LIT 5309 - Spring 2025 - Edwards

Spring
2025
LIT 5309
Studies in Popular Culture: Media in the Digital Era
Leigh Edwards

This LIT 5309 course examines popular culture and media in the context of the emergence of mass culture and focuses on the evolution of media in the digital era. We will address popular music, television, film, and new media. We will also consider audience studies and fan culture. Our reading draws on media studies, screen studies, popular music studies, film and new media, popular culture studies, and digital humanities. The course will give you solid grounding in media studies and the chance to do more specialized research in the field. Within media studies, we will discuss topics including multi-platform storytelling, media convergence, serialized narratives on television, interactive digital videos and films, digital technology and popular music, documentary film, and new ideas of media in the digital era. Our focus will be on U.S. media, but we will consider questions of the global circulation of media.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literature and Culture; the History of Text Technologies (reception conceptual area, Film/Television media); Film and Media Studies; a Literary Genre (Film/Television).