Introduction to Communication and Culture

Com Grad 200B: Communication and Culture
Winter 1998

V. L. Rafael
vrafael@weber.ucsd.edu
Office: MCC 124B
Office Hours: Wed., 2-3:30 pm and by appt.

As part of the core graduate series, this seminar seeks to introduce students to the question of "culture" and its utility in the study of communication. It is one of the main assumptions of this course that the conjunction of culture and communication is conceivable as a function of the history of capitalist modernity and its effect on reshaping social relations. We will focus on three aspects of this conjunction: exchange and signification; experience and ideology; history and technology.

There are three requirements for this class:

1. two short papers (4-5 pages), each of which should paraphrase and comment on one or two of the reading assingments below;
2. a take-home final exam; and
3. class participation.

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   Required texts (available at Groundworks):

   Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Norton).
   

   Marx & Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by R. Tucker (Norton).
   

   Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Verso).
   

   Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Hill & Wang).
   

   Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (U.C. Press).

   A Reading Packet packet (available from Cal Copy at 8657 Villa La Jolla Drive (behind Trader Joe's and near Tower Records).

   Recommended texts (at Groundworks):

   S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (Norton)
   

   A. Gordon, Ghostly Matters (Minnessotta)

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   Schedule of Meetings.

   Week 1. No class. I will be out of town, but please start reading Mauss, The Gift.

   Part I.: Exchange and Signification.

   Week 2. Mauss, The Gift (please read the whole book)
   

   Marx, start with Capital, ch. 1-3 (in Tucker, ed.).

   Week 3. Continue with Marx above.
   

   Georg Simmel, "The Secret and Secret Society" (packet) , "The Stranger" (packet)
   

   Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes Towards a 'Political Economy' of Sex" (packet)

   Week 4. Finish with above.
   

   Jacques Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" (packet)
   

   Paul De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality"

   Part II.: Experience and Ideology.

   Week 5.: Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach" in Tucker.
   

   Marx, The German Ideology part I in Tucker.
   

   (Suggested reading: "On the Jewish Question")
   

   Raymond Williams, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory" (packet)

   Week 6: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, "The Storyteller"
   

   "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," "What is Epic Theatre?"
   

   (Recommended: the Introduction by Hannah Arendt)
   

   Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (packet)

   Week 7: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (please read entire book)

   Part III.: History and Technology.

   Week 8: Marx: The Communist Manifesto, in Tucker.
   

   Benjamin, "Some Motifs on Baudelaire" in Illuminations
   

   Benjamin, "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" (packet)

   Week 9: Continue with above.
   

   Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (please read entire book.)

   Week 10: Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (packet)
   

   Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy and History" (packet)
   

   Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" (packet)
   

   Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" (packet)

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