Media Revolutions: Color Television and the Humanities in the 1960s and 1970s
CHUM 353
Fall 2019
| Section:
01
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| 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. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA CHUM |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (HIST)(STS) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Less than 50% |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium (1938-1950; published posthumously, 1983)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)
John Berger, Art and Revolution (1969)
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973)
Francis Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (posthumous publication, 1968)
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967)
Walter Benjamin, Imagined Communities (1983)
David Attenborough, Life on Air: Memories of a Broadcaster (2002)
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference (1987)
Mary Beard, How Do We Look? The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilisation (2018)
Maurice Berger, Revolution of the Eye (2018)
Asa Briggs, The History of the BBC: The First Fifty Years (1922-1972)
Asa Briggs & Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media (2002)
Stuart Hall, Representations (1997)
Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past (2012)
Darrel M. Newton, Paving the Empire Road: BBC Television and Black Britons (2012)
Gillian Rose, An Introduction to Visual Methodologies (2018)
James Stourton, Kenneth Clark: Life, Art, and Civilization (2016)
Jonathan Conlin, Civilisation (2009)
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Examinations and Assignments:
Grading will be based on a combination of short essays, documentary film reviews, midterm exam, quizzes, class participation, and a final research project. |
| Instructor(s): Tucker,Jennifer Times: .M.W... 02:50PM-04:10PM; Location: FISK312; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 15 | | SR major: 0 | JR major: 0 | | |
| Seats Available: 3 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 6 | JR non-major: 6 | SO: 3 | FR: X |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 3 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 1 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 2 |
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