Fall 2016 PHIL Grad course, open to all graduate students on campus
Dr Darren Hudson Hick
COURSE: PHIL5308-001
Meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:00-3:20 pm, English-Philosophy 150
Analytic philosophy has long held a prejudice against popular culture and the “low” arts in particular: Hollywood movies, rock music, comic books, video games, popular novels, television. The more popular they became, it seems, the less philosophers wanted to acknowledge them. But a growing number of philosophers are spending more and more of their time looking at the popular and mass arts, and finding unique philosophical insights and challenges therein. In this course, we will look at some of the philosophical work from the last quarter century focused on the popular culture and arts—the arts that most people (including most of us) spend most of their time with.
The first half of the course will be spent analyzing the nature of popular art, its particular value, the distinction between art and entertainment, and between “high” and “low” art. The second half of the course will look at current philosophical issues in some particular forms of popular art including television, “junk fiction,” detective stories, comics, and rock music.
This is a one-off course, and is very unlikely to be taught again.
E-mail for questions: darren.hick@ttu.edu