This course must be taken as a pre- or co-requisite to the first 300-level course in ILCC/ILCF/ILCG/or ILCS by those students planning to major in international languages and cultures; students planning to fulfill the requirements for a minor in one of the languages, or to take upper-level courses in one of the language concentrations, should consult with a faculty adviser in international languages and cultures to determine whether and when it would be appropriate to take this course.
This course introduces students to recent scholarship in the area of cultural studies theory. Students will be exposed to a variety of approaches to textual analysis, be it the text of books found within an established literary tradition, the text of expressions within popular culture, or the text of a given social experience in its broadest sense. Students will learn how to use the insights generated by the discipline of cultural studies to better understand and comment about the cultures that they study within the curriculum in the Chinese, French, German, Latin American Studies and Spanish concentrations. By comparison and contrast, students will also come to a better understanding of how U.S. society fits within a globalized cultural context.