A Crash Course

2011-12, second semester
Place and time: to be announced
Organized by Murat Aydemir 

The so-called linguistic, theoretical, cultural, and interdisciplinary turns in the humanities have left the field both exhausted and reinvigorated. Exhausted, because their attendant polemics sapped much scholarly energy. Invigorated, because the overhaul of old certainties allowed for new possibilities. One of those is called “cultural analysis.” Cultural analysis is dedicated to the analysis of the specificities of divergent objects of culture, of whatever medium, genre, or age; whether high or low culture; whether banal or rarefied. Those objects are considered in close dialogue with socio-cultural contexts as well as theoretical frames—without, however, ever reducing the object to an example merely illustrating the explanatory power of the selected context or theory. Objects problematize rather than illustrate. Cultural analysis acknowledges but not necessarily respects the existing disciplinary, historical, or cultural containment of the variegated object it studies. Hence, it requires its practitioners to reflect on and account for their conceptual as well as contextual selections and combinations explicitly and precisely. This crash course fleshes out, then debates, a method of cultural analysis, organized around key notions such as object, text/medium, context/frame, discipline, culture, history, concept, and subject. Guest lecturers expand on, criticize, or reframe aspects of the methodology of cultural analysis, departing from their own methodological, disciplinary, and/or political priorities and preferences. In that way, the crash course will enable its participants to specify and account for their own methodological decisions in their research.