50134 Culture, Writing and Textuality

Handbook description

This subject looks at the interrelationship between culture, writing and textuality. It examines the ways in which culture is written through multiple modes of experience and representation. It looks particularly at the ways in which writers produce themselves through encounters or relationships with 'difference'. This subject introduces students to the methods and products of cultural ethnography (literally writing culture) in a critical and expanded framework so they are able to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of that tradition. It is particularly focused on writing (understood in its richest sense) solutions to critiques of taken-for-granted structures of power and knowledge affecting the development of the social sciences and humanities in Western societies. As a result, students are better able to critique and reinterpret the products of a range of kinds of analysis including traditional ethnography, reportage, exhibitions, documentaries, film, novels and many others.

Subject objectives/outcomes

At the completion of this subject, students are expected to be able to:

1. think and produce within a critical appreciation of what writing is and does
2. make lateral connections between culture, writing, and textual and cultural analysis
3. develop critical skills for reading, interpreting and creating a range of ethnographic texts from a wide transdisciplinary base and from a wide range of sites.

Contribution to graduate profile

This subject:

• enhances creative and communication skills
• builds critical understanding of contemporary cultural forms and innovative practices within those forms
• develops critical knowledge of cultural debates
• enhances the ability to think critically and creatively about future developments in cultural industries
• encourages sensitivity to multiple dimensions of social and cultural difference.

Teaching and learning strategies

This is a reading-centred subject where students are expected to attend each tutorial and lecture and must give some explanation for non-attendance. Students are expected to deliver one tutorial presentation, either individually or as a member of a group. The presentation should explore and generate discussion of the key theories, concepts and arguments of the readings. Students are expected to contribute to the tutorial through discussion and listening to and responding to their fellow students.

Two exhibition visits are scheduled and students are expected to observe and reflect on the exhibition, its site, curatorial theme/rationale and strategies of display and representation. The exhibition visits will count as part of your attendance in the course and an attendance roll will be taken.

Content

This subject will explore various styles and representations of consumption, exhibition, art, fashion and identity from within the broad interdisciplinary enterprise of cultural studies. The subject is composed of three separate, yet overlapping, parts:

1. Consuming Cultures will examine the complexities of people's engagement with consumer culture by exploring various practices and sites of consumption. It will canvass the relationship between the objects, sites and practices of consumption and the forms of identity and belonging that they engender. It will also explore the aesthetics of commodity culture (such as the brand and 'cute'), and the poetics of material culture (such as rituals of possession, customisation and re-use).
2. Exhibiting Cultures will examine the ways in which various art works and artistic practices (including public art, graffiti and performance art) are exhibited and administered by considering different strategies of representation and display across a variety of exhibition sites, including museums, galleries, public and urban spaces.
3. Fashioning Cultures will examine the various social, cultural and historical meanings associated with the production, consumption and representation of fashion across a range of sites. It will also explore the shifting status and meaning of fashion, its modes of display, and the role it plays in the formation and (re-)presentation of bodies and identities.

Assessment

Assessment item 1: Choose either a) Cultural Biography of an Object OR b) Cultural Analysis of an Exhibition

Assessment item 2: Major Essay or Project of comparable length / substance

Minimum requirements

Since class discussion and participation in activities form an integral part of this subject, students are expected to attend, arrive punctually and actively participate in classes. Should they experience difficulties meeting this requirement, they should contact the lecturer. Students who have a reason for extended absence from class (e.g. illness) may be required to complete additional work to ensure they achieve the subject objectives.

Indicative references

A Course Reader containing all set readings is available for purchase from UTS Union Shop, Level 3, Tower Building. Please quote the CN number when purchasing or ordering the Course Reader. A copy of the Course Reader is also kept in Closed Reserve at UTS Library.

The following texts and references are recommended for your further reading and research. Copies are these are held in UTS library. Further references will also occasionally be provided in the lectures.

Consuming Cultures

* Appadurai, Arjun (1988) 'Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value' in Arjun Appadurai (ed.) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

* Bowlby, Rachel (2000) Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, London: Faber.

* Chua, Beng-Huat (2004) 'Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture,' Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 200-221.

* Falk, Pasi and Colin Campbell (eds.) (1997) The Shopping Experience, London: Sage.

* Frow, John (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

* Frow, John (1997) Time and Commodity Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

* Frow, John (2002) 'Signature and Brand' in Jim Collins (ed.) High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, Oxford: Blackwell.

* Hawkins, Gay and S. Muecke (2002) Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

* Hjorth, Larissa (2002) 'Cute@Ketai.com', in Mark McLelland and Nanette Gottleib (eds.) Japanese Cybercultures. London: Routledge.

* Iwabuchi, Koichi (2006) 'Japanese popular culture and postcolonial desire for 'Asia'', in Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto (eds.) Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, London and New York: Routledge.

* Storey, John (1996) 'The Consumption of Everyday Life', in his Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture: Theories and Methods, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Exhibiting Cultures

* Bishop, Claire (2004) 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', October, no.110, Fall, pp. 51-79.

* Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Les Presses du Reel.

* Clifford, James (1997) 'Museums as Contact Zones' in his Routes: Travel and Translation in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

* Cooke, Lynne and Peter Wollen (eds.) (1995) Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, Seattle: Bay Press.

* Duetsche, Rosalyn (1996) Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, Massachusetts, MIT Press.

* Ferguson, Bruce W. et al (eds.) (1996) Thinking about Exhibitions, London and New York, Routledge.

* Foster, Hal (1996) 'The Artist as Ethnographer' in his The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

* Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London: Routledge.

* Karp, Ivan et al (2006) Museum Frictions: Public Cultures / Global Transformations, Durham and London, Duke University Press.

* Maravillas, Francis (2006) 'Cartographies of the Future: The Asia-Pacific Triennial and the Curatorial Imaginary' in John Clark et al (eds.) Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asian Art, University of Sydney East Asian Series and Wild Peony, Sydney.

* O'Doherty, Brian (1976) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Berkeley, University of California Press.

* Papastergiadis, Nikos (2003) Complex Entanglements: Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, River Oram, London 2003.

* Pastor Roces, Marion (2004) 'Crystal Palace Exhibitions' in Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (eds.) Over There: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts, MIT Press.

* Rogoff, Irit (1994) 'From Ruins to Debris: The Feminization of Facism in German History Museums' in D. Sherman and I. Rogoff (eds.) Museum Cultures: Histories, Discourses and Spectacles, Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press.

* van den Bosch, Annette (2005) 'Museums: Constructing a Public Culture in a Global Age', Third Text, vol. 19, no.1, pp. 81-89.

Fashioning Cultures

* Barthes, Roland (1983) The Fashion System, New York: Hill and Wang.

* Carter, Micheal (2003) Fashion Classics: From Carlyle to Barthes, Oxford and New York: Berg.

* Crewe, Louise and Goodrum, Alison (2000) 'Fashioning New Forms of Consumption: The Case of Paul Smith' in Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson (eds.) Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations and Analysis, London and New York: Routledge

* Craik, Jennifer (1994) The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, London and New York: Routledge.

* de la Haye, Amy and Elisabeth Wilson (eds.) (1999) Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

* Entwistle, Joanne and Elizabeth Wilson (eds.) (2001) Body Dressing, Oxford: Berg.

* Entwistle, Joanne (2000) The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory, Malden, MA: Polity Press.

* Hollander, Anne (1994) Sex and Suits, New York: Knopf

* McCrobbie, Angela (1992) 'Bridging the Gap, Feminism, Fashion and Consumption', Feminist Review, no. 55, pp.73-89.

* Narumi, Hiroshi (2000) 'Fashion Orientalism and the limits of counter culture', Postcolonial Studies, vol.3, no. 3, pp.311-329.

* Welters, Linda and Abby Lillethun (2007) (eds.) The Fashion Reader, New York and Oxford, Berg.

* Warwick, Alexandra and Dani Cavallaro (1998) Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body, Oxford: Berg.

JOURNALS

The following journals are recommended for your further reading and research. Copies are these are held in UTS library.

Art and Australia
Art and Text
Artlink
Art Monthly Australia
Art Journal
Australasian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Art and Culture
Continuum: Australian Journal of Media and Culture
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies Review
Eyeline
Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
International Journal of Cultural Studies
positions: east asia cultures critique
Third Text
Space and Culture