CLS2140

Cultural studies and its figures of knowing

Amanda Macdonald

8 points - 3 hours per week - Second semester - Clayton

Objectives Upon successful completion of this subject, students should be able to demonstrate some familiarity with a diversity of critical endeavours in cultural studies; articulate descriptive and analytical reading techniques for the critical understanding of figurative patterns in cultural studies writing; discuss in some detail, in oral and written modes, the critical implications of particular figurative constructions of culture and its study; show an awareness of their own cultural/critical positionality in figurative terms.

Synopsis The subject aims to introduce students to a variety of critical-cum-theoretical texts in cultural studies and to study the ways in which each commentary figures the problem of knowing about one's own culture. Whilst attending to the matter of cultural studies as a grand cultural project, to the discipline's aims and to its objects of study, the subject is principally attentive to the fact that cultural studies is constituted by its own highly self-reflexive critical practices. The subject examines various metaphorical systems formed around the figure of the knowing subject of culture, that is to say the analyst of culture: this includes the spatiality of awareness, the modalities of awareness, and the personification of awareness. From Montesquieu's all-seeing Persian aristocrat travellers to Barthe's street-dwelling intellectual loner, from McCannell's ordinary tourist to Morris's discerning shopper, the figures change and with them the configurations of culture to which they relate. Each of the figurings is read in terms of its implications for concepts of intellectual positionality, the definition of culture, and intellectual-community relations. The subject argues that to understand cultural studies is to understand its metaphoric detail as well as its propositional content.

Assessment Class participation: 5% - First long essay (2000 words): 30% - Second long essay (2000 words): 40% - Tutorial presentation (30 minutes): 10% - Short essay (1000 words): 15%

Prescribed texts

Barthes R Mythologies Vintage
Montesquieu Persian letters Penguin

Recommended texts

Chambers I 'An impossible homecoming' in Migrancy Routledge
Freadman A 'The vagabond arts' in In the place of French Boombana
Frow J and Morris M 'Introduction' to Australian cultural studies reader Allen and Unwin
Mani M 'Multiple Mediations' in Inscriptions 5
McCannell D 'Introductions' to The tourist Schocken
Morris M 'At Henry Parkes Motel' Cultural Studies 2: 1

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