Critical Theory Cont Media

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course serves as an introduction to some of the central questions of critical theory as they help us to understand popular and mass cultures. The course follows the intellectual genealogy of Kantian and Hegelian philosophy as these critical projects have influenced European thinkers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault and Slavoj Zizek. In turn, we read the works of these writers in order to explore the contemporary media-scape that we inhabit. While many of the concerns of critical theory can be understood in relation to other forms of cultural production, such as literature, high art, anthropology, history, and sociology, for the purposes of this seminar we will be examining the readings with an eye to the impact of such phenomena as cinema, television, photography, the internet, recorded sound, etc. Central to the course’s project is to understand the effects of the philosophical work of European philosophers and writer as their analyses and critiques of human thought, politics, language and social interactions have shaped more recent work in such settings as the Frankfurt school, psychoanalysis, feminism, gender studies, critical race studies, semiotics, media theory, and cultural studies. Critical Theory assembles a range of intellectual practices, and all of them in some manner stem from two related enterprises: 1) the liberation of humans from the conditions of their existence that they may not realize function as limits upon their thoughts and actions and 2) the recognition that human symbolic systems—speech, writing, visual culture, music, etc.—function ideologically to represent the world we inhabit in ways that enrich and distort our understanding of the world.