Pick ONE of the topics below to write on for the at-home draft of the Interpreting Popular Culture Paper due on the last day of class, June 20th. The paper should be double-spaced, have a minimum of 1,000 words, and be submitted in a folder along with any pre-writing or peer reviews. In addition to the hard-copy draft you submit to me, you need to submit an electronic draft of the paper to Turnitin.com. When incorporating sources (the relevant folk tales, essays, or books you might use), you should follow the MLA rules for in-text parenthetical citation.
Consult the handout “Parenthetical References” (available on My Courses) and any corrections I made regarding MLA rules on your Media Spectacle papers. Remember that you have only ONE graded draft of this paper with no chance to revise it for a higher grade. Consequently, it would be a good idea to finish a draft of the paper and get some feedback from me before turning it in.1.
Find a folk tale of your own choosing and write an interpretation of it, like the sample student paper, “The Mother and the Seven Young Kids,” or like Jack Zipes and Bruno Bettleheim’s interpretations of “Hansel and Gretel,” from “Interpreting Texts.” You do NOT need to write a Marxist or psychoanalytic interpretation. However, you DO need to argue a reading of the folk tale that goes beyond the surface moral of the story. Or, as Susan Sontag puts it, “The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?”2. Find a print ad or television/web commercial of your own choosing and write an interpretation of it.
As with the folk tale assignment, you need to go beyond the surface message of the ad: drink Jim Beam bourbon, smoke Kools, wear Nikes, etc. Like the student essay, “Stereotypes for Sale,” or James B. Twitchell’s analysis of the Clairol ad in Convergences (544-549), your reading should uncover the ideological or mythical character of the ad. In those example essays, the authors show how ideologies or myths about race, class and gender are at work in the ads.
Be sure to look at the target audience, structure, and technique used to compose the ad. Then use these elements to advance your interpretation of the ad’s ideology.3. Using Stephanie Koziski’s “The Standup Comedian as Anthropologist: Intentional Culture Critic” (My Courses), discuss a standup comedian of your own choosing as an anthropologist. It would be a good idea to pick someone whom you are already familiar with and whose work you have access to through DVDs and/or You Tube.
How does your comic, like the anthropologist, get outside his or her culture in order to call attention to and criticize our cultural habits? Koziski sees this activity as primarily positive. However, maybe it is not that simple. Does your comic’s routine offer insights while simultaneously perpetuating cultural misperceptions?4. T.S. Eliot famously said, “One of the surest tests is the way a poet borrows.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” Broadly apply Eliot’s point to Billy Wilder’s film adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel, Double Indemnity. How does the filmmaker avoid immaturely imitating the novelist and instead maturely stealing from him? Or, to put it more simply, how and why is the film a successful adaptation of the novel? Look at specific elements of the novel and movie (dialogue, plot, scene and character, etc.) and argue why the move does or does not succeed in your opinion.
