Familiar with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney Company products? Have you, however, interpreted them in comparison to the Little Mole, the animated robber Rumcajs or Ferda the Ant? Know a lot about Superman, Batman and other DC Comics superheroes? Compare them to Vinnetou, a Central European image of a native American gentleman, accompanied by his white brother Old Shatterhand, of German origin. Tired of James Bond? Watch and interpret his Czech Communist cover version from 1970s.

This course focuses on the semiotic interpretation of emblems (icons and stereotypes) of pop culture, e.g. entities produced by the intentional reduction of meaning. It will cover discursive practices that produce semantic reductions, be it mass media, the pop-culture industry, or mediating exchange chains between distinct cultures and nations (U.S. and Czech at the center of the course attention). The materials covered and interpreted will also include stereotypes of national mentalities, the most influential people who never lived, ideological propaganda stereotypes, emblems constructing the images of politicians, emblems of cities, distinct commercial strategies in different cultural contexts, and pop music, of course. The course is based on a cultural studies perspective and stresses semiotic methodological approaches. A comparative approach towards similarities and differences of U.S. and Czech pop culture material frames the whole course.

The course meets for three hours per week. Course requirements: regular class attendance, active participation in discussions, reading: 100 - 150 pages per week; 3 workshop presentations; final paper (3000 words).

Petr Bílek

Full professor of Modern Czech Literature at the Department of Czech and Comparative Literature, Charles University. He belongs among the prominent Czech literary theorists and historians. He has published books on contemporary theories of interpretating narratives, on James Bond and his Communist Czech TV equivalent, on pop culture of the Communist era and on contemporary poetry, along with a number of articles in Czech, English, Italian, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Croatian, Hungarian, and Slovak. In 1994-1995, he was a Visiting Professor at Brown University. In 1995 he received a Mellon Post Doctoral Scholarship to continue his research there for two more years. He returned to Brown University as a Visiting Professor in Spring 2000. He has lectured in Hamburg, Uppsala, Stockholm, Budapest, Dublin, London, Glasgow, Lyon, Munich, Amsterdam, Aarhus, and at University of Texas, University of North Carolina, Florida International University, Columbia University, and Yale University. His most recent book Models of Representations in Czech Literary History (co-written by Vladimír Papoušek) has been published by Eastern European Monographs, Boulder, Colorado, in 2010.