiences and nomadic subjects. Cultural Studies 2(3): 359-376.

Rodman, Gilbert B. 1997. Subject to debate: (Mis)reading cultural studies. Journal of Communication Inquiry 21(2): 56-69.

Schwarz, Bill. 1994. Where Is cultural studies? Cultural Studies 8(3): 377-393.

Seigworth, Greg. 1994. Everyday life is always somewhere else. 13 Magazine (November): 18-19.

Seigworth, Greg. 1999. Sound affects. CULTSTUD-L column. Available online at http://www.cas.usf.edu/communication/rodman/cultstud/columns/gs-05-09-99.html

Seigworth, Gregory J., and J. Macgregor Wise. 2000. Deleuze and Guattari in cultural studies. Cultural Studies 14(2): 139-146.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl. 1996. The theory and method of articulation in cultural studies. In Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, 112-127. New York: Routledge.

Stabile, Carol A. 1994. "A garden inclosed is my sister": Ecofeminism and eco-valences. In Feminism and the technological fix, 48-67. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sterne, Jonathan. 2001. A machine to hear for them: On the very possibility of sound's reproduction. Cultural Studies 15(2): 259-294.

Striphas, Ted. 1998. The long march: Cultural studies and its institutionalization. Cultural Studies 12(4): 453-475.

Striphas, Ted. 2000. Banality, book publishing, and the everyday life of cultural studies. Culture Machine 2. Available online at http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/articles/art_strip.htm

Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture is ordinary. Reprinted (1989) in Resources of hope: Culture, democracy, socialism, 3-18. New York: Verso.

Williams, Raymond. 1983. Keywords, rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wise, J. Macgregor. 1997. Communications: From SDI to NII through the MSI. In Exploring technology and social space, 113-135. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Wise, J. Macgregor. 1998. Intelligent agency. Cultural Studies 12(3): 410-428.

Wise, J. Macgregor. 2000. Home: Territory and identity. Cultural Studies 14(2): 295-310.

Wright, Handel K. 1998. Dare we de-centre Birmingham?: Troubling the "origin" and trajectories of cultural studies. European Journal of Cultural Studies 1(1): 33-56.