106-448 Consumerism, Spectatorship and Gender: Theorising Visual Fascination

Credit Points

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This methodology-based subject provides students with an in-depth understanding of theories of spectatorship. Students will look at a range of debates, including psychoanalytic-semiotic theories of spectatorship, debates around pre and post-classical spectatorship, and Frankfurt school theories of spectatorship and reception. Students will look at the relations between spectatorial practices, gender, and relations to the commodity. This subject involves close readings of some of the central theoretical debates around mass culture, consumerism, and spectatorship - in particular, the work of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Buck-Morss. Topics to be covered include: ideas of female spectatorship; the phantasmagoria of commodity culture and the fetish character of the commodity; the photographic image and memory; and spectatorship and postmodernity.

Assessment

Written work of not more than 6000 words.

Prescribed Texts

Course reader available from the department.