Religions and Media
Sample Syllabus
Mark Elmore
Course Logic
The relationship between religion
and media is an evermore ubiquitous part of modern global life,
from sound bites on ‘moral values’ to terror videos.
This course aims to provide students with a global perspective
on this relationship and the tools to critically analyze it.
Throughout the course we will work to understand how these two
categories are increasingly understood in terms of one another.
We begin by drawing into question
several key enlightenment ideals: the notion of the autonomous
subject, the understanding of religion as ‘Belief in’
something, and the redemptive logic of secularization and
a rational public sphere. From there our analysis will proceed
not with ‘world religions’ or even with different
types of media (film, photography etc.). Rather, we will look
at this through a series of conceptual categories: Secularization,
Public Culture, Nationalisms, Violence.
Course Requirements
The requirements for this course
are not simply busy-work for the industrious. I believe it is
impossible to critically engage media without creating yourself.
As a result, fifty percent of your grade will be a media project.
This project asks you to present a critical analysis of one of
the course themes by combining the use of words and images. Your
final project can take one of several forms. It can be a website
that integrates images and texts. It can be a set of photographs
with captions and explanations. It can be a short film with description.
It can be a slide show with narration. It can be a diorama. The
medium is open. The only requirement is that it includes both
words and images. This assignment will be due on the day the final
is scheduled, but your approach must be approved by me by the
end of the seventh week. It accounts for 50% of your grade.
In addition, you will be expected
to write single page review essays (double spaced, 12 pt. Times,
1 inch margins) each week in response to one of the texts or films
assigned for that week. The specific topics are given in the reading
outline below. In each of these assignments, you will be expected
to respond in depth to either a primary text or the film shown
that week. You will be expected to clearly articulate what you
understand as the main point of the text and to offer a critique
or comment on this position. In this assignment, you must be concise.
Responses should be between 280-350 words. You will be expected
to turn in five of these over the quarter. They will account for
50% of your grade.
Weekly Schedule
Week 1: Introduction: The Category of Religion in Modern Global
Perspective
READINGS
-
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline
and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Ch1, 2.
-
Talal Asad, “Reading a Modern Classic: W.C.
Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion" in Vries, Hent de, and Samuel M. Weber.
Religion and Media, Cultural Memory
in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. 131-150.
-
Vries, Hent de, and Samuel M. Weber.
Religion and Media, Cultural Memory
in the Present. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Introduction.
Week 2: Religion/Media and the Mystical Subject
-
Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: The New Press, 1997) “Subjectivity
and Truth,” “The Hermeneutic of the Subject,”
“Technologies of the Self.”
-
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life,
Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984) Ch 13.
-
Michel de Certeau, “The Gaze of Nicholas of
Cusa,” Diacritics fall
(1987).
FILM
Week 3: Secularity
READINGS
-
Casanova, José. Public
Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 1-74.
-
Connolly, William E. Why I Am Not
a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 1-72.
FILM
Week 4: Public Cultures
READINGS
-
Jurgen Habermas, “The Public
Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,” New German Critique 3
(Autumn 1974).
-
Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge Appadurai, “Public
Modernity in India,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture
in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
-
Lila Abu-Lughod "Egyptian Melodrama-Technology of the Modern Subject?"
in Ginsburg, Faye
D., Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
FILM
Week 5: Nationalisms
READINGS
-
Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
London: Verso, 1983.
-
Mankekar,
Purnima, “Epic Contests: Television
and Religious Identity in India" in Ginsburg, Faye D., Lila Abu-Lughod,
and Brian Larkin. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
FILM
Week 6: Fundamentalisms
READINGS
-
Riesebrodt, Martin, Pious Passion: the Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in
the United States and Iran, Comparative Studies in Religion and Society;
6. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Ch 1, 2.
-
Ramaswamy,
Sumathi. "Visualizing
India's Geo-body: Globes, Maps, Bodyscapes"
in Ramaswamy, Sumathi. Beyond Appearances?
Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern
India, Contributions to Indian Sociology. Occasional Studies; 10. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2003.
FILM
Week 7: Violence
READINGS
-
Sontag,
Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others.
1st ed. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2003.
-
Baudrillard, Jean, Jean Baudrillard,
and Jean Baudrillard. The Spirit of Terrorism and
Other Essays. New ed. London; New York: Verso, 2003.
FILM
Week 8: Of Miracles and Special Effects
READINGS
-
Walter Benjamin “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”
in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.
-
Lawrence, Bruce, “Allah On-Line: The Practice
of Global Islam in the Information Age” in Hoover, Stewart M., and Lynn Schofield Clark. Practicing
Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion,
and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
FILM
Week 9: Consumption
READINGS
-
Christopher and Rachael Dwyer Pinney, Pleasure
and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public
Culture in India (Oxford, OUP, 2001) 1-35, 247-286.
-
Doss, Erika, “Believing in Elvis: Popular Piety
in Material Culture” in Hoover, Stewart M., and Lynn Schofield Clark. Practicing
Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion,
and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
FILM
Week 10: Making Sense of Practice: The Aesthetics of Everyday
Life
READINGS
-
Pinney, Christopher and Nicholas Thomas Beyond Aesthetics:
Art and the Technology of Enchantment Oxford: Berg, 2001. Introduction.
-
Hirschkind,
Charles. 2001. "The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon
Audition in Contemporary Cairo." American Ethnologist 28(3): 623-649.
Hirschkind, Charles. 2001. "Religious Reason and Civic
Virtue: An Islamic Counter-Public." Cultural Anthropology
16(1): 3-34.
FILM
Assignment
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