Předměty

OBJECTIVES
This seminar will examine?in overview?the relationship of media in the information age to the on-going project of critical
modernity, both in the arts and in the broader context of social praxis?primarily with regard to democracy and the institutions
of public accountability. Topics for consideration will include media ownership and copyright, the transformation of the public
domain into fields of corporate control, public policy, virtual realities and the status of ?the real.? Textual sources will range
from the pioneering work of Marshall McLuhan to the latter-day apocalyptic pronouncements of Jean Baudrillard and Paul
Virilio. Events in the historical media will also be examined with regard to the advent of new media and changing conditions
of access to information, propaganda and geopolitics. Special consideration will be given to the question of ?terrorism? from
Patty Hearst to Al-Quaeda; public disclosure in the Kennedy assassination, the Nixon impeachment and the Iraq War;
corporatism and the commodification of knowledge, the rise of individualism and the impact of globalisation on social
infrastructures and legal systems, etc. A large percentage of this seminar will be devoted to analysing visual media, from TV
and film to the predominance of the personal computer, mobile communication systems and the future of immersive virtual
reality.

ASSESSMENT
for this course will be in the form of a short seminar paper (2000-2500 words), as well as participation in class discussions.

Poslední úprava: UAAZNOJE (27.01.2010)

MATERIAL

Primary:

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)

Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (Berkeley: Odonion, 1992)

Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel (New York: New Direction, 1970)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1968)

Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Panther, 1977)

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (London:

Granada, 1981)

Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Picador, 1977)

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1997)

Secondary:

Niel Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986)

Peter Hayes, Lyuba Zarsky & Walden Bello, American Lake: Nuclear Peril in the Pacific (Ringwood: Penguin, 1986)

Jean Claude Carriere, The Secret Language of Film (New York: Random House, 1994)

Jürgen Müller, ed. Movies of the 70s (Köln: Taschen, 2003)

David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)

Friedrich Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems, ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: OPA, 1997)

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000)

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995 [1967])

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e),

1983 [1981])

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989)

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1994)

Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1994)

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992)

Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. Jon Snyder (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)

Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000)

Poslední úprava: UAAZNOJE (27.01.2010)

seminář

Poslední úprava: UAAZNOJE (27.01.2010)

SCHEDULE

Week 1 Introduction

Week 2 mass media & the birth of "the public" (McLuhan)

Week 3 from expansionism to empire (Gore Vidal)

Week 4 Libertarianism & the failure of democracy (Rexroth)

Week 5 from Havana Harbor to Pearl Harbor: disinformation

Week 6 realestate & intellectual property (Chinatown)

Week 7 the McCarthy Era (Good Luck and Goodnight)

Week 8 Kennedy: Home of Conspiracies (JFK)

Week 9 poets, hippies and home-grown terrorism (Guerrilla)

Week 10 network news as "white knight" (The Network)

Week 11 Watergate (All the President's Men)

Week 12 Fear and Loathing (the Corporation)

Week 13 Arcadia Burning (An Inconvenient Truth)

Week 14 Conclusion

Poslední úprava: UAAZNOJE (27.01.2010)