Popular Culture & Appropriation

Course Description

This course aims to study the development of popular culture through observing the behaviour of media. Icons, myths, semantics and nomenclature of emergent culture and the ways in which these are appropriated across different mediums will be considered. The course will also consider popular culture as particularly apt for appropriation since it creates a unique public common where there is no distinction between high and low culture. Students will consider the implications of such appropriation in areas ranging from cross-cultural contact, accelerated distribution of images, authorship and the fine line between the private and the public in the contemporary world.