Cultural Theory and Analysis
(aka Cultural and Text Theory and Cultural and Text Analysis)
English 4th semester

The two-semester course in Cultural Theory and analysis is an introduction to cultural studies. In particular the course seeks to provide the tools and methods that are helpful when writing the exam paper in Cultural Theory and analysis. During this semester of the course an exam exercise will be offered. The course does not only consist of lectures as the theoretical fields are combined with various analytical exercises.
The course compendium is available from the secretary of English, Evy Christensen. It's pink.

Important dates:

This semester:

1. The semiotics of everyday life (Baudrillard)
    Diagram
    Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (article is in Danish)

2. The feminization of plastic: Tupperware

3. Globalisation (Zygmunt Bauman) (The Panopticon) (+ hand-out of exam exercise)

4. Workshop: The exam exercise and how to write the exam paper
     Take a look at the model paper

5. Modernism/post-modernism

6. Historiography (Aristotle, Lyotard, Greenblatt).

7. British cultural studies and multicultural studies (Williams, Hoggart, Thompson)
    See video lecture in Danish about Tolkien and Rowling at http://www.dr.dk/DR2/Danskernes+akademi/Kultur___Sprog/Fantasy.htm

8. Workshop: Practical Media Analysis: film language, dramaturgy

The other semester:

1. Introduction: Cultural studies - the concepts and key terms
    The Culture Show

2. Cultural identity (Stuart Hall, Foucault)
    Bring prints of these pages to class.

3. Narcissism (Ziehe, Lasch)

4. Commodity aesthetics (Adorno, Haug)
    Bring prints of these pages to class.

5. The theory of the public sphere (Habermas)
    Bring prints of these pages to class.
    Habermas ideal division of society.
    Read this summary of Great Expectations.

6. The field of cultural production (Bourdieu, The spheres)

7. Multiculturalism
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiculturalism

8. Walter Benjamin and Cultural Materialism
    Read "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" or at least this summary.

Books:
Jørgen Riber Christensen, Compendium Cultural Theory and Analysis, available in the University book store. - - - The course book for both semesters.

Additional literature, not obligatory:
The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory, Polity Press 1994 - out of print, but a generally good source of texts
Francis Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture, Routledge, London 2000
Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory An Introduction, Routledge, London 2002
Tony Thwaitess et al., Tools for Cultural Studies An Introduction, MacMillan, South Yarra, 1994
Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies, Routledge 1990
Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, Polity Press 1997
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film art An Introduction, McGraw-Hill, N.Y. 1997
Ann Gray, Research Practice for Cultural Studies, Sage Publications, London 2003

Read an exam paper here. It is about The Teletubbies, Baudrillard and Narcissism.

Suggestions for exam papers:

• Haul videos and commodity aesthetics
• YouTube and the Panopticon
  
• Experience design, events, carnivals and the post-colonial world
• Starbucks, the rise of the coffee house and Habermas
• The culture of fear
• Globalization and the film District 9
• The grand and/or local narrative of death: Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened of
• The Globe Theatre in London and New Historicism
  
• Stephen Frear's film The Queen in the light of the critique of Habermas
• Shakespeare's leaders and business management theories
• Action chicks - tough women in popular culture
• Is knitting politically correct in this postmodern age? (The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs, Divas Don't Knit by Gil McNeil and Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas)
• Pastiche and Blade Runner
• What is Brad Pitt really like? The construction of a modern celebrity.
  
• Populism, Christopher Lasch's True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, and John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk or The Grapes of Wrath
• Disney’s Princess-series compared to the Bratz-series
  
• The sociological and ideological concept of Middle England and Midsomer Murders - or in Tolkien
• Multiculturalism: Bend It Like Beckham and the new diaspora
• Prince Charles' model village Poundbury in Dorset (perhaps compared to Disney's Celebration in Florida)
• ER (the NBC hospital drama) - intubating the ego
• Commoditification of heritage: a case study of the museum shop
• The construcion of identity and community: Goth sub-culture
• Fairies as a cultural metaphor of departure
• Consumption, taste and identity in everyday life: a case study of the Apple iPod
• Globalisation and cultural consequences
• A comparison of Ducksburg, Bedrock and Springfield
• A comparison of the 1975-version and the 2004-version of the film The Stepford Wives, and Desperate Housewives
• The concept of the fan and fandom (plus a media text that does not necessarily have to be Star Trek)
• The Barbie doll and the symbolic annihilation of women
• Discourse analysis: Foucault's epistemes and Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish
• Cowboy Bebop and its fan community
• The spiritual and the supernatural in the mass media
• The concept of childhood in Teletubbies compared to the concept of childhood in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience
• Celebrities as hyperreality: Julia Roberts, Notting Hill and Baudrillard
• Prisons, Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman
• Marilyn Manson as a cultural icon
• Princess Diana's dresses
• Is Harry Potter a narcissist? An investigation of family structures in the Harry Potter universe
• Sex and the City and metropolitan identity (Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin)
• Mass observation
• Youth culture: from A Clockwork Orange to Trainspotting
• Research practice for cultural studies: Ethnographic methods and lived cultures
• Requiem for the Twin Towers (Baudrillard)
• The pastiche: a dialogue of grand and local narratives? (Lyotard)
• The Gothic Novel and the separation of the spheres (Habermas)
• The representation of Africa in European visual and verbal language (Saussure)
• Attitudes to madness in the 18th and 19th centuries (Foucault)
• Marilyn Monroe's enclosure within sexuality in the 1950s
• The locations in Dickens' Great Expectations in the light of Habermas' theory of the division of bourgeois society into spheres
• A comparison of Ricki Lake and Samuel Pepys' Diary (Habermas, Foucault)
• Theodor Adorno's reading of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
• The marketing of art/literature/music for different audience segments
• Commodity aesthetics and American Psycho
• An analysis of the relationship between commodity aesthetics and use value in television commercials
• The changes of the boundaries in the field of cultural production in a specific period (Bourdieu)
• An investigation of the contemporary hierachy of taste (Bourdieu)
• A discussion of Peter Bürger's claim that "young readers tend to see literary characters as real instead of considering formal and narratological aspects of the text".
• Stuart Hall's de-centring of the subject and Coupland's Microserf - or Ellis' Informers
• Disneyland and Baudrillard's hyperreality
• British cultural studies: A comparison of Coronation Street with Eastenders
• The role of the gaze in David Lynch's The Elephant Man (Lacan)
• Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Habermas' cultural sphere
• Gilbert and Sullivan and the invention of tradition
• Is Seinfeld postmodern?
• Narcissim and the development of the Super-ego as reflected in a selection of vampire movies: van Helsing through time.
• A visit to Celebration

Some hints about writing the exam paper:

Don’t just summarize. If you are asked to give an outline, then it should be brief. Rather analyze.

Only one third of you paper should be (critically) descriptive about the theory you intend to use, and the rest should be your own analysis of the cultural subject you have chosen. You may also write a purely theoretical paper, but this demands a critical and independent approach to the theories in question.

The exam paper is neither a purely literary project nor media project. The paper is the analytical meeting-ground between a cultural theory and a text that is a reflection of a cultural phenomena. The text may for instance be a Tupperware container, a film, a television series, and it may also be literary. The crucial point is that you use a cultural analytical and theoretical approach, not a literary one. In this sense the exam paper is different from an ordinary project.

The exam paper should not be a small social-historical project full of facts and figures. Remember that it should be analytical and that it should contain material that is analyzed by you.

The text that you analyse must have been produced in the English-speaking world.

You should use the theories (or similar ones) that have been presented during the course. However, it may be a good idea to include some of the knowledge you have gained from other courses, just at they may give you an idea of what to write about.

Be ready to hand in a description of your field to your supervisor relatively early in the semester. It should be around half a page, and it should describe the approach you want to take and a list of the texts, also theoretical ones, you want to use.

Based on this description and a consultation with your supervisor, he or she will formulate the exam question. The exam question must be included on the title page of your exam paper.

If you do not hand in the description when it is due, or if you supervisor cannot approve of it, you cannot write the exam paper.

You are always welcome to ask any teacher (especially the teacher of the course in cultural theory and analysis) about any problems or whether you ideas are the right ones for the exam paper.

Studieordningen, Engelsk:

2009

§ 25 Modulet ”Kultur- og tekstteori og kultur- og tekstanalyse”
Modulets placering: 3. og 4. semester.
Modulets omfang: 5 ECTS-point.
Modulet omfatter:
• kulturvidenskabelig teori og kulturanalysemetoder
• et emnestudie inden for et udvalgt emne inden for området.
Mål:
Når modulet er afsluttet, skal den studerende kunne demonstrere:
Viden
• dybtgående kendskab til kulturvidenskabelige teorier og metoder
• forståelse af forskellige metoders forudsætninger, muligheder og begrænsninger og af deres anvendelighed i forhold til forskellige kulturfænomener
• særlig indsigt i et udvalgt emne inden for området på baggrund af et emnestudie.
Færdigheder
• Færdighed i at definere og analysere kulturvidenskabelige problemstillinger
• Videregående færdighed i analyse af kulturprodukter og kulturelle fænomener
• færdighed i at formidle opnået viden om kulturvidenskabelige problemstilinger i en adækvat form.
Kompetencer
• kompetencer i problemanalyse, -afgrænsning og -bearbejdning samt forståelse af kulturvidenskabelige og/eller tværfaglige problemkomplekser.
Tilrettelæggelse:
Modulet tilrettelægges som en kombination af et kursusforløb over 3. og 4. semester, hvor den studerende udarbejder skriftlige opgaver og/eller mundtlige oplæg, og et emnestudie på 4. semester, hvor den studerende skal lave en problemafgrænsning og en bibliografi inden for et selvvalgt emne inden for modulets område, som tilsammen danner baggrund for en hjemmeopgave.

Modulet afsluttes på 4. semester med følgende:
Prøve 17
En intern skriftlig prøve på engelsk i: Kultur- og tekstteori og kultur- og tekstanalyse (Cultural and Text Theory and Cultural and Text Analysis). Prøven har form af en 7-dages hjemmeopgave på grundlag af tekstopgivelser. Den studerende udfærdiger en problemafgrænsning og en bibliografi over tekstopgivelserne, som begge skal forhåndsgodkendes af eksaminator. På baggrund heraf fastsætter eksaminator opgavens emne. Besvarelsen må højst være på 15 sider.
Vægtning: Ved bedømmelsen vægtes det faglige indhold 4/5, den sproglige fremstilling 1/5. Der foretages en samlet bedømmelse af indholdet og den sproglige fremstilling, dog således at begge elementer skal være bestået. Opgaven bedømmes af eksaminator; opgaver, som eksaminator vurderer til ikke bestået, bedømmes tillige af en censor.
Bedømmelsesform: En karakter efter 7-trinsskalaen.
Omfang: 5 ECTS-point.
Besvarelsen skal demonstrere de læringsmål, som er angivet i modulbeskrivelsen ovenfor.
Ved bedømmelsen af prøvepræstationen vil der med henblik på opnåelse af karakteren 12 blive lagt vægt på, at den studerende demonstrerer en udtømmende opfyldelse af fagets mål med ingen eller få uvæsentlige mangler.