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Teaching Cultural Studies For An Undergraduate Course

The aim of this paper is to introduce practical approaches in teaching cultural studies for undergraduate students. Therefore, its focus is less on how to teach the theories of cultural studies than on how to apply those theories to our culture with down-to-earth examples in our everyday life. Although the theories were written based on English and American cultures, those should be applied to Korean culture too. For instance, popular reality TV shows both in America and in Korea can be used as the epitome of popular culture and analyzed with the arguments of the critics like Matthew Arnold, Raymond Williams and F. R. Leavis. When structuralist approach is used to analyze the western movies, the same methodology can be used to analyze the Hollywood blockbusters. The notion of myth introduced by Roland Barthes can be applied to political or commercial advertisements that the Korean students are familiar with. Louis Althusser’s notions like “repressive state apparatus” and “ideological state apparatus” can be explained with the repressions used by the military dictatorship and the social media campaigns in Korea. There are quite a few books dealing with cultural studies, but since those books contain some contents irrelevant to Korean students, it is necessary to choose the relevant materials to our culture from those books, instead of using the whole books. Therefore, this essay also offers brief book reviews on those books about the related topics.