The Star Wars: Frontiers of Postmodernity
Monograph Lecture
Course Description
NAVIGATION
The present course consists of a series of a monograph lectures dedicated to, or more precisely, revolving around George Lucas's Star Wars. The course has been designed for graduate students, whose experience in literary analysis and knowledge of literary and cultural theory would be a prerequisite. Through Star Wars, a universal favorite and a classic of the SF genre, students will revisit a network of mutually related phenomena contributing to the development of American cultural history, beginning with the discourse of the American Frontier and finishing with postmodernity, which in the light of the course is understood as a cultural and intellectual formation. Employing methodological instrumentarium of Culture Studies, the course leads the Students "by the hand" towards a deconstruction of metanarratives underlying the language of the Star Wars. In effect, Students would be expected to gain a broad perspecive upon the volitional projects that continually fix and reinvent America as a concept requiring voluntary suspension of disbelief, yet a concept demonstrating a very real power to shape the metanarrative of contemporary Western world.
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