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.
- Introductory Session: Capitalism, Consumption, & Consumer Culture
- Consumer Revolution
*Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in 18th Century Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 46-84.
- The Culture We Ingest
*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.
- Spaces of Consumption
*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.
- Gender & Consumption
*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.
- Raising Consumers
*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.
- 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.
- Counterculture & Consumer Society
*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 Ève 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.
- Consumer Activism and Consumer Movement
- 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.
- Waste & Want
*Susan Strasser, chapt. 7, “Good Riddance,” in Waste and Want. A Social History of Trash, New York: Holt, pp. 265-293.
- 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.