Required Texts
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Richardson, Allissa V. Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Week 1: Sites of Struggle
Eco, Umberto. “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare.” In Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, translated by William Weaver, 135-144. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
Welch, David. “The Conquest of the Masses.” In The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, 2nd ed., 10-37. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Week 2: Ideology and the Orwellian
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, 127-186. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Fisher, Mark. “It’s Easier to Imagine the End of the World Than the End of Capitalism.” In Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, 1-11. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009.
Fisher, Mark. “Lecture 1: What Is Postcapitalist Desire?” In Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, edited by Matt Colquhoun, 21-48. London: Repeater Books, 2021.
Viewing
Squid Game. Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk. Netflix, 2021. Television series, 9 episodes.
Week 3: Simulation and Pastiche
Friedlander, Emilie. “Social Anxiety: Why Amalia Ulman’s Fake ‘Middlebrow’ Instagram Is No Different From Yours.” The Fader, November 7, 2014. https://www.thefader.com/2014/11/07/social-anxiety-why-amalia-ulmans-middlebrow-instagram-feed-is-no-different-from-yours.
Sooke, Alastair. “Is This The First Instagram Masterpiece?” The Telegraph, January 18, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/photography/what-to-see/is-this-the-first-instagram-masterpiece/.
Dazed Digital. “Amalia Ulman: Meme Come True.” Dazed Digital, 2016. https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/23700/1/amalia-ulman-meme-come-true.
Ulman, Amalia. Excellences & Perfections. Instagram performance, 2014. Documentation at http://amaliaulman.eu/.
Viewing
El Planeta. Directed by Amalia Ulman. Holga’s Meow Pictures, 2020. Film, 79 minutes.
Inventing Anna. Directed by Shonda Rhimes. Netflix, 2022. Television miniseries, Episode 6: Friends in Low Places.
Week 4: Feminism/Postfeminism
Negra, Diane, and Yvonne Tasker. “Introduction: Feminist Politics and Postfeminist Culture.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, 1-25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Roberts, Martin. “The Fashion Police: Governing the Self in What Not To Wear.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, 227-248. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Week 5: Witnessing
Richardson, Allissa V. “Looking As Rebellion: The Concept of Black Witnessing.” In Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism, chapter 1, 18-42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Richardson, Allissa V. “The New Protest #Journalism: Black Witnessing as Counternarrative.” In Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones, and the New Protest #Journalism, chapter 3, 65-89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Week 6: Tribes - Subcultures, Lifestyles, Aesthetics
Giolo, Guilherme, and Michaël Berghman. “The Aesthetics of the Self: The Meaning-Making of Internet Aesthetics.” Cultural Sociology (2024). https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755241229570.
Week 7: Fandom
Baym, Nancy K. “Social Media and the Struggle for Society.” Social Media + Society 1, no. 1 (2015): 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115580477.
Baym, Nancy K., Daniel Cavicchi, and Norma Coates. “Music Fandom in the Digital Age: A Conversation.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 141-152. New York: Routledge, 2018.
Additional Recommended Readings
Semiotics and Media Theory
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: The Basics. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2017.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128-138. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
Ideology and Cultural Studies
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2007.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Cultural Writings. Edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Postmodernism and Simulation
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Feminism and Gender Studies
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
hooks, bell. Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000.
McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage, 2009.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18.
Race and Media
Bonilla, Yarimar, and Jonathan Rosa. “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States.” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (2015): 4-17.
Gray, Herman. Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Subcultures and Fan Studies
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
Filmography
El Planeta. Directed by Amalia Ulman. Holga’s Meow Pictures, 2020. Film, 79 minutes.
Inventing Anna. Directed by Shonda Rhimes. Netflix, 2022. Television miniseries.
Squid Game. Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk. Netflix, 2021. Television series, 9 episodes.