Global Media Cultures

Dr. Jeffery P. Dennis

 

[This is a sample syllabus from a previous semester. Check Blackboard for the syllabus for your class.]

 

Introduction

Every day we are inundated by thousands of mass media images, telling us what life “is” or should be like, telling us what is right, normal, and natural, telling us what can be known, thought, and imagined.  More often than not, the images are absolutely complicit with the dominant ideologies of other social institutions. But we are not the passive robots that the Frankfurt School once imagined, being quietly brainwashed into Stepford citizens.  We know how to tweak the mass media texts, to resist and subvert them, to appropriate them as our own.  This course will explore a variety of subcultures organized around the production and consumption of mass media in the global arena.

 

Prerequisites
There are no prerequisites.

 

Textbooks

Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Matt Hills, Fan Cultures.  Routledge, 2001.

Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis: Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession. Harvard UP, 1999

 

Course Requirements
Link to Class Rules

 

Project

Projects may be completed alone or in groups of  two to four persons, and should consist of traditional sociological research (ethnographic interviews, content analysis, participant observation, survey).  You may either present them before the class or submit a paper of 15-20 pages. 40% of final grade. 

 Link to Writing Guide.

Projects will be graded on:

  • Knowledge of sociological principles.

  • Insight into a sociological problem concerning human sexuality and social change.

  • Thoroughness of analysis.

  • Logic.

  • Creativity.

  • Classroom delivery.

Note that observation or description of intimate encounters is not permitted.

 

Examinations

2 examinations, essay and short answer format,  take home, open book. Examinations must be typed, doubled spaced, with pages stapled and numbered.  Complete sentences, an academic writing style, and a minimum of grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors are required.  60% of final grade.  

Course Outline

Week #1: Introducing Media Cultures

Read: Lisa A. Lewis, Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Routledge, 1992 (selection).

 
Week #2: Movie Stardom

Read: Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity.

 

Week #3: Comic Book Collectors
Read: Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. University Press of Mississippi, 1999 (selection).

 
Week #4: Star Trek Fans
Read: John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences: Doctor Who, Star Trek, and their Fans. Routledge, 1995 (selection).

 
Week #5: Dark Shadows Fans
Read:  “Secrets, Closets, and Corridors Through Time: Negotiating Sexuality and Gender Through Dark Shadows Fan Culture.” In Cheryl Harris, Brenda Dervin, and Alison Alexander, eds., Theorizing Fandom. Hampton, 1998.

 
Week #6: Elvismania
Read: Greil Marcus, Dead Elvis.

 
Week #7: Slash Fiction
Read: Lisa A. Lewis, Adoring Audiences: Fan Culture and Popular Media. Routledge, 1992.

 
Week #8: The Book of the Month Club
Read: Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book of the Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire.  University of North Carolina Press, 1999 (selection).

 
Week #9: Theorizing Media Cultures
Read: Matt Hill, Fan Cultures, Ch. 1 (“Fan Cultures Between Consumerism and Resistance.”)

Week #10: Strategies of Resistance
Read: Matt Hill, Fan Cultures, Ch. 3 (“Fan Cultures Between Knowledge and Justification”) and 4 (“Fan Cultures Between Community and Hierarchy.”). 

 
Week #11: Strategies of Resistance
Read: Matt Hill, Fan Cultures, Ch. 5 (“Fandom Between Cult and Culture”) and 6 (“Media Cults: Between the Textual and the Extratextual.”).

 
Week #12: Globalizing Media Culture

Read: Matt Hill, Fan Cultures, Ch. 7 (“Cult Geographies: Between the Textual and the Extratextual”).

 

Week #13
Student Presentations.

 

Week #14
Student Presentations.