Pop Culture Blog Posts (5 posts)
Students will be required to write a blog post each week for the first five weeks of the session. For each blog, they may post links to contemporary news stories about things we've covered in class, ruminations on the week's readings, links to additional materials that can help us understand the course material, demonstrations/applications of critical readings of pop culture texts, etc. The basic idea is to contribute something to our understanding of pop culture. Within the post, they will pose at least one questions to their classmates (beyond "what do you think about...?).
Pop Culture Blog Responses (5 responses)
Apart from the 5 blog posts that students author, they will also be required to respond to 5 posts during the semester session. They can choose any of their classmates’ posts to respond to, but they cannot respond to more than one blog post in a single week for points. They should engage the content of the original post in a manner that is civil.
Exams
Students will take a midterm and a final exam covering material from the 7-week session. They will be given a study guide at the very beginning of the semester to help guide their studying and will be able to use notes during the exams. Time will be limited, so students shouldn’t expect to have copious amounts of time for each question.
Final Pop Culture Analysis Paper
The paper is a synthesis of the critical tools students have learned during the duration of the course. They conduct a criticism of some text or artifact of popular culture of their choice and choose one of the rhetorical approaches they learned about during the semester. The paper should provide novel insights about the artifacts they wish to analyze (i.e. not a summary of what other writers have written about it). It must also include information from the readings as a theoretical grounding for the analysis. It should include a clear thesis/argument, a rationale for the artifact and some context regarding its cultural emergence, a review of the literature and basis for the method (citing other studies on similar artifacts and/or readings from the course), and an analysis section (the most important part). Students should be trying to understand the cultural assumptions that led to the abstract being created. They must ask themselves, “how does the small help us to understand the big?” In other words, how does this artifact help us understand the larger culture that created it? The majority of the paper should be dedicated to discussing your analysis and what the artifact reveals about the culture that produced it.