This course will provide an introduction to the discourses and debates surrounding the concept of the public sphere and its concomitant norms of citizenship. We will begin with Jurgen Habermas’s standard account of the emergence of the public sphere in the 18th century and its relation to political and philosophical modernity. But we will focus most of our attention on the challenges posed to Habermas’s account by the development of consumer society, visual and electronic media, and embodied forms of political identity, which we will regard as ongoing transformations. Among the topics we will consider are the relation of “publicness” to counterpublics and subcultures; remappings of the boundaries between public and private, rational debate and affect or intimacy; the effects of the increasing displacement of print technologies and cultures by forms of publicness mediated through other technological means and other cultural logics; the shift from norms of abstraction, anonymity, and self-transcendence to norms of embodied or spectacularized particularity; and the relation between publicness and market relations. The theoretical and critical readings will probably include Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s Public Sphere and Experience, Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics, the collection The Black Public Sphere, and Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, along with essays or chapters by Benedict Anderson, Lauren Berlant, Rita Felski, Nancy Fraser, Cindy Patton, Aihwa Ong, Dick Hebdige, and Monroe Price. While we will probably read some short selections from the 18th century, literary readings will center around two sets of topoi: African-American literature and post-cyberpunk science fiction about information technologies (we may also spend some time discussing blogging and other new media practices). These readings will be selected from this list of texts (we will not read all of these works): Frances E.W. Harper, Iola Leroy; George Schuyler, Black No More; Nella Larsen, Passing; Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt; Samuel R. Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; Bruce Sterling, Distraction; Geoff Ryman, Air; Cory Doctorow, Eastern Standard Tribe, Nancy McCarthy, Chat, Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan, Nearly Roadkill, and stories by Nalo Hopkinson and Ted Chiang. Students will write two shorter papers, or one longer one, along with an in-class presentation.