10532 Communication as Culture 1
Credits: 6 advanced credits in Communication or in Sociology & Anthropology
Prerequisites: 36 credits, including Introduction to Mass Media. Students must also fulfill all English requirements and take bibliographic instruction in the Library.
Authors: Tamar Liebes, Amit Kama, Miri Talmon, David Levin
The course deals with contemporary communication as a locus for daily negotiation of meaning and identity.
Topics: Television as an everyday cultural environment – popular communication is also culture; What is culture?; Mass communication as everyday culture; Producing texts as negotiation; Semiotic-structural analysis of popular culture; Soap opera, news discourse, advertisements – a demonstration of semiotic-structural analysis. Generating meaning as an encounter between the text and the readers – encounter with the media (contextual constraints, media constraints, textual constraints); Active reading – generating meaning by interpretive communities, critical ability, pleasure and subversion, multiculturalism and the constraints of hegemonic discourse.
1Students may write a seminar paper in this course, although it is not required.