14205 Theories and Approaches in Cultural Studies

Credits: 3 graduate credits in Cultural Studies or in Democracy Studies / Communication and Culture

Prerequisite for Cultural Studies: Admission to the graduate program in Cultural Studies

Prerequisites for Democracy Studies: Democracy: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Israeli Democracy: Selected Issues, Contemporary Democratic Theories; and one of the following: Democracy and Democratization, Selected Problems in the History of Western Democracies, Democracy and Mass Communication,1 Selected Topics in Public Administration, or Education Policy: Education for Democracy in Democratic Societies

The course is based on a reader edited by Nurith Gertz, Tammy Amiel-Houser and Gal Hermoni.

The course offers an historic review of schools of thought, methodologies and theories that engendered and shaped ‘Cultural Studies’ in the 20th century and created the conceptual language that continues to guide the study of culture today. The course presents the philosophy of some of the major scholars in the field in order to develop a critical perspective about three of the main concepts in cultural criticism: ideology, the subject and language.

Topics: Theoretical foundations: Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure; Structuralism: Claude Lévi Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes; Theories of the subject: Carl Gustav Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault; Marxist developments: Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault; Deconstruction and poststructuralism: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari; Postmodernism: Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson; The entrance of ‘the Other’ into theory: Feminism and gender – Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler; Postcolonialism, race and color – Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha; Queer theory – David Halperin, Judith Butler.


1or Liberalism: Texts, Contexts, Critiques (12005), for students who took it as a required course in the Culture specialization before Spring 2010.