This course will introduce students to various twentieth-century schools of thought such as psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, gender studies, post-colonialism, and the development of "French Theory" in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular emphasis will be put on the philosophical traditions underlying these theories and the way in which they have been applied to visual media, arts, and cultures.