ADVERTISING AS CULTURE IN MODERN AND CON

Advertising emerged in modern societies as they developed into bourgeois market economies. As a creative industry involving verbal/visual communication and technology, it is intertwined with cultural production in general, and many of its products can be seen as artistic in their own right. As it both caters to and creates a consumer public with needs and desires, it is intertwined with broad social and ideological currents, and can provide an angle for their historical analysis. This course posits analysis of a “discursive formation” that includes the language of advertising as well as literary, cinematographic, and other social languages engaging publicity as a vehicle for the study of modern/contemporary Spanish cultural history, from the birth of the modern constitutional monarchy (1812), through the Franco dictatorship (1939-75), and into the transition to present-day democracy. Topics will include the evolution and professionalization of Spanish advertising itself, advertising and aesthetics, early bourgeois reflection on art vs. commerce, the special role of women as both publicity and public, changing views on consumer culture, and marketing’s function in consolidating substate political identities.