PLEASE NOTE THAT IN SPRING 2008, THIS COURSE WILL FULFILL THE LITERARY THEORY REQUIREMENT

In the days when multimillion-dollar spectacles fight for attention alongside “user generated content”, when your favorite music might come from Mali, Iceland, or the basement next door, it is hard to say where “popular culture” really takes place. Does it descend from the top down, mass consumerism fine-tuned by niche marketing? Or does it spread from everywhere outward, irrepressible creativity always breaking free from the control of plans and programs?

This course will explore contemporary “everyday culture,” the culture we make for ourselves. It will involve both critical and creative work. On one hand, we will map and analyze the field of cultural practices and artifacts with which we are already engaged. On the other hand, we will make our own cultural artifacts in an experimental mode, learning new practical attitudes toward media technologies and social relations. If things go well, we’ll reach a new understanding of the relationship between work and play, between producing and consuming, and between critique and creativity.

This course will involve a lot of reading, writing, talking, and collaborating. We will develop our collective projects by taking advantage of the various distinctive kinds of skills and knowledge each of us can offer. This is a course that calls for active participation; more than that, it is a course that will make sense only if you feel a commitment to the material we study and to the project of the course itself.