Affect and emotion play a central role in popular media culture. This centrality shows, for example, in how popular culture studies foregrounds the category of ‘pleasure’ in its approaches to popular media artifacts; it also shows in many terms that the field of popular media culture uses to describe itself – genre terms, for example, like ‘thriller,’ ‘weepy,’ or ‘horror.’ To a significant extent, popular media culture does its work of ‘entertaining’ us by eliciting bodily responses – making us laugh, cry, shiver with horror, excited with suspense – and by making us feel. In this seminar, we will explore some of the ways in which popular culture studies has theorized affect and emotion, and how it has conceptualized the (cultural) work of these in selected popular genres. We will both develop and apply these conceptual insights to a few selected artifacts of US-American popular culture.
Please note that this is a discussion- and reading-intensive graduate seminar, with an emphasis on theory. Students outside the MA American Studies are generally welcome to join the class, but should inquire for prerequisites with Prof. Kanzler (katja.kanzler@uni-leipzig.de).
- Trainer/in: Kanzler Katja