CLEN 6xxx: Conspiracy Theory

with Prof. Dennis Yi Tenen
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Fall 2024
MW 2:40 - 3:55pm

Office Hours

TBA

Course Description

To understand the modern conspiracy theory---as a way of personal and shared meaning-making in complicated times---we must first consider its history. In this class, we will encounter the many genres of political storytelling, from myth to legend, fairytale, tall tale, rumor, disinformation, and propaganda. These distinct, yet related genres blend fact and fiction and, ultimately, structure our understanding of the world. Located outside of systematic, scientific knowledge they nevertheless present us with a cohesive, if shadowy archive, sung to children at the bedside, whispered at church, manufactured by political marketers, hammered out on troll farms, or broadcast by state-sponsored agents through AM radio waves and social media networks.

In each week, we will first familiarize ourselves with secondary---scholarly and theoretical sources, and second encounter a number of primary materials "from the field" of folklore studies, anthropology, literature, and digital ethnography.

This being a reading- and research-intensive curriculum, the class is open to graduate students from all departments. The students should expect to synthesize ~100 pages of reading per week, write short response papers, and complete a final project based on original archival research.

All readings will be linked from the syllabus. Please print and bring to class when possible.

Course Requirements & Grading

  • 50% Class & Online Participation
  • 25% Project Proposal
  • 25% Final Project

All written work should be submitted to the Courseworks page.

Class and University Policies

The usage of electronic devices is strongly discouraged in the classroom.

When in doubt, cite! Plagiarism is insulting to your fellow students, your instructors, and to the research community at large. It wastes my time and yours, and is, ultimately, not worth the risk. Consult Columbia’s guidelines at http://www.college.columbia.edu/academics/integrity or ask me for help early in the writing process.

Provisional Schedule & Reading List

Week 1: Intro

Introductions. Structure of the class. Topics covered. Grading and attendance policy.

Week 2: Myth

  • Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955): 428–44.
  • Malinowski, Bronislaw. “The Role of Myth in Life.” In The Role of Myth in Life, 193–206. University of California Press, 1984.
  • Wender, Dorothea. “The Myth of Washington.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 3, no. 1 (1976): 71–78.

Explore: Selection from Metamorphoses (~8 CE) by Ovid.

Week 3: Legend

  • Tangherlini, Timothy R. “‘It Happened Not Too Far from Here...’: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization.” Western Folklore 49, no. 4 (1990): 371–90.
  • Degh, Linda. “What Is A Belief Legend?” Folklore 107 (1996): 33–46.
  • Fine, Gary Alan. “The Kentucky Fried Rat: Legends and Modern Society.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 17, no. 2/3 (1980): 222–43.

Explore: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820) by Washington Irving.

Week 4: Fairytale

Explore: Selection from Tatar, Maria, ed. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Week 5: Urban Legend

Explore: Selection from: Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Week 6: Folklore

Explore: Selection from Dégh, Linda. Indiana Folklore: A Reader. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1980. Selections from: Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. New York: Amistad, 1990.

Week 7: Tall Tale

  • Chapter IX, "Round Up" in Rourke, Constance. American Humor: a Study of the National Character. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1955.
  • Loomis, C. Grant. “The American Tall Tale and the Miraculous.” California Folklore Quarterly 4, no. 2 (1945): 109–28.
  • Reaver, J. Russell. "From reality to fantasy: Opening-closing formulas in the structures of American tall tales." Southern Folklore Quarterly 36 (1972): 369-382.

Explore: Selection from: Hart, Fred H. The Sazerac Lying Club. H. Keller & Company, 1878. Selection from: Fee, Christopher R., and Jeffrey B. Webb, eds. American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2016.

Week 8: Rumor

  • Buckner, H. Taylor. “A Theory of Rumor Transmission.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1965): 54–70.
  • Mullen, Patrick B. “Modern Legend and Rumor Theory.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 9, no. 2/3 (1972): 95–109.
  • Turner, Patricia A. “Church’s Fried Chicken and The Klan: A Rhetorical Analysis of Rumor in the Black Community.” Western Folklore 46, no. 4 (1987): 294–306.

Explore: World War II Rumor Project at the Library of Congress.

Week 9: Folk Belief

  • Dundes, Alan. “Folk Ideas as Units of Worldview.” The Journal of American Folklore 84, no. 331 (1971): 93–103.
  • Alver, Bente Gullveig. “The Bearing of Folk Belief on Cure and Healing.” Journal of Folklore Research 32, no. 1 (1995): 21–33.
  • Labotka, Danielle, and Susan A. Gelman. “Scientific and Folk Theories of Viral Transmission: A Comparison of COVID-19 and the Common Cold.” Frontiers in Psychology 13j (June 28, 2022).

Explore: Tangherlini, Timothy R., Shadi Shahsavari, Behnam Shahbazi, Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh, and Vwani Roychowdhury. “An Automated Pipeline for the Discovery of Conspiracy and Conspiracy Theory Narrative Frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and Storytelling on the Web.” PLOS ONE 15, no. 6 (June 16, 2020): e0233879.

Week 10: Performance

  • Bauman, Richard. “Verbal Art as Performance.” American Anthropologist 77, no. 2 (1975): 290–311.
  • "Introduction" from Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press, 1984.
  • Chapter 1, "Information, Distortion, Propaganda: Control Factors in Technological Societies" in Szanto, George H. Theater & Propaganda. University of Texas Press, 1977.

Explore: TBA (visual material / public theater)

Week 11: Propaganda

  • Chapters 1 & 2 in Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Vintage, 1962.
  • Abrams, Steve. “Beyond Propaganda: Soviet Active Measures in Putin’s Russia.” Connections 15, no. 1 (2016): 5–31.
  • Woolley, Samuel C. “Bots and Computational Propaganda: Automation for Communication and Control.” In Social Media and Democracy, edited by Joshua A. Tucker and Nathaniel Persily, 89–110. SSRC Anxieties of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Explore: White Rose sticker archive.

Week 12: Disinformation

  • Lewandowsky, Stephan, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, and John Cook. “Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the ‘Post-Truth’ Era.” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition 6, no. 4 (December 1, 2017): 353–69.
  • Guess, Andrew M., and Benjamin A. Lyons. “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Online Propaganda.” In Social Media and Democracy, edited by Joshua A. Tucker and Nathaniel Persily, 10–33. SSRC Anxieties of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  • "What is Disinformation?" in Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Week 13: Conspiracy

  • The self-named Chapter 3 in Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996.
  • Keeley, Brian L. “Of Conspiracy Theories.” The Journal of Philosophy 96, no. 3 (1999): 109–26.
  • Sunstein, Cass R., and Adrian Vermeule. “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures*.” Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (2009): 202–27.
  • Dentith, M R. X. “Expertise and Conspiracy Theories.” Social Epistemology 32, no. 3 (May 4, 2018): 196–208.

Explore: Selections from Fee, Christopher R., and Jeffrey B. Webb, eds. Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories in American History. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019.

Week 14: Final Projects

  • Highlights from student projects.