ABSTRACT
Literary Studies and Cinema Studies, and World Literature and World Cinema differ, however, in terms of the political orientation and disciplinary legacies of their departmental “hosts.” The topic of World Cinema is largely housed in “Film and Media Studies” departments which were from the beginning more friendly toward, in the beginning, Third World Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies, and later toward left-inflected transdisciplines like Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Multicultural Studies, a friendliness which has much to do with the fields’ geneses as disciplines. Cinema Studies emerged in the 1960s during the heights of first-phase structuralism and semiotics, and was intimately linked to artistic, political, and theoretical in France. 1960s radical film theory and semiotics anticipated and came to form part of the Cultural Studies that came later with its penchant not only for debating the concept of “radical film” but also for deploying “high” theory to analyze “low” popular objects of study such as B-films, pop genres and advertisements.
