First-Year Cultural Studies Course

Please note that CUST 1000J: Introduction to the Study of Modern Culture is another version of the full credit introductory course, but taught in a compressed 12-week format on Tuesday and Thursday evenings in the Winter term.  It will be taught in Winter 2012 by Dr. Bill Clarke, and will be different in design from the course taught during the FW session. though there are some overlapping materials, and the overall objectives of the course are the same.  Students taking CUST 1000J will need to purchase the coursepack developed for this particular version of the course (Winter 2012),  and not the one for CUST 1000Y, 2011-12. 

CUST 1000Y – Introduction to the study of modern culture.

Click here for 2011-12 syllabus

CUST 1000Y provides a many-sided approach to the study of modern culture: it works with texts; it disposes of concepts; it travels across media; and it constitutes the sites for its practice of theory.  It invites the student to do the same – to begin with the commonplace and familiar and to turn it about in order to glimpse facets of the world that might not have otherwise been noticed; in this way, it aspires to illuminations. Focusing on narratives, cultural sites, events, and objects, and beginning with the question “what is cultural studies?” the course aims to demonstrate the scope and depth of offerings in the Cultural Studies Department that cut across literary studies, cultural theory, media, communications, and the visual and performance arts.
The format of the course is one two-hour lecture per week and one one-hour seminar per week.  In 2011-12, the course will be organised into four thematic sections: (1) What is Culture?; (2) Modernity/Post-modernity; (3) Media, Technology, and the Body; and (4) Memory and Identity.

Course Material

Required texts include one book, Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage, and a coursepack of selected readings. These include: stories by Franz Kafka, W.G. Sebald, and Margaret Atwood; articles from a range of disciplines, such as Sociology (Georg Simmel), Anthropology (Clifford Geertz), Cultural Theoy (Matthew Arnold, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), Linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure), and Neurology (Oliver Sacks); films by Francois Truffaut, Charlie Chaplin, David Cronenberg, and Christopher Nolan; and both the text and performance of the play He Left Home by renowned Polish playwright Tadeusz Rosewicz.  [The play is the annual CUST-sponsored student-run production, directed by a professor in the CUST Department.]

For More Information

For more information regarding this course offering or if you have any other questions, please contact the Cultural Studies department.