ENGL 114PC: |
Women and Literature
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Feminism and Popular Culture |
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| Fall 2009 |
| Instructor: Andrea Fontenot |
| Meets on: MW 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM PHELPS 1444 |
| Prerequisites: Writing 2, 50, or 109; English 10; or upper-division standing |
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| Satisfies a GE area G and a writing requirement |
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| May be repeated for credit provided the letter designations are different, but only 8 units may be applied toward the English major. |
This course will evaluate the parallel histories of feminism and popular culture as they have unfolded, paying particular attention to the way the two have behaved in relationship to each other. We will explore the variety of ways that popular culture has been read, analyzed, and used by feminist critics, as well as the ways that the politics of feminism have informed and subverted the development of popular media and been incorporated into a number of popular genres and mediums.
Starting with a consideration of the history of the rise of popular commercial culture in the late 19th and early 20th century, we will discuss the relationship between the advent of the New Woman and the development of popular entertainment forms, both in the US and internationally. From there we will look at a variety of approaches to feminist study of popular media forms, from spectator theory, to reception studies, to queer theory, and cultural studies. The course offers an introduction both to feminist theory and to the history and theories of popular culture with units on specific cultural switch points that connect feminism and popular culture, such as: representing the “New Woman”; women as stars and producers of early silent cinema; blues legacies and black feminism; the politics and possibilities of post-WWII melodramas; the pornography debates; transnational feminism and the globalization of popular culture; and the rhetoric of “postfeminism.”
Course texts: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; The Color Purple, Alice Walker; Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi; several mandatory film screenings, and a course reader available at Grafikart.
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