About
The Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture houses the Cultural Mediations Ph.D. This interdisciplinary doctoral program is designed to advance knowledge and understanding of that body of cultural theory and those cultural practices that inform literary studies, cinema studies and work in music, art history and new media, along with the historical, intellectual and social frames of reference that this work invokes.
Since the 1960s, a wide range of methodologies and shared assumptions across the disciplines has been applied to an understanding of the ways in which cultural practices have meaning and consequences. Developments in psychoanalysis, semiotics, post-structuralism, narratology, historiography, discourse analysis, gender studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, and post-colonialism have been at the origin of some of the most provocative critical approaches to recent studies of culture and cultural practices. It is this ensemble of shared discourses across once discrete disciplines that defines perspectives in interdisciplinarity today. Although unevenly deployed across areas of study such as literature, film, music, art and popular culture, these discourses serve as protocols with which to articulate a range of common concerns and preoccupations, both within and against the dominant Western tradition.
The program is supported by the existing disciplinary strengths of Carleton University in specific academic units while taking advantage of current, widespread faculty research activity in cultural theory, within and across various literatures, twentieth-century aural and visual cultures, history, architecture, and in work with contemporary media technologies. Cultural Mediations represents the vertical integration of M.A. graduate and B.A. undergraduate programs in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of French, the School for Studies in Art and Culture (Art History, Film Studies, Music) and in Comparative Literary Studies within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton. These programs and their academic units are the principal participants in the program.
Carleton University’s commitment to research and development in high technology testifies to an institutional interest in the workings of an information economy. Furthermore, the ubiquitous presence of the new technologies of production and reception in our society are very much on the agenda of research and study in cultural interdisciplinarity generally. One of the distinguishing features of this program, therefore, is to take Carleton’s commitment to electronic technologies in the direction of cultural analysis. New technologies have been instrumental in dissolving the boundaries between heretofore discrete kinds of texts and creating new, heterogeneous kinds of cultural works and new sorts of audience relations to those works. They have instituted new scopic and auditory regimes that call for new conceptual and analytical approaches.