Syllabus
Media and Cultural Studies:
Concepts, Traditions and Currents
Ph.Dr. Jiřina Šmejkalová, CSc.
BIBLIOGRAPHY – FURTHER READING
Alasuutari, P. (1995) Researching Culture: Qualitative Method and Cultural Studies. London: Sage.
Altick, R. D. (1967) The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago: Chicago university Press.
Bren, P. (2010). The Greengrocer and his TV. The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring. Ithaka and London: Cornell University Press.
Clifford, J, (1992) „Traveling Cultures“; in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler (edd.): Cultural Studies. New York/London: Routledge. Pp. 96–112
Curran, J. and Myung-Jin Park, eds. (2000), De-Westernizing Media Studies.Routledge.
Darnton, Robert – Roche, D. edd. (1989) Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775–1800. Berkeley/London/New York: University of California Press/New York Public Library.
Dobrenko, E. (1997) The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Easthope, A. (1991) Literary into Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Eisenstein, E. (1979) The printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early modern Europe (2 vols. ed.). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Engels, F. (1993) The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., Treichler, P. eds.(1992). Cultural Studies New York: Routledge.
Hoggart, R. (1992 [1957]) The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin.
Harding, J. and Pribram, E. D. eds.(2009) Emotions: a Cultural Studies Reader. Routledge.
Lutter, C. – Musner, L. edd. (2003) Kulturstudien in Österreich. Wien: Locker Verlag.
Burns, R. ed. (1995) German Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford University Press.
O’Sullivan, T. et al. (1994) Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies.London/New York: Routledge.
Storey, J. (1996) What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. New York: St. Martin Press.
Šmejkalová, J. (2007) “Cultural and Media Studies: The Politics of Location. An Interview with Ann Gray”, Media Studies 1:4. https://www.medialnistudia.fsv.cuni.cz/front.file/download?file=2007_04_06_smejkalova.pdf
Šmejkalová, J. (2011) Cold War Books in the ‘Other’ Europe and What Came After. Leiden, Boston, Brill.
Šmejkalová J., Lishaugen R. (2019): “Reading East of the Berlin Wall”, PMLA, no 134, pp. 178-187.
Thompson, E. P. (1985) The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, R. (1992 [1961]) The Long Revolution. London: Hoggarth Press.
(1983) Writing in Society. London: Verso.
(1983) Keywords. London: Fontana.
KEY PERIODICALS & links
The Cultural Studies Association (U.S.A.) http://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/
ACS - Association For Cultural Studies http://cultstud.org/
The International Journal of Cultural Studies http://ics.sagepub.com/content/current
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/journals/clcweb
Theory, Culture & Society http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/current
European Journal of Cultural Studies http://ecs.sagepub.com/content/current
New Formations: A Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/about.html
Culture Machine http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current
Webs of the key departments of Media and Cultural Studies in the USA and UK: University of California, Davis; Stanford; George Mason U.; Warwick; Goldsmith, Westminster, Sheffield, Leeds, Loughborough.
Go out to be ‚in’: http://jussiparikka.net/ http://www.bruno-latour.fr/ http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm http://tcjournal.org/drupal/ https://newmaterialism.eu/
Prague Libraries and resource centres: http://www.en.nkp.cz/ http://knihovna.fsv.cuni.cz/ https://www.lib.cas.cz/en/ http://www.vaclavhavel-library.org/en/ http://www.cefres.cz/en/cefres https://www.goethe.de/ins/cz/cs/index.html
Assessment – Final Essay – 10 pgs. - to be submitted by 19 January 2024
“Power, Hegemony and Identity in … (the filmic/literary text of your choice …)”
For dates and location see the SIS timetable.
Syllabus: 1. Introduction: Self-presentation, content & structure & assessment & resources & key concepts
Self-presentation
Name
Country & university & subjects you currently study
Your reasons for coming to Charles University/Prague
Your dreamed off professional future
Independent study & open book task for the next (!) session:
You will be assigned one of the following concepts to provide a brief definition and refer to the names of scholars who developed these concepts theoretically: 1. Culture, popular culture, subculture, everyday life, cultural consumption 2. Discourse, identity, gender, ideology, patriarchy 3. Power, hegemony, agency, propaganda, censorship, dissent 4. Representation, text, canon, reader, UGC - user generated content, performance, interactivity 5. Symbolic economy, cultural capital, culture industry 6. Encoding/decoding: dominant - negotiated - oppositional reading positions 7. Diaspora, subaltern, globalization, multiply identities, modern/post-modern subject
Support reading for next session and independent study:
Williams, R. (1973) “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” 1973. First published in New Left Review, Vol. 0, Iss. 82, (Nov 1, 1973). Reprinted in Williams, R. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, Verso 1980, pp 30-49.
Williams, R. (1983) Keywords. London: Fontana.
O’Sullivan, T. et al. (1994) Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies. London/New York: Routledge.
Šmejkalová, J. (2007) “ Cultural and Media Studies: The Politics of Location. An Interview with Ann Gray”, Media Studies 1:4. https://www.medialnistudia.fsv.cuni.cz/front.file/download?file=2007_04_06_smejkalova.pdf 2. What is Media & Cultural Studies? Concepts & Ideas & Origins & Inspirations: Birmingham and Beyond & ‘God fathers’
Independent study for next session: Watch and/or read one of the following products Czech Cold-War or post-Cold War culture, take notes and prepare the key points of further discussion:
Films:
The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze) dir. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (1965)
Daisies (Sedmikrásky) dir. Věra Chytilová (1966)
Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky) dir. Jiří Menzel (1967)
The Firemen's Ball (Hoří, má panenko) dir. Miloš Forman (1967) and/or any of Forman’s films!
Kolya (Kolja) dir. Jan Svěrák (1996)
Cosy Dens (Pelíšky) dir. Jan Hřebejk (1999)
Fiction and non-fiction:
Any text (in translation!) by one of the following authors:
Milan Kundera (The Joke)
Josef Škvorecký (The Miracle Game)
Bohumil Hrabal (I Served the King of England)
Václav Havel (The Garden Party/Zahradní slavnos
Annotation
Course description:
This course is designed to introduce students to the analytical terms and research methods, as well as interpretive strategies employed in contemporary media and cultural studies in order to support their capacity to analyse and conceptualize critically the transformation of print and books in contemporary media environment. Among the questions addressed are the following ones: Can a process of contesting a society’s media representations produce significant social change? How does the central project of British Cultural Studies relate to orthodox Marxist scepticism? Moreover, what is the methodological legacy of British cultural studies in the process of studying and researching democratization and commercialization of culture in former socialist countries of East and Central Europe after the end of the Cold War? There is a special focus on interdisciplinary approaches which allow examining the ways in which cultural processes are produced, distributed, consumed, and responded to.
Students are to investigate varied dimensions of cultural production and reception; learn to comprehend them in their broader social, aesthetic, ethical, and political contexts. The course also aims at introducing the ideas of key scholars who have shaped the development of the field, including Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Ann Gray, Paul Gilroy, John Fiske; key figures upon whom CS has drawn (Karl Marx, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci); and those who – more or less independently advanced some of its key impulses and challenges (Judith Butler, Edward Said, Robert Darnton).
Though the course is primarily designed for international/Erasmus students, capacity allowing it is also suitable for the domestic ones who need to master the appropriate conceptual frameworks and linguistic competence that would facilitate their study abroad.