MA course – British Culture and Civilisation in the Context of Globalisation

Introduction to Cultural and Critical Theory – final assessment – 22 January 2018 – 16.00–18.00

The written test that will constitute half of your final assessment for this course will consist in 3-4 questions/topics for discussion. You will be required to explain
and comment on certain notions, issues, ideas, themes, etc. which are part of the conceptual repertoire of a certain critical-theoretical orientation and which are
presented in the texts which constitute your reading requirements and/or in the course notes.
For each of these critical-theoretical trends, you are supposed to know the main representatives and their main contribution. Review the course notes and the
seminar assignments, and read the indicated texts, making sure you understand the main notions and concepts surveyed in the course.
The course syllabus provided at the beginning of term contains examples of such topics.

Here is, as a reminder, a synoptic review of the main contents of our study:

 Culture: history of the concept and its meanings; broad categorization of theories of culture; from traditional approaches to critical theory
 Culture and/vs. civilisation

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British culturalism: historical context; representatives

 Utilitarianism and culture – Bentham, John Stuart Mill
 Elite vs. popular
 Dynamic vs. mechanical
 Coleridge: the role of state and church in the moral and intellectual cultivation
 Matthew Arnold: culture vs. anarchy; the social role of culture; faith in “machinery” vs. “sweetness and light”; Hellenism and Hebraism

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Precursors of the Frankfurt School: Marx, Weber, Freud – basic tenets of their theories
 Karl Marx: Base/infrastructure – superstructure; ideology as “false consciousness”; historical-dialectic materialism; freedom vs. necessity;
commodity fetishism
 Max Weber: types of social action; legitimation and authority; modernity and the disenchantment of the world; bureaucracy and rationalization;
capitalism and the protestant work ethic; the “iron cage” of modern societies
 Sigmund Freud: the reality principle / the pleasure principle; culture/civilisation and repression/deferment of gratification (sublimation)

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The Frankfurt School – context of formation; main aim and representatives

 Western Marxism (difference from classic Marxism)
 Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer: capitalism as “anti-enlightenment”; features of the “culture industry”
 Freudo-Marxism – Herbert Marcuse: the performance principle; false needs/repressive needs; surplus repression; repressive desublimation; the
“aesthetic principle”
 Walter Benjamin: art, “aura”, and the technology of reproduction

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Structuralism – features and representatives

 The linguistic model: Saussure;
 Langue vs. parole; signifier vs. signified; synchrony vs. diachrony; Nature vs. Culture; binary oppositions
 Claude Lévi-Strauss: structural anthropology and the study of culture
 Semiology vs. structuralism
 Roland Barthes: “myth” and its ideological dimension; semiological analysis as demystification of cultural myths

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Poststructuralism – context of emergence; relation to structuralism; main representatives

 Jacques Derrida – “there is nothing outside the text”; the “transcendental signifier”; logocentrism; deconstruction
 Roland Barthes: “death of the author”
 Foucault – archaeology vs. genealogy; discursive formation/event/statement; episteme; “archaeology” in the human sciences and the linguistic
model
 Power and discourse; power and knowledge; power and the body
 The modern “Panopticon” – features of the disciplinary/carceral/panoptic society

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Postmodernism and the consumer society

 Jean Baudrillard – the sign-value of commodities; the production and consumption of signs; consumption as a class institution; simulacra; media and
hyperreality; de-differentiation; implosion of meaning
 Zygmunt Bauman: postmodernism as liquid modernity – solid vs liquid society; consumption and the liberation of wishful fantasiesș, the rationality and
irrationality of consumerism; the “liquid” society and the tourist syndrome
 George Ritzer: tourism, post-tourism, and the McDonaldized society

Lists of compulsory texts:

1. Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (the provided excerpt)
4. Sigmund Freud – Civilisation and Its Discontents (the provided fragment)
5. Walter Benjamin – “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”
6. Roland Barthes – Mythologies: “Toys”, “Ornamental Cooking”, “Striptease”
7. Michel Foucault – “Panopticism” (from Discipline and Punish)
8. Jean Baudrillard – “Hypermarket and Hypercommodity” (from Simulacra and Simulations)
9. George Ritzer – The McDonaldization Thesis (chapter " ‘McDisneyization’ and ‘Post-Tourism’: Complementary Perspectives on Contemporary Tourism”)
10. Zygmunt Bauman – “Consuming Life”, Liquid Modernity (the provided excerpts), “The Tourist Syndrome”