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Reading popular culture is designed to provide students with the theoretical vocabulary and critical skills to analyze the media-oriented culture in which they live and learn. This course takes popular culture seriously and considers the ways that popular culture comes to mean for various audiences. Through an examination of aspects of popular culture practices and theories, we will explore "culture" as a lived set of practices spanning a variety of forms which cuts across (and informs) categorizations such as class, gender, sexuality, race, and citizenship. Using the methodology of cultural studies, the course will survey the history of the term popular culture as well as current critical engagements with it.
For the final section of the course, you will sharpen and refine the skills you have developed by interrogating one specific popular culture site: the action film.
1940s pulp novels, the O. J. Simpson trial and The O.C. have more in common than just their sensational plots and villainous characters; they are all also manifestations of melodrama.
Though sometimes critiqued as 'just mass entertainment,' melodrama has come into its own in recent years as a genre worthy of close attention from cultural critics.
Indeed, since the late 1970s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the melodramatic mode from within novel theory, feminist criticism, and film theory. Sparked by Peter Brooks The Melodramatic Imagination and by Christine Gledhill's collection of essays Home is Where the Heart Is, critics have raised many questions about the relationships of melodrama to culture and to particular historical moments.
Although we will take a brief look at sources in the nineteenth century, we will spend the majority of the course studying the narrative and generic conventions of melodrama in 20th century American fiction, film and pop culture. Reading selections from literary criticism, literary theory and film studies alongside novels and non-fiction will help us develop a working definition of melodrama. We will then use this definition to study melodrama's transmutations through history and in varied media. In so doing, we will ask what melodrama, as a genre, has to do with American Culture, especially how it addresses and uses issues of race and class.
Some of the questions we will address together include:
What does it mean to read melodramatically? What strategies does melodramatic interpretation require? What does a melodramatic lens privilege? How can reading melodramatically challenge the dismissal of "low-brow" cultural forms? What happens when the melodramatic is translated from page to screen? How can reading melodramatically highlight the problematic and oppressive racial, gender and class politics still at work today? How prevalent is the melodramatic today?
Please note that screenings are required. Do not register for this course if you cannot attend the weekly screenings.
Novels may include: Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Fannie Hurst Imitation of Life (1933), James M. Cain Mildred Pierce (1941), Nicholas Sparks The Notebook (1999)
Films and television shows may include: Birth of a Nation (1915), Imitation of Life (1959), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Jerry Springer Show, Cruel Intentions (1999), Monster's Ball (2002), The Notebook (2004), The O.C.
While Lara Croft combines fashion and firearms, Bridget Jones counts calories and writes about her neuroses. Buffy slays vampires while the women of Sex and the City slay relationships. Jessica Simpson plays chaste and ditzy wife to her Ricky Ricardo-esque husband while the new Stepford Wives (2004) and ABC's Desperate Housewives treat traditional femininity with, respectively, nostalgia and irony.
What do these disparate icons of femininity tell us about gender and power today? Why is femininity such a site of struggle? How has femininity evolved over the past fifty years? Who is femininity available to? And how has masculinity responded?
The broad context for this course is the study of the relationship between gender and representational texts. The particular context for this section, however, is to investigate representations of American femininities in the 20th and 21st centuries. This course will treat femininity as a site of struggle and examine its icons and rebels in order to understand how femininity has been articulated, disarticulated and rearticulated by literary and filmic texts and the people who consume them.
Through a focus on a range of representational texts, the class will address images of white, heterosexual, able-bodied women with cultural and historical specificity in order to understand their construction and power. Further, we will consider the implications of these representations on the lived experiences of women and men as they seek to articulate a gendered identity in the US. In other words, with these icons of femininity up on the screen, how do women and men make sense of their own gendered identities and relationships?
Readings will include contemporary fiction, non-fiction and a few theoretical texts. Assignments will include two papers and a final exam. Attendance at the Monday night screenings is required.
Films to be screened include: The Stepford Wives (1975); The Stepford Wives (2004); Sex and the City; American Psycho (2000); Fight Club (1999); Desperate Housewives; Little Black Book (2004); All About Eve (1950); The Women (1939); Kill Bill vol. 1 & 2 (2004)
While princess culture encourages girls to wait for their prince, raunch culture encourages girls to go wild. Sarah Palin is declared an icon of the "new feminism" as desperate housewives and equally desperate bachelorettes rule the television screen. Roe v. Wade is in danger of being overturned and just last month Canada's female ski jumping team has to go to the supreme court to fight for the right to compete in the 2010 Olympics (they lost).
The broad context for this course is an introduction to the central issues in Women's Studies and feminist scholarship. Recognizing gender as both a social construction and a key organizing category insocial formations, we will investigate select topics related to women including sexuality,gendered violence, women's work, beauty culture and representationsof femininity in popular culture.