Literature, Culture and Media

This course aims to introduce students to an interdisciplinary framework that will allow them to explore and theorize on the intersections of literature, culture, and media. The students will get the opportunity to analyse the complex ways in which literary and cultural products/texts inter-animate each other to produce and reproduce the ways in which society and culture give rise to new forms of perspectives and ideologies; in turn, determining the ways in which identities are constructed.The course will highlight the ways in which new forms of media (TV, films, internet, digital media) transform and reinvent traditional literary and cultural forms. The course will stimulate a nuanced discussion on the historical, empirical, and cultural analyses of contemporary forms of culture, literature, identity, and power relations. A variety of theoretical approaches—Intersectionality, Feminism, Marxism, and Deconstruction—will deepen and complicate the problematics of defining literature and culture in a digital and post-industrial society that constantly reinvents the binaries of high and low/popular culture.
INTENDED AUDIENCE : Interested studentsPREREQUISITES : NoneINDUSTRY SUPPORT : None

COURSE LAYOUT

Week 1 : Introduction, Aims and Objectives; Defining Literature; Defining Culture; Relationship between Literature and Culture; Literature, Culture and MediaWeek 2 : Introduction to Cultural Studies; Cultural Studies I: Raymond Williams; Cultural Studies II: Stuart Hall; High Culture and Popular Culture; Subculture and CountercultureWeek 3: Modernism and Postmodernism I and II; Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge; Foucault’s Notion of Knowledge and Power; Poststructuralism and DeconstructionWeek 4 : Introduction to Feminism I and II; Theories of Gender; Men’s and Masculinity Studies; Queer Studies and Representations of Gender in MediaWeek 5 : Intersectionality; Introduction to Postcolonial Theory; Key Concepts in Postcolonial theory; Said, Spivak and Bhabha; Postcolonial Reading of Achebe and Amitav GhoshWeek 6 : Theories of Ideology; Adorno and Horkheimer on Culture; Culture Industry and Mass Deception,Walter Benjamin; Interconnections between Literature, Culture and Identity: Woolf and Deshpande I and IIWeek 7 : The Evolution of Media: Print forms; Media and Culture; Media, Culture and Technology I and II; Harold InnisWeek 8 : Introduction to Marshall McLuhan; Media and the Electric Age; Hot and Cool Media; Postmodern Media I; Postmodern Media II and Formation of Public OpinionWeek 9 : Word and the Image: Drama, Photography, Birth of the Cinema; Film and Literature I and II; Language of Films: Mise-en-scene, Type of Shots, Camera angles/movements, Montage; Reading of 12 Years a Slave: Film and TextWeek 10 : Development of Media: Radio; Development of Media: Television; Film, Television and Literature; Impact of Technology on Literary Genres: Novel; Media in the 21st CenturyWeek 11 : Approaches to Digital Forms of Media; Literature, Internet and Culture; Digital Culture, Media, and Literature; Representation of Partition in different Media: A historical and Cultural Analysis I and IIWeek 12 : Game Studies I and II; Body Culture Studies and Representation of Women in the Media; Media and Gender; Media and Language, Glass Ceiling in Media