2025 - Spring

Journalism and Society: Culture Vulture

Course Number: JOUR-UA 503.003

Day & Time: Thu | 3:30 PM – 6:00 PM

Location: 20 Cooper Square, Room 655

Prerequisites: None

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? We’ll take advantage of our location in New York city and inhale culture — art, film, theater, books, TV — 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.