The New School
Visual and Cultural Studies
Credit students will draw on the readings in this list for midterm and final papers. Grouped readings are closely related and should be read as one unit.
Numbers in square brackets refer to the sessions the reading is intended to supplement.
I = Introductory; M = Intermediate; A = Advanced
> Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry" (M) [9]
Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of the Image" (M) [10,11]
Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life" (M) [2,3]
> Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (M) [9]
> John Beverley, "The Ideology Of Postmodern Music And Left Politics" (A) [12,13]
Victor Burgin, "Something About Photography Theory" (I) [12,13]
> Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (I) [12,13]
Gilles Deleuze, "Nomad Thought" (M) [12,13]
Jacques Derrida, "The Decentering Event in Social Thought" (M) [11]
> Jacques Derrida, "Différance" (A) [11]
Francis Frascina, "Signs and Systems in Western Painting" (M) [10]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" (A) [6,7]
> "First Things First: A Manifesto" [pdf file] (I)> Rick Poynor, "First Things First: A Brief History" (I)
> Renata Salecl, "The Sirens and Feminine Jouissance" (A) [8,12,13]Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "Photography After Art Photography" (I) [12,13]
Cornel West, "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" (M) [11]
Slavoj Zizek, "From the Sublime to the Ridiculous: The Sexual Act in Cinema" (A) [8,12,13]