HIST-LIT 90GQ: Popular Culture

Interested students should petition to enroll on my.harvard. In your petition, say a few words about your interest in the course (including concentrations you are considering if you are undeclared), any requirement the course may satisfy, and whether you have taken any other History & Literature seminars. Please contact me if you have any questions.


Popular Culture
Harvard University, Fall 2024
Wednesday, 9:45-11:45


Angela S. Allan
allan@fas.harvard.edu
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Studying popular culture reveals much about the society that creates, consumes, and critiques it. How do ideas circulate in mass media? Can popular culture create social change? Who determines what counts as serious or frivolous culture? Is popular culture a democratizing influence to be cheered or a tool of social control to be feared? This course will introduce students to theories of popular culture; provide the skills for formally analyzing sources like film, television, music, advertisements, and more; and teach students how to historically contextualize works of culture. Using case studies from the postwar United States ranging from Bob Dylan to Barbie dolls and sitcoms to sci-fi, we will consider how ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and class were mediated by popular culture. We will also explore how ordinary individuals participate in the shaping of popular culture and public discourse via fandom, youth subcultures, and consumerism. As we consider the role popular culture plays in our daily lives, we will examine how these debates surrounding its influence and value continue to inform intellectual discourse today.


The syllabus is under construction, although I've included some more information below. I'd also love to chat with you if you have any questions about the course--you can use the link above to make an appointment!

 

Course goals:

This course is an introduction to the methods of History & Literature, particularly regarding the study of popular culture. We will read theories of "the culture industry" and how its relationship to capitalism, social and political change, and intellectual critique has evolved from post-World War II to the present.

  • The course will provide you with a foundation to formally analyze a wide variety of primary sources and media including film, television, music, material culture, and more.
  • We'll discuss how to contextualize works of culture as products of their time, both in terms of their production and consumption. At the same time, we'll also think about cultural objects in dialogue with longer histories.
  • The class will include academic scholarship from historians, cultural critics, and theorists so we'll spend time unpacking their arguments, archives, and methods.
  • The course is also designed to help foster your skills as a writer, so that you can make strong analytic arguments, supported by textual evidence.


Format and enrollees:

This is a two-hour seminar which meets once per week. Class will primarily be discussion based.

This class is open to all students, but priority will go to first-year and sophomore students who are considering concentrating in History & Literature and are interested in analyzing popular culture! The class is framed as an introduction, in that we won't be able to do a deep dive on any particular theme or medium, but that you'll be exposed to a lot of different ideas and methods; as for topics, you can consider it a survey of American popular culture after 1945. The class has about the same amount of reading and writing that you'd do in another HL90, so it's also suitable for current concentrators who might be thinking of writing a Junior Essay or Senior Thesis dealing with popular media.

 

What can students expect?

This is a new course, so I'm excited to approach the sources with a sense of discovery together. I hope the class will also be a lot of fun--and you'll get to choose our reading for the last week of class--but it will also be a chance to think more critically about objects we might not always think about as worthy of serious study. (Some of those objects may now seem goofy or uncomfortable to us from the vantage of 2024, but we'll have the chance to think about why audiences at the time would have found them entertaining.) What might also be surprising is how scholars have thought about popular culture in quite complex ways; there are a few challenging theoretical texts on the syllabus, but we'll work through these arguments together so we can apply and critique these ideas throughout the semester.

One of my informal class policies is banning the word "problematic." While I anticipate critiquing many of the sources throughout the semester, it's important to remember that these sources were and are popular and our goal is to think through the reasons and implications. I want discussion to move beyond the "hot take" culture of the social media age. As an instructor, I really value helping students improve their writing skills, so you can count on receiving a lot of feedback. I also make myself available to discuss any ideas for papers!

 

Sample reading list:

Stay tuned for the final version over the summer, but here are a few different weeks!

Week 1: The Culture Industry

  • Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Dialectic of Enlightenment (1945)
  • Dwight Macdonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture" (1953)
  • Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" (1981)

Week ?: Sounds of Change

  • Listen:
    • Lead Belly, "We Shall Be Free" (1944)
    • The Soul Stirrers, "Nearer to Thee" (1955)
    • Peter, Paul, and Mary, "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)" (1962)
    • Nina Simone, "Mississippi Goddamn" (1964)
    • Sam Cooke, "You Send Me" (1957), songs from Live at the Harlem Square Square Club (1963) and Live at the Copa (1964), "A Change is Gonna Come" (1964)
    • Bob Dylan, "The Death of Emmett Till" (1962), songs from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), "Like a Rolling Stone" (1965)
  • Chris Welles, "The Angry Young Folk Singer," Life (1964)
  • Louie Robinson, "The Tragic Death of Sam Cooke," Ebony (1965)
  • Jack Hamilton, "Dreams and Nightmares" and "Darkness at the Break of Noon," Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (2016)

Week ?: The Fandom Menace

  • Dir. George Lucas, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)
  • Selections from 1980s fanzines
  • Henry Jenkins, "'Get a Life': Fans, Poachers, Nomads," Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992)
  • Visit to Houghton Library


Week ?: Playing with Race and Representation

  • American Girl catalogs from the 1990s/early 2000s [in class]
  • Connie Porter, Finding Freedom (Originally published in 1993)
  • Ann Ducille, "Dyes and Dolls: Multicultural Barbie and the Merchandising of Difference," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6.1 (1994)
  • Robin Bernstein, "The Scripts of Black Dolls," Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011)


Assignments and grading:

As an introductory seminar, assignments will be designed with developing skills and robust participation. While we'll spend time working on the skills that will lend themselves to successfully writing a paper in History & Literature, we'll have a mixture of formal and informal assignments. For the final, you'll have the option to write about texts that interest them that are not on the syllabus.

Absence and late work policies:

Attendance (and punctuality) is crucial but is not the same thing as participation (more than one absence may affect your participation grade. If you are sick, please do not come to class.). Our classroom will be a space for intellectual conversation, debate, and questioning, so your active participation and engagement with the material is imperative. If you are quieter by nature, please come speak to me in office hours so we can discuss strategies for your participation.

Everyone will start with three "grace days" to be used at your discretion. You need not ask for an extension, but rather use these days as you see fit. Your three days may be used in any permutation (e.g. one day on the first, two days for the second), but once you have used all three, no more will be granted without contacting me, so please plan accordingly. After all days are used, papers will be deducted a half-step for each late day (an A becomes an A–/A, etc.). In extenuating circumstances, I encourage you to be in touch your resident dean and me so that we can accommodate your needs.