Syllabus/achievement requirements

The articles and chapters marked with * will be available at Kopiutsalget/Akadmika as a compendium.

Required readings:

Readings marked with an asterisk (*) are available in a compendium which can be bought at the Akademika bookstore at Blindern campus. Please bring your student ID card and registration confirmation with you when you buy compendiums.

 

  1. Introductory Session: Capitalism, Consumption, & Consumer Culture

     

  2. Consumer Revolution

     

*Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in 18th Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 46-84.

Natacha Coquery, “The Language of Success. Marketing and Distributing Semi-luxury Goods in Eighteen-century Paris”, Journal of Design History, 17, 1, 2004, pp. 71-89.

 

 

  1. The Culture We Ingest

 

Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Benjamin Sacks, “The Global Exchange of Food & Drugs,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption.

*Sidney W. Mintz, chapt. 3, “Consumption,” in Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York: Penguin Books, 1985, pp.74-150.

*Wolfgang Schivelbusch, chapt. 8, “The artificial paradises of the Nineteenth Century,” in Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants.

 

  1. Spaces of Consumption

 

Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Small Shops and Department Stores,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Michael Miller, chapt. 2, “The Grands Magasins,” in The Bon Marché, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 48-72.

*Rachel Bowlby, chapt. 4, “The Passer-By and the Shop Window,” and chapt. 7, “The Supermarket’s Beginnings,” in Carried Away. The Invention of Modern Shopping, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 49-78, 134-151.

*Lizabeth Cohen, chapt. 6, “Commerce: Reconfiguring Community Marketplaces,” in A Consumer’s Republic. The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, New York: Vintage Books, 2003, pp. 257-290.

 

  1. Gender & Consumption

Erika Diane Rappaport, chapt. 2, “The Trials of Consumption,” in Shopping for Pleasure. Women in the Making of London’s West End, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 48-73.

*Leora Auslander, “The Gendering of Consumption in Nineteenth Century France,” in The Sex of Things, eds. V. de Grazia & E. Furlough, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 79-112.

*Wendy Parkins, “‘The Epidemic of Purple, White and Green’: Fashion and the Suffragette Movement in Britain 1908-14,” in Fashion the Body Politic, ed. Wendy Parkins, Oxford: Berg, 2002, pp. 97-124.

 

  1. Raising Consumers

Franck Cochoy, “Hansel and Gretel at the Grocery Store. Progressive Grocer and the little American consumers (1929-1959),” Journal of Cultural Economy 1, no. 2 (2008), pp. 145-163.

*Lisa Jacobson, chapt. 2, “From Thrift Education to Consumer Training: Reforming the Child Spender,” in Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. 56-92.

*Daniel Thomas Cook, “The Rise of ‘The Toddler’ as Subject and as Merchandising Category in the 1930s,” in New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture, and Commodification, ed. Mark Gottdiener, pp. 111-130.

  1. The Forgotten Consumer?

*Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “‘Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’,” in Consumer Society in American History, A Reader, ed. Lawrence Glickman, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 241-273.

*Elizabeth Chin, chapt. 4, “Hemmed In and Shut Out,” in Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture.

Malia McAndrew, “A Twentieth-Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945-1965,” Enterprise and History 17, no. 4 (2010), pp. 784-810.

  1. Counterculture & Consumer Society

Alexander Sedlmaier and Stephan Malinowski, “‘1968’ – A Catalyst of Consumer Society,” Cultural and Social History 8, no. 2 (2011), pp. 255-274.

*Thomas Frank, chapt. 7, “The Varieties of Hip: Advertisements of the 1960s,” in The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, 1998.

*Luc Boltanski and ?ve Chiapello, chapt. 3, “1968: Crisis and Revival of Capitalism,” in The New Spirit of Capitalism, London and New York: Verso, 2005, pp.167-215.

*Cotten Seiler, “The Commodification of Rebellion: Rock Culture  and Consumer Capitalism,” in  New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture, and Commodification, ed. Mark Gottdiener, pp. 203-226.

  1. Consumer Activism and Consumer Movement

Matthew Hilton, “Consumer Movements,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann, 2012.

Lawrence B. Glickman, “Consumer Activism, Consumer Regimes, and the Consumer Movement: Rethinking the History of Consumer Politics in the United States,” in  The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, 2012.

  1. Consuming Bodies

*Beverley Mullings, chapt. 11, “Fantasy Tours: Exploring the Global Consumption of Caribbean Sex Tourism,” in New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture & Commodification, ed. Mark Gottdiener, pp. 227-250.

*Jean Baudrillard, chapt. 8, “The Finest Consumer Object: The Body,” in The Consumer Society: Myths & Structure, pp. 129-150.

*Margaret Jane Radin, chapt. 10, “Prostitution and Baby-Selling: Contested Commodification and Women’s Capacities,” in Contested Commodities: The Trouble with Trade in Sex, Children, Body Parts & Other Things, pp. 131-153.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “Bodies for Sale: Whole – or in Parts?,” Body and Society 7, no. 2-3 (2001), pp. 1-8.

 

  1. Waste & Want

 

Joshua Goldstein, “Waste,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 326-347.

*Susan Strasser, chapt. 7, “Good Riddance,” in Waste and Want. A Social History of Trash, New York: Holt, pp. 265-293.

 

  1. Anxieties of Affluence

 

*Avner Offer, chapt. 1, 2 & 12, “ The Challenges of Affluence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 1-38, 270-301.

*Daniel Horowitz, chapt. 4 “Critique from Within,” in The Anxieties of Affluence. Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004, pp. 101-128.

Published May 12, 2017 1:03 PM - Last modified Oct. 11, 2017 9:20 AM