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 IMPORTANT LINKS:For scheduling of courses, please consult the Trent Timetable. FALL-WINTER 2011-2012 courses in PeterboroughPlease note that our course numbers have changed as of 2010-11 from 3 digits to 4 digits. The previous course number is noted beside the new one. CUST 1000Y (previously CUST 100): Introduction to the study of Modern Culture is taught by a team of Department staff and is taken by all students majoring in Cultural Studies. Though the content of this course changes from year to year, it generally begins with an introduction to the concept of culture before turning to the investigation of a wide range of materials exploring methods of study which help us to understand the contemporary cultural landscape. Students are introduced to a multiplicity of ways in which the tradition of cultural theory suggests avenues for reflection on how culture at once informs, and is informed by, social, political, subjective, and aesthetic concerns. Instructors: V. de Zwaan, I. Junyk, and staff. CUST 1000J - Winter course offering CUST 2016Y (previously CUST 216): Introduction to Visual Studies features a communications approach in aesthetic theory for the study of the visual arts, images, and sites. It considers ritualistic, mnemonic, architectural and sculptural sites in preparation for an inquiry into modern picturing from its extraordinary emergence in Renaissance art and science to its hyperbolic technologization in photographic, filmic, televisual and digital media. Field trip costs. $100 Instructor:G. Timms (Fall term) Jonathan Bordo (Winter term) CUST 2022Y (previously CUST 222): Culture in the Novel Considering the historical development of the novel from the eighteenth century Enlightenment to contemporary postmodernism, this course examines the novelistic form as a complex site that both reflects and challenges its social, political, and cultural contexts. Readings include Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Pynchon, Rushdie, Sebald, Stendhal. Prerequisite: 4 university credits. Please note that texts will likely be ordered through Titles Bookstore on George St. (743-9610). Instructor: I. Junyk CUST 2027Y (previously 3953): Noir Images of Crime CUST/ENGL 2029Y (previously CUST-ENGL 229): Science fiction Introduction to the history, theory and representative works and authors of science fiction, from Shelley and Wells to Dick, Le Guin, and Gibson. Will examine stories of alternate worlds, technoculture, and space adventure, including cyborgs, alien encounters, non-contemporary earth life and human destiny. There are two contact hours weekly. Instructors: V. Hollinger and staff. CUST 2035Y (previously CUST 235): Media and society serves as an introduction to the history, sociology and critical interpretation of contemporary mass-communicated culture, both as an overall formation and with reference to such specific elements as the newspaper press, advertising, network TV and recorded popular music. The course excludes CUST/ SOCI 240. There is a one-hour lecture and seminar weekly. Instructor: G. Zielinski and staff. CUST 2045Y (previously CUST 245): Music and society is an introduction to music as cultural practice. The course explores formulations of the relationship between music and society offered by ethnomusicology, sociology, semiotics and feminist theory. Emphasis is placed on the development of listening skills through an engagement with a variety of musical texts and practices from Western art music, popular music and world music traditions. No formal background in music is required. There is a lecture and seminar weekly, as well as a field trip fee of up to $45. Instructor: M. Morse and staff. CUST 2050Y (previously CUST 250): Civilization and human nature is an introduction to the thought of several of the founders of modern social and cultural theory including Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Such topics as ideology and illusion, reason and eros, individualism and alienation, as well as the idea of progress will be explored. There is a one-hour lecture and one-hour seminar weekly. Instructor: D.Torgerson CUST 2065Y (previously CUST 265): Sex/sexuality/sexual difference is an interdisciplinary introduction to feminism and queer theory which explores the problematic and limits of sexual identity. Through considerations of fiction, autobiographical writing, film, painting, and theoretical texts, the course explores what we mean when we refer to someone's (or our own) sex, gender, or sexuality. The implication of these terms in broad socio-political antagonisms will be explored, as will the specifics of the psychoanalytic approach to the question. There are two hours of contact weekly plus occasional film screenings. Instructor: J. Penney CUST 2070Y (previously CUST 270): History and Theory of Theatre will examine some key traditions and developments in the evolution of European theatrical practice and dramatic theory from Classical Greek tragedy to late 19th-century naturalist drama. Emphasis will be placed on the evolution of theatre in relationship to the development of culture and society at large, including religion, social classes, and politics. We will discuss some of the most famous literary debates and wars of theatre, including Corneille’s Battle of The Cid, Molière’s War of Comedy, and Hugo’s Battle of Hernani. There is one lecture and one seminar weekly. Instructor: D. Manole CUST 2080Y (previously CUST 280): History and theory of the cinema is an introduction to critical interest in the medium through texts representing film movements and major trends in film theory. Films from around the world, as well as critical studies on the medium, apparatus, institution, and spectator, will help us to consider a technologized visuality, the production of meaning and pleasure, and the politics of criticism. There is a field trip fee of $10. Instructor: Z. Baross (Fall term). TBA (Winter term) CUST 2111Y (previously CUST 211): Drawing is a basic drawing course exploring techniques and ideas in the visual arts. Historical and contemporary issues are examined through practical hands-on experiences. Art materials fee: $75. Limited enrolment. Prerequisite: 4.0 university credits or permission of instructor. Recommended pre- or co-requisite: CUST 2016Y (previously 216). Instructor: M. Cherry CUST 2560H (previously 260, and excluded 2060Y):The Making of the (Post)Modern Body investigates the origins and explores the many manifestations of what the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard called the “omnipresent cult of the body” today. Following a brief historical review of the dominant paradigms of body images – the inheritance of Greek idealism, of Christianity and of the scientific rationalism of the 17th century – the course turns to contemporary art, science, and technology, to representations, politics, cultural practices, and critical discourses to observe the historically unprecedented proliferation of scientific, medical, legal, cultural and political interventions that both redefine and transgress the body as a thing of nature. A selection of critical literature by Foucault, Rabinow, Agamben, Bataille, and Didi-Huberman, among others, will be supplemented by representations in literature, painting, and the cinema. Instructor: Z. Baross (Fall Term) CUST 3015Y (previously CUST 305): Modernism and the avant-garde This course examines one of the most important cultural movements of the twentieth century—modernism. It traces this movement from its genesis in the dynamic city culture of the fin de siecle, to its embodiment in avant-garde art, literature, and cinema, and concludes by considering its problematic transition into "postmodernism.". Instructor: S. Marentette CUST 3022Y (previously CUST 322): Experimental Fiction. This course traces an international "tradition" of modern and contemporary experimental texts, focusing on such figures as Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Rushdie and Pavic. Individual works are related to theories of narrative which help to place them in both aesthetic and cultural contexts. Prerequisite: 4 university credits. Instructor: V de Zwaan CUST/ENGL 3029Y (previously CUST/ENGL 329): Utopia (Future Fiction) is a study of the speculative social imagination in utopian and anti-utopian literature of Western modernity. This course examines the narrative construction of equality, progress, gender, identity, technoculture, globalization, and cultural politics from More and Bacon in the Renaissance to Orwell, Piercy, and Lem in contemporary science fiction. Instructor: G. Murphy CUST/IDST 3032Y (previously CUST/IDST 332): Images in Global Media examines issues of global media, cultural imperialism, and alternatives such as Third Cinema and community radio. Within the context of Latin American cultural studies, the course explores debates about the lettered city, a hidden civilization, postmodernism, cultural memory, and popular culture. Instructor: A. O'Connor and staff. CUST 3045Y: World Music (previously CUST 345): Through a focus on African and Afro-diasporic musics (from West African drumming to blues, and calypso) we will consider the problematics of “world music,” a category that raises issues of globalization and hybridity. We will examine selected musical traditions, mapping the complex, interactive networks of musical performance, pleasure, and politics. Field trip fee: $45. Prerequisite: 4.0 university credits including CUST 2045Y (245) or permission of the instructor. Instructor: M. Arnold CUST 3070Y (previously CUST 370): Theatre in the 20th Century investigates the continuous redefinition of Western theatre, determined by rapid changes in the cultural, social, and political contexts, as well as by the influence of technological discoveries and mass media. To answer the question What is theatre?, we will examine representative plays, theoretical texts, and performance styles, ranging from realist theatre and theatre for young audiences to post-modern performance and cyber theatre, including the work of Chekhov, Cocteau, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Stelarc. Classes and assignments have a practical and academic character. Field trip $50. Instructor: D. Manole CUST 3081Y (previously CUST 381): World cinema offers a wide-ranging exploration of world cinema from diverse theoretical perspectives. We will examine associated notions (third cinema, national cinema, guerrilla cinema, countercinema) that articulate the cinema’s relation to society and politics, as well as theories of the cinema as medium or apparatus, including semiotic, psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches. Prerequisite: 4.0 university credits. Instructor: G. Norton CUST 3175Y (previously CUST 375): Theatre workshop: staging ideas is a practical course in modern acting with a focus on methods of performance in works that dramatize ideas and the conflicts between them. CUST 270 or 370 is a pre- or co-requisite. Otherwise permission of the chair is required. There is a workshop fee of $50 and enrolment is limited to 20. There are four contact hours weekly. Instructor: R. Winslow CUST 3550H(previously CUST 350, normally 3050Y):Advanced Studies in Cultural Theory CUST 4010Y and 4020D (previously 401 and 402D): Honours thesis. The thesis is a major research project of approximately 15 000 words worth two credits. The single credit 4010Y is assigned when a student writes a thesis for CUST and also for another Department, which assigns the other credit; this is usually undertaken as part of an Honours joint-major degree. 4020D is a double-credit course taken in CUST for which a double fee is charged. With the chair's approval the thesis project alternatively may consist of an equivalent combination of written work and work in another medium. A preliminary statement of intent and brief outline must be submitted to the chair by April 1. The Department deadline for a thesis abstract and bibliography (signed by a thesis supervisor) is April 30. Extensions beyond this date will not normally be granted. Staff Hollinger CUST 4029Y (previously CUST 429): Advanced studies in science fiction - Special Topic: "Speculative Fiction and Contemporary Technoculture". Through the study of speculative fictions and critical theoretical writings, this course will examine representations and constructions of the subject of Western technoculture, including postuman configurations such as the robot, the cyborg, and artificial and virtual intelligences. Fictional and critical/theoretical speculations will focus on how our understandings of subjectivity, agency, the body, and gender and sexuality are being transformed in the context of technological pressures on both the individual subject and the community. The course will emphasize the metaphorical relationship between speculative fiction and its cultural/historical present, at the same time as it will examine the speculative character of some theoretical writings about the subject and history, writings that make use of science-fictional discourse to map significant features of the contemporary moment understood as a kind of future/present. Instructor: V. Hollinger CUST 4035Y (previously CUST 435): Advanced Topics in Mass Media & Popular Culture: CULTURE, NEW MEDIA AND SOCIAL CHANGE The course will be an exploration of the communicative and cultural nature of new media technologies, and the creative use of digital technology to advance human knowledge, meaning-making and democratic processes. Mass adoption of social computing and communicative technologies appears to have led to new types of networked interactions and relationships, with increased participation and self-expression online. At the same time, new digital tools and platforms have also enabled more subtle means of control, surveillance and marketization of human culture and communicative practices. This course surveys the implications of control and liberation inherent in new media production and use, and in the digital media forms themselves as communicative texts. CUST 4065Y (previously CUST 4650): Politics of love: psychoanalysis and cultural studies. This course offers a comprehensive introduction to psychoanalytic approaches to cultural studies, focusing on the theme of love. Freud viewed love as a unifying force that aims to compensate the subject for its feelings of separateness and incompletion by securing a reparative sense of wholeness or union. For his part, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan theorized love as the unconscious demand we place on the other to be acknowledged as what we might call, to borrow a term from lifestyle marketing, our "aspirational" self. In addition to these "negative", neurotic or inhibitory manifestations of love, however, both Freud and Lacan saw that love can alternatively be ethical or authentic. Love can also take the form of an act of giving a partner or the world "what you don't have", as Lacan somewhat cryptically put it. One of the aims of the course will be to figure out what Lacan meant to say by this statement. The first half of the course will provide an overview of a selection of key texts of psychoanalytic theory, defining and contextualizing its central concepts: unconscious, desire and drive, transference and repetition in the case of Freud; imaginary, symbolic and real in the case of Lacan. We will also consider in detail what psychoanalysts have said about love. The second half will focus on the problem of love in its particular relation to visual studies. How does psychoanalysis think our desiring relation to the field of vision? Here we will delve into the specifics of Lacan's complex and wildly misunderstood concept of the gaze. In particular we will interrogate this concept's consequences for the study of both painting and cinema, more specifically the history of the nude up to Lucian Freud, as well as the works of contemporary filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Michael Haneke. No previous engagement with psychoanalysis is expected or required. Instructor: J. Penney CUST 4070Y (previously CUST 470): Advanced studies in the Theatre will review major trends in Western stage directing. Through seminar presentations, class discussions, and practical exercises, we will examine the work and theories of some of the most influential theatre directors, including Stanislavsky, Grotowski, Mnouchkine, and Lepage. Assignments will include directing a short open-class project (December 2011), accompanied by an essay, and contributing to the CUST theatre production (March 2012). Options for individual involvement in the CUST production range from acting (based on auditions) and stage-managing to working on the sound, video segments, costumes, sets, publicity and/or front of house. The rehearsal and performance schedule is available upon request. . Instructor: D. Manole CUST 4124Y: Creative Writing and Performance: (previously 424) Focusing on work-in-progress, this workshop combines one-to-one critiques with the instructor,
group editing of an individual’s work, writing time, and the presentation of a piece of writing or
performance monologue that serves as the basis of a reflection on writing in conditions of postmodernity. CUST 4515H : Art culture theory. Special Topic: "Sojourns (previously 4951, normally 4015Y) Art Culture Theory takes its topic for 2009-10 "Sojourns" intellectual, poetic and actual. The seminar will begin with an account of cultural theory as a critical topography, a geo-aesthetic and the introduction of a critical topography as an approach for study by considering a few texts, films and artworks with walking as the theme. Seven sojourns will be presented: The sojourn into the wilderness - Thoreau and Conrad; the sojourn of the unconscious - Freud; sojourn to the ancients - martin Heidegger; the sojourn of the stranger! (emigration, exile and death) - Sophocles and Walter Benjamin; sojourn of the disaster and the seeking after redemption -- Sebald, Keifer and Wim Wenders; sojourns of the stranger II in pursuit of the athropos - Franz Boas and Claude Levi- Strauss. Instructor: J.Bordo (Winter term) CUST 4550H (previously CUST 450, usually 4050Y): Advanced Studies in cultural theory. The seminar turns to the question of violence at the intersection of Religion and the Political. It asks how the public space (polis) and the affairs of the republic (res publica) have come to accommodate (or to be contaminated or even dominated by) affairs of the Spirit, of Faith and Dogma? How the separation of the Enlightenment believed to have achieved between the discourses of religion(s), of the political and of the critical reason has been weakened or subverted? Texts by Arendt, Adorno, Agamben, W.Benjamin, Castoriadis, Horkheimer, C.Schmitt, Rousseau, Virilio, among others, will help us to distinguish between different forms of violence (state and religious, archaic and techno-scientific, on the one hand, and between different forms of the "spirit" (humanism, human right, democracy, civic religion) in whose name violence is sanctioned, on the other hand. Excludes 3050 and 350. Instructor: Z. Baross (Fall term) CUST 4900Y, 4901H, 4902H (previously CUST 490, 491, 492H): Reading course is a course of individual study supervised by a faculty member. The proposed syllabus requires permission of the instructor and of the chair of the program prior to registering in the course. Proposals should be submitted by March 31 for reading courses to begin in the following Fall session, and by Nov 30 for reading courses due to be taken in the Winter session. Prerequisite: Open to Cultural Studies Honours students with 14.0 credits completed or permission of instructor. FALL-WINTER 2011-2012 courses in OshawaCUST 1000Y (previously CUST 100): Introduction to the study of Modern Culture is taught by a team of Department staff and is taken by all students majoring in Cultural Studies. Though the content of this course changes from year to year, it generally begins with an introduction to the concept of culture before turning to the investigation of a wide range of materials exploring methods of study which help us to understand the contemporary cultural landscape. Students are introduced to a multiplicity of ways in which the tradition of cultural theory suggests avenues for reflection on how culture at once informs, and is informed by, social, political, subjective, and aesthetic concerns. Instructors:TBA and staff CUST 2025Y – Oral narrative The world of voice, oral thought, the spoken story, and literature without texts. Emphasizing myth CUST 2035Y (previously CUST 235): Media and society serves as an introduction to the history, sociology and critical interpretation of contemporary mass-communicated culture, both as an overall formation and with reference to such specific elements as the newspaper press, advertising, network TV and recorded popular music. The course excludes CUST/ SOCI 240. There is a one-hour lecture and seminar weekly. Instructor: TBA CUST 3045Y: World Music (previously CUST 345): Through a focus on African and Afro-diasporic musics (from West African drumming to blues, and calypso) we will consider the problematics of “world music,” a category that raises issues of globalization and hybridity. We will examine selected musical traditions, mapping the complex, interactive networks of musical performance, pleasure, and politics. Field trip fee: $45. Prerequisite: 4.0 university credits including CUST 2045Y (245) or permission of the instructor. Instructor: TBA
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