Star Wars: A Cultural History

Module code: HA3488

The Star Wars movies have been both celebrated and disparaged by fans and theorists alike for better than forty years now, a time-frame which almost perfectly coincides with the phenomenon of post-modernism following the era of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War through to a post-9/11 and post-convergence present. Love them or hate them, such a populist and intellectual zeitgeist marks the films as significant cultural artefacts in the history of cinematic art. With a full twelve feature-length productions having been released, the astonishing recent popularity of the serialised The Mandalorian, and so much more imminent under the new ownership of the Disney Corporation, as well as a veritable ‘universe’ of ancillary narratives, the Star Wars mythology offers a significant fantasy-prism through which to measure the ideological temperature of American and now global capitalist society. Taking cultural studies as its governing framework, this module seeks to answer why the films have enjoyed such immense popularity, what material conditions prompted their construction, and what cultural ‘work’ they do. Incorporating theories of mythology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminist theory, and post-structuralism, the module mines the films for all of the earthly insight they offer from a “galaxy far, far away.”