Analyzing Popular Culture: Investigating Key Issues and Topics

Instructions

Instructions This assignment allows you to investigate a second important aspect of the course in detail, consulting the best available scholarly literature on the subject. You are expected to apply the analytic skills that you have learned in the course as you research a major topic or issue in the area of popular culture and write a scholarly essay on it. In researching this paper, you are expected to go beyond the textbooks and readings provided in your course materials, and make use of the supplementary materials (books and articles) in any college or university library to which you have access. This essay should be approximately 3,000 words in length, and should include notes and a bibliography. Essay Topics Choose one only of the following essay topics: 1. On the whole, is popular culture progressive or reactionary? Explain the opposing viewpoints on this question among writers on popular culture, and set out the relevant criteria by which works of popular culture might be judged in this regard. In framing your answer, choose four appropriate works from different genres (literature, film, television, and music), including at least one that is not American, and identify the elements in them that support your argument as well as any that run counter to it. Do you find significant differences between the genres on this question? 2. Has Western popular culture become thoroughly Americanized? Evaluate the arguments in the secondary literature on popular culture for and against the Americanness of contemporary popular culture, and devise criteria that might reasonably be used to arrive at an empirical judgment on this issue. Choose four appropriate and important works from different genres (literature, film, television, and music) that were created and produced outside the United States, and identify the elements in those works that are the most American, the most non-American, and the most universal in character. On the basis of these case studies, build an argument that Western popular culture outside the United States is one of the following: (a) primarily American in nature; (b) primarily British, European, or multicultural in nature; or (c) universal in nature. 3. With regard to a single topic (gender, class, race, etc.), discuss whether it is possible for popular culture to be a force for dissent. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was profoundly against slavery and was the first American bestseller. It was so popular and so deeply against slavery that Abraham Lincoln described it as having started the American Civil War. However, it is also deeply racist, supports racial segregation, and depicts intrinsic European superiority over slaves. Hence, it is difficult to call it a popular work of dissent. Is it possible for a mainstream, mass-produced work of popular culture to be genuinely dissenting or even revolutionary? Must such works always be conservative and conciliatory to attract a sufficient audience to become popular and profitable, or is genuine dissent from popular opinion possible? 4. Is the medium the message? How do new media alter the relations between a product and its consumers or audience when it is remediated through new media technologies? Draw on three different works of popular culture that have undergone remediation, or look at one work that has gone through three forms of remediation. How has each remediation changed its content or its relationship to different audiences? What remains the same? Does remediation lead to a profoundly different set of relationships between culture, consumers, and industry?