ENG 604
Material Culture
Spring 2006

Beth Tobin

Maureen Daly Goggin

Tentative Syllabus

Week 1 January 23 Introduction

Introduction to the Course

Week 2 January 30 Introduction to Material Culture

Read:

Auslander, "Beyond Words"
Pearce, From Museums, Objects and Collections

Week 3 February 6 Design

Read:

Theory:

Victor Margolin, "The Product Milieu and Social Action"
Judy Attfield, "The Meaning of Things: Design in the Lower Case"

Case Studies:

Prasad Boradkar, “‘10,000 Songs in Your Pocket’: The IPod as a Transportable Environment”
Koichi Iwabuchi, "How Japanese is Pokeman"

Week 4 February 13 Production

Read:

Theory:

Karl Marx, "Estranged Labour"
Pamela H. Smith, "The Artisanal World"
Mackenzie Wark, "Production," "Property," and "Subject"

Case Studies:

James A. Schmiechen, "Reconsidering the Factory, Art-Labor, and the Schools of Design in Nineteenth Century Britain
Maureen Goggin, "Arguing in 'Pen of Steele and Silken Inke': Theorizing a Broader Material Base for Argumentation"

Week 5 February 20 Commodification

Read:

Theory:

Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret"
Arjun Appadurai, "Commodities and the Politics of Value"

Case Studies:

Howard Brophy, "Aboriginal Art in a Global Context"
Dickinson, Greg. "Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks"

Week 6 February 27 Exchange and Circulation

Read:

Theory:

Marcel Mauss, excerpts from The Gift (1925)
Georges Bataille, "The Notion of Expenditure"

Case Studies:

Jonathan Parry, "The Gift, the Indian Gift, and the 'Indian Gift'"
Nicholas Thomas, "Indigenous Appropriation of European Things"

Week 7 March 6 Consumption

Read:

Theory:

Thorstein Veblen, "Conspicuous Consumption"
Pierre Bourdieu, "Aristocracy of Taste"

Case Studies:

Amanda Vickery, "Women and the World of Goods"
Eva Badowski, "Choseville: Bronte's Villette and the Art of Bourgeois Interiority"

Week 8 March 13 ***NO CLASSES SPRING BREAK*** (March 12-19)

Week 9 March 20 Valuation

Read:

Theory:

Alan Radley, "Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past"
John Fiske, "Commodities and Cultur,"

Case Studies:

Jo Dahn, "Mrs. Delany and Ceramics in the Objectscape"
Natasha Eaton, "Excess in the City? Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta, c. 1780-c.1795"

Week 10 March 27 Collection

Read:

Theory:

Sigmund Freud, "The Fetish"
Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Collecting"
Susan Stewart, "The Collection"

Case Studies:

Annie E. Coombes, "The Spectacle of Empire"
Julie Codell, "Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collection of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharaja of
Baroda , and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern India "

Week 11 April 3 Problematic: Praxis vs. Object

Keyterms: Design, Production, Exchange, Circulation, Consumption. Collection, Economies

Week 12 April 10 Problematic: What is Art?

Keyterms: Art, Artisan, Memory, Social/Cultural value, Material Objects, Material Culture, Popular Culture, Commodification, Valuation

Week 13 April 17 Problematic: Women and Others as Producers & Consumers

Keyterms: Gender, Class, Race/Ethnicity/Nationality, Identity/Identification, Gifts, Consumption, Social/Cultural Space

Week 14 April 24

Conference Presentations

Week 15 May 1

Conference Presentations

DUE: Seminar Paper due on Friday, May 5

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