Readings
Primary Texts
- Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
- Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World
Assignment Sheets
- Response Paper 1 on Textual Poachers (due Feb 28)
- Response Paper 2 on Fandom (due April 22)
- Fan Artifact Presentation and Blog Writeup (due once during semester)
- Fan Artifact Presentation Schedule
- Final Colloquium and Paper
- Panel Assignments and Colloquium Schedule
Readings
Week 2:
- Roland Barthes, excerpt from S/Z
- Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”
- Stanley Fish, “What Makes An Interpretation Acceptable?”
- Powerpoint for Jan 31, “Active Texts” (Hall/Fish/Barthes readings)
Week 3:
- Dick Hebdige, excerpts from Subculture: The Meaning of Style
- John Fiske, “Popular Texts”
- Janice Radway, excerpts from Reading the Romance
- Ellen Seiter et al, “Toward an Ethnography of Soap Opera Viewers”
- Optional: Camille Bacon-Smith, “Play, Creativity, and Narrative”
Week 5:
- Optional: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (PDF)
- A nicer web version of Benjamin’s essay
- Presentation for Feb 19, “A Brief History of Seriality”
Week 7:
- Henry Jenkins, “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence”
- Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?”
Week 8:
- Chris Anderson, excerpts from The Long Tail
- Louisa Stein and Kristina Busse’s essays on “Taste and Fandom” (FlowTV link)
Week 9:
- Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”
- Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage”
- Optional: Jeff Sconce, ” ‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”
- Powerpoint for Mar 25, “Cult Films, Icons, and Camp”
Week 10: