The assignment for your midterm essay was to critique (as in analyze) some of what you find connecting Horkheimer and Adorno's Culture Industry chapter, Eco's essay on Casablanca, and Borges' Pierre Menard.

Keeping in mind what you found in answering this question, discuss them in the context of Stuart Hall's article "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies" from the During reader.  

Hall lays out a genealogy of Cultural Studies that addresses some of the political commitments involved in this work.  His implicit argument that the era when work in Cultural Studies maintained its coherence through these shared objects of study, interventions, commitments, and ideologies has come to an end.  Paradoxically, this end comes precisely when Cultural Studies becomes institutionalized in the universities in the United States.  This may be, as Marx would have had it, either tragic or farcical.  But the question to consider is less whether Cultural Studies is viable as an academic field, than it is to consider whether or not the work that you have encountered is still of use, or if its theoretical legacies render it only of historical interest.  What do you think can be salvaged from the wreckage?

____________________________

Your essay should be concise, and should not exceed 8-12 typed pages.