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Reading Image and Text: A Case Study of the Cultural Studies Course

&nbsp;&nbsp;This essay explores how the cultural studies course in English department can contribute to the critical readings of the traditional and modem Western culture. For this purpose, it makes a detour to the detailed review of an actual course which was offered to the senior students of English in Korea University during the fall semester of 2003. The semester topic for the course was "Image/Text/Cinema" which was intended to make the basic inquiries of the Western discourses on the visual culture by such writers as Plato, Barthes, Foucault, Benjamin, Bazin, Metz, and Deleuze. The specific issues of the class discussion included the Western metaphysics of mimesis, connotations of the press photo, the continuity and discontinuity of the visual media development, time and memory in the image, mechanical reproduction vs. digital reproduction, and the window and mirror imagery in film. A series of presentations by the student groups could provide some forking paths for the dissemination of textual meanings into a variety of intertextual possibilities.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The cultural studies course must be directed toward the expansion of the horizon of the literary study in English department, and thereby, it should enhance the critical reading of literary texts as well as other cultural texts. In this sense, the course in the fall semester of 2003 was an attempt to connect literature with culture. As J. Hillis Miller argued, it brought us to the rethinking of culture (including literature) as a living force rather than as a finished product.