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CS92PROD
Media Revolutions: Color Television and the Humanities in the 1960s and 1970s
CHUM 353
Fall 2020 not offered
Crosslisting: HIST 345, SISP 352

This course visits some of the groundbreaking TV series that presented humanities and sciences to global mass audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Television emerged as a powerful cultural presence and with remarkable speed. From the late 1960s, the British Broadcasting Company, in partnership with PBS in America, created a series of television programs (partly to widen the audience market for new color television programming). This course focuses on the role of television as a still new, and potentially disruptive, medium. We will look at and discuss a range of British TV series from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (both 1969) to Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" (1973) and Alistair Cooke's "America" (1972), John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty" (1977), and David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" (first aired in 1979). We will read and discuss works of art and media criticism around this time that laid the groundwork for major conceptual and theoretical remappings of the fields of cultural and visual studies. We also will explore the impact of television on art worlds and museums, looking at how 1960s' color television documentaries influenced the way that humanities are presented televisually up to today. This course satisfies requirements for the "Visual and Material Culture" module in history and major requirements for the Science in Society Program.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (HIST)(STS)

Last Updated on MAR-29-2024
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