124263 KO Critical Media Analysis (2017S)

In this course we will retrace these variously subjugating and transgressive ideas of the inferior, the ephemeral, and the ‘bad’ and explore how they allow a Culture Studies perspective to move out towards the margins of culture for the politics, identities, communities, and ways of living situated there. Students will gain a detailed literacy in the first principles of Cultural Media Analysis by exploring the genealogy of modern distinctions between ‘the good, the bad, and the ugly’. Together, we will discuss relevant questions: Are these distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ essential or non-essential? What is their history? How is this history organised by ideology and power relations? In what ways are our concepts of the ‘bad’ shaped by normative categories of gender, sexuality, class, and race? How can we theorise the pleasures of the bad, its potential for transgressive politics and its amenity to subcultural group identities and ways of living?

Central to these theoretical inquiries will be Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of taste as an ideological category, Umberto Eco’s analysis of ‘Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ and definitions of camp aesthetics from Susan Sontag to Richard Dyer. However, this vantage also allows us to review, in detail, a number of crucial Culture Studies perspectives and aesthetic lenses, from subcultures, bricolage, and culture jamming, through the cultural injunctions of Leavisism, the Frankfurt School, and postmodernism, to Richard Hoggart’s pluralistic emphasis on the communal and everyday and Raymond William’s ‘Structure of Feeling’. Together, by taking a closer look at the cults and communities that arise around ‘bad culture’, we will gain greater insight into the ways in which we reveal ourselves to one another and forge communities.

The syllabus is open to student input and feedback depending on individual research projects and presentations, but the central outline of the course is as follows. We will begin with the cult of Amanda McKittrick Ros, whose ‘purple’ prose was so beloved by Lewis and Tolkien that they would hold ‘sporadic Ros reading competitions, in which the winner was the member who could read from one of her novels for the longest without breaking into laughter’. Ros will allow us to consider not only the aesthetic and social conditions of cult communities, but also the ways in which such phenomena can be marked by gender, class, and race. We will also consider similarly received texts in diverse genres, such as the infamous The Eye of Argon, the ‘worst fantasy novel ever’ which has become the subject of a science fiction convention party game in which the winner is the person who can read the story aloud the longest without laughing. Considering Bad Culture and Modernism, we will discuss the intentionally bad puns of Myles na gCopaleen, James Joyce’s pastiches of bad-writing in “Eumaeus”, and the aesthetic of comic failure that underpins Samuel Beckett’s prose and plays. Turning to post-modern cultures, we will consider the rise of mass culture and genre – from comic books and romance novels to trashy B-movies (Ed Wood) – and the cults/communities that arose around them. After a discussion of Pop Art and Outsider Art, we will look at the camp politics of Rocky Horror Picture Show and John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray), the countercultural scenes of avant-garde music and comedy that embrace the bad as a critique of mainstream culture (The Shaggs, ZCR, Tim & Eric, Neil Hamburger, On Cinema at the Cinema, Decker). Finally, we will turn to the present Remix Culture, to discuss lo-fi meme aesthetics, online fan-fics, viral hits, YouTube communities, and contemporary modes of culture jamming and culture hacking.