Course abstract

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.