106-092 Theorising the Spectator

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually admission to the Postgraduate Diploma or Fourth Year Honours in English, Cultural sSudies or Women's Studies, see Honours entry.

Semester

Subject Description

This subject looks at and evaluates a wide range of competing theories of and arguments about spectatorship. It mobilises spectatorship as a way of profiling and analysing a number of issues and debates within the inter-related fields of cultural, film and television studies. The subject is designed to provide students with a broad over-view of and solid grounding in contemporary media theory. Students should become familiar with the question of spectatorship in psychoanalytic-semiotic theories of the cinematic apparatus; Marxist accounts of ideological interpellation in the mass media; cultural studies models of audience negotiation and subcultural resistance; critical theories about the cultural transformations of modernity; feminist and queer debates about the sexual dynamics of popular culture; postmodern accounts of the virtual subjectivities of cyberculture.