MEDIA FEARS & FANTASIES in Spring 2019 (CM1091FB2)

Popular media are spaces in which we work through our most compelling fears and fantasies. In their social and political world-making capacity, media project fears and fantasies for audiences to inhabit, and media consumption allows audiences to access emotions and ideals as vehicles for evaluating the society around them. At the same time, systems of media distribution circulate material in ways that provoke fears for some and realise fantasies for others. In this course, we will take individual and collective fears and fantasies as frames for the analysis of a selection of media genres, narratives, systems, and modes of production – in contemporary culture and historically. In particular, we will focus on how the media’s construction and circulation of ideas of sex and violence, danger and paradise, the impossible and the unspeakable can teach us about our shared values and the politics of current and future worlds.