Queering Texts: Popular Culture and LGBTQ+ Representation

We will be screening Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's The Celluloid Closet (USA, 1996) on Tuesday, November 27 @7.30pm in GG1 Guarini Campus. 
This is a required screening for CMS 360.

Diane Raymond, "Popular Culture and Queer Representation: A Critical Perspective"
Susan J. Hubert, "What's Wrong With This Picture: The Politics of Ellen's Coming Out Party"
Alexander Doty, "Modern Family, Glee, and the Limits of Television Liberalism" 

Alexander Doty, "There's Something Queer Here"
Susan Sontag, "On Camp"
Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"

bell hooks, "The Oppositional Gaze"

Reccomended Readings:

Fred Fejes, "Advertising and the Political Economy of Lesbian/Gay Identity"
Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, "Representing Gay Men on American Television"
Bruce LaBruce, "Pee Wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext"
Richard Dyer, "Judy Garland and Gay Men"

"I'm A Rebel"

"I Know You Are But What Am I?"

Fatal Strategies & Slackers: Withdrawing or Accelerating?

Matthias Leupold, Im Kino / In the Cinema, Part II Berlin GDR, 1983

The screening of ENJOY POVERTY will be on Monday November 26 @6.30pm in GG1 Guarini Campus. Please look for readings related to the screening in the post below.

This is mandatory viewing for ALL students in COM 470 Advanced Communication Theory.

Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"

Additional Recommended Baudrillard Readings:
Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media from Simulacra and Simulation

The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow.

Please read the section 'Disciplines and Sciences of the Individual' in Part II, particularly the first four segments (from "The Body of the Condemned" to "Panopticism")

Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis" from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I

In the clip below the scene discussed in the first pages of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism.
from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaròn, US/UK, 2006)






Faster! Faster! Faster!


#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (Srnicek & Williams)
Steven Shaviro, "What is Accelerationism?" from No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

Bonus:
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (Laboria Cuboniks)

+

What About 'Today'?

Christian Fuchs, "Participatory Web 2.0 as Ideology" from Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies

McKenzie Wark, The Hacker Manifesto

"Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death"
"Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."

Screenings: EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERTY by Renzo Martens @6.30pm on Monday, November 26

Screening will be on Monday November 26 @6.30pm in GG1 Guarini Campus.
This is mandatory viewing for ALL students in COM 470 Advanced Communication Theory.


"Enjoy Poverty: Disclosing the Political Impasse of Contemporary Art" in Art Papers

-an interview with Renzo Martens

Paul O'Kane, "Renzo Martens: Episode III" review in Third Text, 2009

T.J. Demos, "Poverty Pornography, Humanitarianism and Neo-Liberal Globalization: Notes on Some Paradoxes in Contemporary Art"

Bonus Interview from the "Africa is a Country Blog" here.

Bonus Reading:

Susan Sontag, "Looking At War/Regarding the Pain of Others"

An Art of Tensions: Narrating, Reporting and Adapting

from Glyn Dillon's The Nao of Brown

Happy Thanksgiving to all.
For those who decided to go on Thanksgiving break early you are required to watch the first hour of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis before class on Monday. The DVD is on reserve in the library (either Netflix or Amazon Prime or both might also carry it in their catalogue).

Ann Miller, Narrative Theory and Bande Dessinée from Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (Intellect, 2008)

Hillary Chute, "'The Shadow of a Past Time': History and Graphic Representation in Maus"

Amy Kiste Nyberg, "Comics Journalism: Drawing on Words to Picture the Past in Safe Area Goradze" from Duncan& Smith (eds.), Critical Approaches To Comics: Theories and Methods

Pascal Lefèvre, "Incompatible Visual Ontologies?": The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images" from Gordon, Jancovich & McAllister (eds), Film and Comic Books

The 'Post' Archipelago: A Brief Intro

Young Jacques Derrida's English Comp Essay
Note the teacher's comments. Do they still apply to Jacques' adult writing? Read 'Différance' below to find out.

Some introductory readings to the various 'posts' that we will be reading in the next weeks. Having concluded our discussion of structuralism, here is some material to bring us towards the post-structuralist theoretical framework. Remember that a good exercise for us is to read the theories in their original form. As you read get a sense of the language, of the rhetorical processes, of the way the argument proceeds. I am including here, in addition to the Roland Barthes essay on "The Death of the Author" also a brief introduction to poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonial studies (the pdf has these entries in alphabetical order but please read them in the order above). I've also included Derrida's 'Différance' --this is a bonus reading but I would urge all of you to tackle it in order to get that sense of the language mentioned above so that we may talk about it in class. Enjoy.

"poststructuralism"; "postmodernism"; "postcolonial studies" entries
from A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory; 2nd Ed. (Wiley-Blackwell)

Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" from Image/Music/Text

David Harvey, "Postmodernism" from The Condition of Postmodernity

Jacques Derrida, Différance

How To Read Comics II: An Art of Tensions

Here are some articles that you are warmly advised to integrate in your papers:

from Jason, Lost Cat

Groensteen, "The Impossible Definition"
Hatfield, "An Art of Tensions"
Beaty, "Autobiography as Authenticity"

Two sample analyses of comic art and auteurs:

Hignite, "Jamie Hernandez's LOCAS"
Kannenberg, "The Comics of Chris Ware"

à la Queneau...Excercises in Style:
Madden, Excerpts from "99 Ways To Tell A Story"

How To Read Comics I

 "To say that Nancy is a simple gag strip about a simple-minded snot-nosed kid is to miss the point completely. Nancy only appears to be simple at a casual glance. Like architect Mies Van Der Rohe, the simplicity is a carefully designed function of a complex amalgam of formal rules laid out by the designer. To look at Bushmiller as an architect is entirely appropriate, for Nancy is, in a sense, a blue print for a comic strip. Walls, floors, rocks, trees, ice-cream cones, motion lines, midgets and principals are carefully positioned with no need for further embellishment. And they are laid out with one purpose in mind - to get the gag across. Minimalist? Formalist? Structuralist? Cartoonist!"

Nancy 're-mixes' by James Benning.

How To Read Nancy by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik.
Ernie Bushmiller, Selected Nancy Sunday Strips

Please keep up with the readings in the Duncan&Smith Power of Comics and start working your way through the rest of Understanding Comics. You should be reading Watchmen, Maus and Jimmy Corrigan.

Structuralism 101

"Structuralist Theories" from Selden et al. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd Edition (Prentice Hall, 1985)

Below are some very basic intro articles on Semiotics and the media for those that need a refresher/recap:

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema