PhD Program in Cultural Studies
Trent University 2011-12
CUST 6100: Intellectual Traditions in Cultural Studies
Course co-ordinator: Alan O’Connor
208 Scott House, Trail College
Office hours by appointment: aoconnor@trentu.ca
Faculty members in the PhD Program contribute to the course, normally in their area of expertise
and research.
Classes are scheduled for Tuesday evenings from 7pm to 10pm in WH 226
Weekly readings are normally available in the PhD Student Resource Room, SH 207.
The following books are available at the Trent Bookstore:
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Harvard University Press, 2006)
Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life (Harvard University Press, 2006)
Pollock, Adorno and others, Group Experiment (Harvard University Press, 2011)
Bourdieu, Distinction (Harvard University Press, 1984)
Foucault ed., I, Pierre Riviere: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (1975)
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minnesota, 1984)
Evaluation: The main evaluation for Year One comes in CUST 6125 Comprehensive Exam.
Attendance and participation in seminars is required to pass CUST 6100.
Week 1: Culture as experience and as structure (13 Sept)
Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary” (1958)
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, “Structure of Feeling,” “Hegemony”
E.P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class, Ch. 3 “Satan’s Strongholds”
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Stuart Hall, “Cultural studies: two paradigms,” Media, Culture and Society 1980, 2, 57-72
Week 2: The Marxist foundation (AO, C. Andrews) – 20 Sept
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part I
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “Preface”
Frederick Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism”
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Ch 1, Section 4, “The Fetishism of Commodities”
Antonio Gramsci, An Antonio Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs,
ch. VI, VII, X -- Hegemony, Politics, Intellectuals
Week 3: Max Weber, Georg Lukacs (DT) - 27 Sept
(class moved to another night)
Max Weber, From Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” “Bureaucracy”
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “Author’s Introduction,”
Ch. 2: “The Spirit of Capitalism,” last 4 pp. of Ch. 5 “Asceticism and the Spirit of
Capitalism”
Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, “Reification and the Consciousness of the
Proletariat”
Week 4: Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse (DT) - 4 Oct
(class moved to another night)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment,
“Dialectic of Enlightenment,” “Culture Industry” (Stanford, 2002 trans.)
Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” in his Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1972)
online at www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/hork.doc
Herbert Marcuse, “The concept of essence,” in his Negations: Essays in critical theory
(1969): 43–87.
Section on research methods (Week 5 – Week 8)
Week 5: Walter Benjamin (11 Oct)
Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”
and “Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil (not required for exam)
Richard D.E. Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic (Clarendon Press, 1991),
Ch. 5 “Red Wine, Red Politics: The Wine Poems in Context” (not required for exam)
Week 6: The Frankfurt School: social research (18 Oct)
Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno and others, Group Experiment: The Frankfurt School on
Public Opinion in Postwar Germany (Harvard University Press, 2011)
Adorno, Theodor W. et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (Heinemann, 1976) online
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/positivismusstreit/contents.html (not required for exam)
Week 7: Pierre Bourdieu (1 Nov)
Bourdieu, Distinction (Harvard University Press, 1984)
Bourdieu, “From revolutionary war to revolution,” in his Political Interventions (orig. pub. 1962)
Week 8: Michel Foucault (8 Nov)
Foucault ed. I, Pierre Riviere: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century (1975)
_____________________________________________________________________________
Week 9: Language and Structuralism (15 Nov)
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, Intro, ch. 3 “The Object of Study”;
Part 1, ch. 1 “Nature of the Linguistic Sign”; Part II ch. 1-4 “Synchronic Linguistics”
Claude Levi Strauss, Structural Anthropology, “Structural Analysis of Myth”
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, “Myth Today”
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, “Language”
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, “Discourse in the Novel”
Week 10: Heidegger, Derrida (AO / K. Mitchell) – 22 Nov
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” “The Origin of the Work of Art”
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, “Plato’s Pharmacy”
----- Of Grammatology, Part I, ch. 1 “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing;
Part II, ch. 1 “The Violence of the Letter”
----- Writing and Difference, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
Week 11: Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault (AO, J. Bell) – 29 Nov
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay II on guilt and bad conscience
Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, “The Notion of Expenditure”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, “Preface,” ch. 7-10
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Part III: “Discipline”
Week 12: Deleuze and Guattari (DP / G. Kalyniuk / K. Mitchell) – 6 Dec
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minnesota, 1987)
“Introduction: Rhizome”
“November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”
“1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity”
“1227: Treatise on Nomadology:- The War Machine”
Week 13: Habermas (AO, D. Mincheva) – 10 Jan
Habermas, The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere, Part II and Part VI
Habermas, “On Systematically Distorted Communication” Inquiry 13 (1970): 205-218.
Habermas, “Toward a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 360-375.
Habermas, "The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality" in The Hermeneutic Tradition: from
Ast to Ricoeur ed. Ormiston and Schrift (SUNY, 1990): 245-272.
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Chs. 7-12, on Derrida, Bataille, Foucault
Week 14: Freud, the apparatus and the work (JB) – 17 Jan
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Ch. 6 “The Dream-work”
------ Totem and Taboo, Ch. 4
------ “Mourning and Melancholia”
------ “Timely Reflections on War and Death”
in Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (Penguin, 2005)
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (new
translation) in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and
Other Writings on Media (Harvard, 2008).
------ Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Harvard, 2006)
Conrad, Heart of Darkness (not required for exam)
Week 15: Lacan (JP) – 24 Jan
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, (trans Bruce Fink 2002) “The Mirror Stage,” "Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis"
----- Seminar XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a”
Week 16: Beauvoir, Irigaray, Kristeva, Butler (VH, C. Ellis) – 31 Jan
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex,“Introduction”; ch. 25 “The Independent Woman”
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
Ch. 2: "This Sex Which Is Not One"
Ch. 3: "Psychoanalytic Theory: Another Look"
Ch. 4: "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine"
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, “Approaching Abjection”
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, “Introduction,” “Bodies that Matter”, “Critically Queer”
Week 17: Fanon (IM) – 7 Feb
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks, “The Fact of Blackness”
----- The Wretched of the Earth, “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”
Edward Said, Orientalism, “Introduction,” Ch. 1
Films: Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, Italy)
Fratz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (dir. Isaac Julien, 1996, Great Britain)
Week 18: Media and Technology (VZ, G. Timms) – 14 Feb
Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication, chs. 1-4
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy, “Prologue”; pp. 11-35; 124-127;
“The Galaxy Reconfigured”
Raymond Williams, Television, Ch 1.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
Film: The Man with the Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov, 1929, Russia)
Week 19: Science and Technology (David Holdsworth) – 28 Feb
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, Part I.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Introduction, Ch. 10
Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Part III: Ch VII-VIII
NOTE: Week 19 may be moved to Fall Term when Prof Holdsworth is available
Week 20: Postmodernism (6 Mar)
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Chs. 1 and 2, “Separation Perfected,
“The Commodity as Spectacle” (Zone Books, 1994 trans.)
Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism,” NLR (1984)
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
Lyotard, Differend, “Differend,” “The Sign of History”
Hayden White, Metahistory, “Introduction”
Week 21: Politics (DT) – 13 Mar
(class moved to another night)
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: "What Is Freedom?", "The Crisis in Culture: Its Social
and Political Implications", and "Truth and Politics".
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Ch. 13 “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of
Government”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (not required for exam).
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, “Lying in Politics” (not required for exam).
Week 22: Aesthetics and the Political (DP) – 20 Mar
Jacques Rancière, “Dissenting Words: Interview with Davide Panagia” Diacritics 30:2 (2000).
Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics” Theory and Event vol. 5, no. 3 (2001)
Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, “Distribution of the Sensible”
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, “Democracy or Consensus”
Conclusion:
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” Selected Work Vol. 4 (Harvard, 2003),
previously translated as “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940).
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. 1, Ch 14, Ch. 27.
Academic Integrity: Academic dishonesty, which includes plagiarism and cheating, is an extremely
serious academic offense and carries penalties varying from failure in an assignment to suspension from the
University. Definitions, penalties, and procedures for dealing with plagiarism and cheating are set out in
Trent University’s Academic Dishonesty Policy which is printed in the University Calendar and on the
university web site at: http://www.trentu.ca/deansoffice/policies_dishonesty.php.
Access to Instruction: It is Trent University’s intent to create an inclusive learning environment. If a
student has a disability and/or health consideration and feels that he/she may need accommodations to
succeed in this course, the student should contact the Disability Services Office (BL Suite 109; 748-1281;
disabilityservices@trentu.ca) as soon as possible.