COURSE DESCRIPTION

As you no doubt noticed when you signed up for this course, most descriptions of English 207: Introduction to Cultural Studies (and I think there are about five available in the catalog right now) offer some version of the following disclaimer: “A commonplace about cultural studies is that it is ‘difficult to define’” (Rachel Goldberg). One instructor puts it like this:

Cultural studies is, by its nature, interdisciplinary and diverse. It is comprised of literary theory, media studies, sociology, political economy, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often consider how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, and/or gender. Given its inherent diversity, cultural studies can be regarded as a nebulous and “floating” discipline (Sydney Lewis).

Perhaps this lack of disciplinary definition and consensus excites or intrigues you… or perhaps you already find it frustrating! In either case, the first thing to understand about cultural studies is that nobody, including me, can offer you an authoritative, comprehensive description of it. As Sydney Lewis notes, it is “interdisciplinary,” which means its SUBJECTS and even its METHODS come from a variety of disciplines. Moreover, as Heyang Julie Kae goes on to explain in her course description, “While cultural studies has derived its inquiry and methodologies from specific intellectual and institutional formations, this field of study is also the subject of heated criticism.” In other words, there is even debate about the GOALS of cultural studies. So why this chaotic state of affairs? Well, the second thing to know about cultural studies is that its practitioners need this disciplinary freedom, even at the cost of some disciplinary disagreement, because they want to be able to move between and within the conventional disciplines in order to pursue questions that have been neglected or marginalized by conventional disciplines. In other words, cultural studies is generally adaptive, circumstantial and partial (in both senses of the word); its scholars modify their SUBJECTS, METHODS and GOALS in practice.

“In practice”: this term provides the transition to my next point. In lieu of a permanent definition of what cultural studies “is,” we will investigate how to “do” cultural studies—and what cultural studies, in turn, can “do.” How does one implement a cultural studies approach? What are the benefits—and challenges—of such an approach? Those are the overarching questions we will ask.

But of course we will also need a focus—something upon which to practice! For this class, the set of issues and materials we’ll explore have to do with “textual culture” in and about the urban environment. By “textual culture,” I mean the culture that is generated through various kinds of written texts: books, of course, but also newspapers, magazines, posters, fliers, street signs, graffiti and of course virtual texts that we encounter via the internet, such as web pages and email. For cultural studies scholars, the term “text” has come to mean just about any cultural artifact or artifice (which can be a noun or a verb) that can be “read,” or analyzed, in terms of the culture that has produced and/or consumed it: visual materials, such as paintings or photographs or comic books, musical recordings, performances, television shows, even mass-produced products like Barbie dolls, Eames chairs and the shirt you are wearing right now. The particular forms of “textual culture” we’ll examine are those that are present in and speak of the city.

Okay, this terrain is still pretty huge, so I’m going to delimit it further to focus our investigations: while the internet will provide us with resources and even models (more on this later), our main texts will be physical materials that 1) are printed, i.e., are reproduced through old-fashioned print technologies, or 2) are written on the “body” of Seattle itself, i.e., are found within this here urban environment. In particular, we’ll explore graphic novels and their relationship to conventional novels; and then we’ll research artifacts that you collect from your own urban locales. In order to orient these activities to cultural studies, we’ll preface them with a set of introductory and key cultural studies texts that help us understand its history and character—a few gateways and skyscrapers from the “city of texts” that is cultural studies scholarship.

To summarize: our study of cultural studies will consist of three basic parts.

I. Introductions to cultural studies. We'll start off by thinking about different origins for cultural studies and the disciplinary debates that inform these origin stories. Our readings from this part of the course will come from the course reader and from Bennett, et al, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. We’ll finish this section of the course with Sardar, Introducing Cultural Studies.
II. The graphic novel. We’ll read Paul Auster’s City of Glass twice: first the conventional and then the graphic novel version. We’ll look at some of the ways scholars have discussed the novel(s) and the "contexts" and "keywords" that we need to invoke to fully account for it/them. Then you will investigate a different graphic novel; you'll work with a group to make a brief presentation and write a short essay about it.
III. Urban artifacts. We'll think more explicitly about cultural studies methods at this point. Then you’ll collect and analyze artifacts from a particular urban site--a project that will culminate in an illustrated "tour guide" of the site, along with an essay.