School of Communication

CMNS 323-4

CULTURAL DIMENSIONS IN ADVERTISING

Prerequisite:

Required: 60 credit hours, including two of CMNS 200, 220, 221, 223, or 226.

Strongly recommended: CMNS 362 or 363.

Course Description:

Advertising is one of the most familiar and pervasive means by which consumer society creates a spectacular world of wonder, excitement and promise; effectively countering the rationalizing forces of disenchantment wrought by modernity. This course introduces students to the study of advertising in the expanded field. In this sense, the course is an extended analysis of the ways in which images, objects, environments and sets of ideas are created and deployed in the interest of consumerism. Through careful visual analysis of select ads drawn from magazines, TV and the Internet, this course will provide students with the means to understand and decode the mechanisms of visual persuasion at work in the culture of advertising. The course will look specifically at how advertising discourse frames other means of social expression - gender, youth culture, ethnicity, art, resistance, and so on - and becomes an influential means of constructing truth in contemporary society.

The course emphasizes the relationship between the formal properties of commercial advertising, their content, and the broader contexts in which advertising is produced and received. While ads comprise the predominant language of contemporary visual culture, their social function can only be understood with reference to the emergence and intensification of 'market society'. As such, the course will review how various social theorists have conceptualized the market and the historical role of advertising within it.

Required Texts:

Robert Goldman Reading Ads Socially (Routledge, 1992)
Don Slater and Fran Tonkiss Market Society (Polity, 2001)
Some additional articles will be assigned and made available on reserve at the library downtown.

Course Requirements:

In-class quiz (week 4) 10%
Mid term exam (week 7) 35%
Term paper (due: week 12) 35%
Tutorial participation 10%
Tutorial presentation 10%

Note: There will be no final exam for this course.

The school expects that the grades awarded in this course will bear some reasonable relation to established university-wide practices with respect to both levels and distribution of grades. In addition, the School will follow Policy T10.02 with respect to “Intellectual Honesty” and “Academic Discipline” (see the current Calendar, General Regulations section).