2020 - Summer

Culture Vulture (Session 2)

Course Number: SS2: JOUR-UA 503-001

Day & Time: Tue/Thu 1:00pm - 4:00pm

Location: Online

Albert Class Number: 2628

Have you ever gone to a four-star/two-thumbs up film and fallen asleep? Were you shocked when Once won the Tony for Best Musical? Do you secretly think that Breaking Bad is a lot more poignant than Hamlet? Culture Vulture is a course in reading, writing and thinking about the art of criticism. Do you wonder why novels about love and family by men are Great Novels and novels about love and family by women are chick lit? Could your grandma paint some of that stuff in the Museum of Modern Art? Students will be introduced to some of the best and most important cultural critics and to some of the key critical debates of the last decades. What makes something “high” or “low” culture? Is “taste” just a matter of opinion? How much does the race of an author matter? Why can we scream at a concert but talk in whispers at a museum? Now that the Internet has made everyone a critic, do the “official” critics matter? Even though we’ll mostly be home social distancing, we’ll do our best to inhale culture – art, film, theater, books, TV – online and then learn to write about it, both as arts reporters and as cultural critics.

Notes: Counts as an elective for the journalism major and both journalism minors.