AustLit

This subject investigates cultural texts and their meanings as they come to appear in present day Australia and globally. It aims to provide ways of investigating such meanings and how they are produced that are both critical and creative. This reflects the Cultural Studies approach of this subject which hopes to both introduce students to some of the key concepts in Cultural Studies while providing methods for analysing complex cultural phenomenon in a media-saturated environment. Some of the key areas of focus will be cultural and social differences, signification and representation, modes of meaning production, genres of intervention and the engaged practice of theory.

1. Culture, Text and Meaning Production

Keywords: culture (high, low and history of) text, textuality, intertextuality, textual turn meaning produced from texts via semiotic readings, meanings produced from site out theory or engagement

Concept: Cultural text, Representation

2.Orientalism

3. Popular Culture and Reality TV

4. Subcultures and Postcultures

5. Gender and Performance

6. Representing Indigeneity

7. Postcoloialism and Regimes of Meaning

8. Listening to Stories

9. The Flaneur

10.Fictocriticism

11. Natural Disasters

12. True Crime and End of History

13. Experimental Histories