GOVT 3605

Ideology

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2017-2018.

This course will focus on critical approaches to the study of ideology in order to understand the role of ideology in political subject formation. After an initial presentation of the classical Marxist texts on ideology, we will examine twentieth century reworkings of hegemony theorist Antonio Gramsci and the critical structuralist approaches of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Dick Hebdige. We will concentrate on the "lived relation" to ruling ideas in the form of ideologies of everyday life. The second part of the course will be devoted to psychoanalytically oriented theories (Freud, Lacan) which address the internalization of belief, both in relation to the intrapsychic and in the interaction between psychic and state apparatuses. We conclude with Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, which resumes the Marxist, structuralist and psychoanalytic objectives of the course material. The theorists in the second part of the course will be contextualized within the experience of the historical traumas of fascism and French decolonization. Throughout the semester, we will be reflecting on the continued relevance of historic ideologies, centered around notions of class interest, to late twentieth century ideologies' attachments to national, religious, gendered, ethnic, technological identity.

When Offered Fall.

Distribution Category (CA-AS)
Course Subfield (PT)

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