This course introduces students to debates and concepts relating to representation in and through a diverse range of media texts (i.e. literature, television, cinema, and comic books). The course begins by looking at how various branches of the mass media present texts as purported reflections of a stable, consistent and consensual social reality, and then turns toward examining how those same texts, in fact, shape and even create that reality. Thus the focus is on examining texts both as discursive and aesthetic objects (which provide pleasure and/or information), on the one hand, and as social and ideological constructs (particularly in respect to ideas of sexuality, gender, identity, race, culture and community), on the other. In doing so it draws on concepts and theories such as ideology, semiotics, discourse analysis, the ethics of looking, and speaking on behalf of the other, as well as theories of affect, queer and Trans, feminism, and psychoanalysis, and recent accounts of technics and the postmodern. It also analyses a range of formal textual features and compositional techniques in terms of their potential social, political, conceptual and corporeal effects. |