Course Description

The Study of Cultures focuses on themes and methods that enable students to critically survey and think about fundamental concepts of culture, through the discussion of essayistic texts from the twentieth century, a period in which culture and its analysis were understood as responses to a sequence of political crises. The course offers a historically situated introduction to the study of cultures and prepares for the continuation of that work in Cultural Studies. Taking into consideration ideas of culture as a form of individual investment, collective development, or as an anthropological fact, this course will concentrate on ideological aspects of the distinctions between high and low culture in the Modernist period, as well as on the Frankfurt School’s contribution to the study of mass culture and the culture industry, touching also on Cultural Materialism in the transition to Cultural Studies.

 

Grading and Assessment

Students will be expected to have read the texts chosen for each class and to be prepared to discuss them orally in detail. The analysis of the texts is performed in dialogue with the students, who are encouraged to devise their own critical conclusions. Parallel to the gradual presentation of theoretical tools and of elements of historical context, the analysis and discussion of short texts in a “small group” will also be practised, based on a script with specific questions, after which the results of the discussion will be shared in the context of the “large group”.

This course will be taught in English.

Evaluation: two written tests (40% + 40%), with the possibility of replacing the second test with a written assignment, as well as quality of class participation (20%).

 

Bibliography (selection)

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber, 1962.

Horkheimer, Max & Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780-1950. London: Vintage, 2017.

Woolf, Virginia. Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.