Indústrias da Cultura nos EUA / Culture Industries in the USA

LAC2.12830

6

1

1

Bernardo Manzoni Palmeirim

Inglês / English

After introducing some founding texts (‘Frankfurt School’ and key influences) and groundwork concepts (reproduction, capitalism, cultural commodities, mass culture, ‘media’), we will traverse the modern age, starting with early 20^th-century ‘legacy media’ and working our way up to the contemporary digital era. We will focus, one by one, on specific American cultural industries and how they have transformed Western society: the press, radio, film, advertising, television, literature, music and streaming, comics, digital platforms and AI-generated art. We will discuss such topics as how Western society is enmeshed in capitalist structures of meaning; how American cultural commodities have created and affect our value systems: ideologies and representations of cultural identity (gender, class, patriotism, etc.); the differences between popular, high, and mass culture; etc. The course will also include a brief workshop on semiotics, providing students with practical tools to critically interpret American advertising, promotional and propaganda materials.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Prism Key Press, 1936. EPUB.

Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries. 4th. SAGE, 2018.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 1944. Continuum, 1969.

Oakley, Kate and Justin O'Connor. The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries. Routledge, 2015.

Poell, Thomas, David B. Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy. Platforms and Cultural Production. Polity Press, 2022.