1 Semester

36 hours

Hawthorn

Nil

Nil

Credit Points: 25 Credit Points

Related Course/s:

A unit of study in the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - Cultural Studies Strand

Aims & Objectives:

The aim of this unit of study is to introduce students to the whole range of recent developments in cultural and social theory.

Teaching Methods:

Seminars

Assessment:

Two essays

Generic Skills Outcomes:

• Critical and intellectual skills.
• Project management skills.
• Research and writing skills.

Content:

Theories of semiotics, language, narrative, texts, discourse and ideology will be examined, and structuralist, hermeneuticist, post-structuralist, Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of culture will be looked at. The dialectics of representation, of recognition and of labour will be examined from these different theoretical frameworks. The main theorists whose work will be considered are Jameson, Harvey, Barthes, Saussure, Peirce, Levi-Strauss, Ricoeur, Lacan, Althusser, Zizek, Bakhtin, Derrida, Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, and Habermas. In the final week, postmodern science will examined as a cultural phenomenon.

Reading Materials:

Baynes, K, Bohman, J, & McCarthy, T (eds), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? Cambridge, MIT Press, Mass, 1987.
Benhabib, S & Cornell, D, Feminism as Critique, Polity, Cambridge, 1987.
Bernstein, RJ, The New Constellation, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991.
Collier,P & Geyer-Ryan, H (eds), Literary Theory Today, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990.
Habermas, J, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990.
Hayles, K, Chaos Bound, Cornel University Press, Ithaca, 1989.
Jameson, F, Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, London, 1992.
Stam,R, Burgoyne, R & Flitterman-Lewis, S, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, Routledge, London, 1992.
Toulmin, S, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1990.