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S1312 Comparing Cultures

Golden Sean

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The quarterly journal CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture defines comparative cultural studies as “scholarship following tenets of the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies … in a global, international, and intercultural context and with a plurality of methods and approaches.” Ziauddin Sadar characterises cultural studies as aiming to examine cultural practices and their relation to power; understanding culture in all of its complex forms and the social, economic and political contexts in which it manifests itself; as the study and location of political criticism and action; as exposing and reconciling the division of knowledge between tacit culture-bound knowledge and objective or universal forms of knowledge; as a commitment to an ethical evaluation of society and a line of political action. This course will follow the history and evolution of cultural studies from their beginnings in the study of specific cultures, such as the working class and popular culture in Great Britain, through their evolution in the study of other cultures in a colonial and postcolonial context to their present role as a methodology for studying the construction and deconstruction of a variety of cultures in order to increase our understanding of other cultures as well as our own. Students will be provided with a course pack of readings to accompany the following topics.

 

Teaching & Evaluation Methods

The approach adopted in this course is cross-disciplinary but it does not require any preliminary knowledge of any of the disciplines that will come into play. Classroom lectures will be combined with brief compulsory reading assignments to promote interactive debates and discussions and to foment the preparation of classroom presentations by students. The evaluation will be based on a short critical analysis of at least one of the compulsory readings (to be handed in at mid-term, 30% of the final mark), on an oral presentation (either individual or group, depending on the number of students enrolled, 30% of the final mark), and on a term paper (40% of the final mark).