Assignments

Assignment # 1: Critical Response, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Length: ~2 pages, double-spaced and typed

Due Date: Feb. 19, 2009

The critical responses for this class require three basic components: 1. research into the provenance of a text, 2. critical response to its content and 3. Personal reaction.  Our first text is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein's first popular work, and the book that launched her career as a more or less public figure in American letters. Your response should reveal something about the original publication of the book, account in some way for the work's success and popularity, and reveal something about your unique encounter with the text in 2009.  For the responses, my requirements will be less formal than for the two major papers--but I insist that this does not mean they are less stringent. I expect you to construct a sophisticated and nominally well-organized response to AABT, one that links the work to the themes of the class and begins thinking in a formal way about the kind of interpretative possibilities this text opens up.

Assignment # 2:  Paper # 1: Toward a Theory of Readership

Due: March 24, 2009

Length: 5-7 Pages

Possible Primary Source Texts:

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Modern Times

Tender Buttons

The Maltese Falcon

Possible Secondary Source Texts:

Benjamin, “Notes Toward a Theory of Distraction.”

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Stein, “Why I like Detective Fiction”

Stein, “Reflection on the Atomic Bomb”

Overview:

At this point, we’ve barely begun to think about the possibilities that are offered by the supposition that we may see popular culture and cultural theory as interlocking discourses, each offering commentary on the other while attempting to offer up some kind of a theory of the modern age.  Stein is explicitly a theorist, having used her notoriety to offer up a series of “explanatory” writings that documented both her feelings about the avant-garde and her understanding of the popular—and the Autobiography is just one example.   What is critical is for us to understand how Stein imagined “readership”—and this is perhaps why her use of Alice as the “voice” of the autobiography is most significant, since Alice can reasonably be inferred to be outside the elite coterie of artists that Stein was decidedly on the inside of—and Alice might therefore be thought to stand for an American public that was interested in art movements, cultural theories and media in general, but preferred to “sit with their backs turned” to them.

Benjamin’s theory of distraction is of course critical here, because it is almost self-evident that what he thought of as a “critical” understanding of history simply could not exist in the consciously registered mind of the populace—and he felt the need to create a theory of a new cognitive space, dreamlike and hazy, beyond the reaches of conventional attention but absolutely essential--because it offered the people a place where in the face of a totalizing, all-penetrating media universe, they could finally interject with their own counter-ideological rejoinder. 

Both Stein and Benjamin are theorizing something that is critical to the themes of this course: that is—reception.  And more critically, reception in the age of mass culture, and how it differs from earlier regimes of readership and art.

Thus, your task is twofold: to create (through dialogue with either Stein or Benjamin, or both if you’re brave) your own theory of reception, and then to link this theory somehow to the broader concept of the “politicization of art” alluded to by Benjamin.  Put more simply, your mission is to answer the question that bedeviled both Benjamin and Stein—how can we create a theory of a readership that will not or cannot theorize itself?  Put in a more Frankfurt-School-specific way, we might ask: how can a popular literature that is produced by the establishment also offer a critique of that establishment in a way that might be legible to a mass audience?

Your paper should be 5-7 pages in length, and should make use of at least one primary and one secondary source—though the list above should not be considered inclusive.  If you would like to cast a wider net and look beyond the texts we have read for class thus far, feel free—with the caveat that I would like a heads-up before you begin.  If you choose a film as a primary text, it’s a good idea to address the visual composition of the film, and perhaps even to include some still images; be aware, however, that such still images don’t count toward your page count.  Texts should make use of correct MLA format in citing sources, and should show evidence of careful polish.

Assignment # 3: Research Project                                                                                                    

Due: End of Semester

The research project is the “capstone” project for the semester for you—and it asks you to take what you have learned in terms of analysis of reception and politics in popular culture and apply it to a “popular” source of your own choosing.  What this effectively means is this: the world of mass media is your oyster in terms of what “primary” source you should use—and you should select “secondary” sources as a way of generating a critical dialogue with your primary source that has the effect of theorizing and contextualizing your work’s appeal to its readership in a way that touches on the daily political realities that produced it, its political contexts, and the possible receptions that might unlock its “hidden dialectics” in a Benjaminian sense.

Your task is thus:

1.  To choose a “source text” as the basis of your project.  It can be a popular novel, or even a film or television program.  A few students have proposed board and video games, and that’s fine—what’s important is that it be a mass-produced text, and that it yield to the sort of analysis that we have done in class with Stein, Chaplin and Kenneth Fearing.  You may wish to choose a contemporary of Stein’s, such as Dashiell Hammett—and if so, you might consider the original media forms in which his work appeared—inexpensive periodicals from his time period—as a way of analyzing his appeal to his audience.

2.  Create a context in which we may view this work.  Do some research to uncover the historical milieus of the work, the conditions of its production, salient details from author biographies and so forth.  This sort of research may well begin on the internet, but should probably end with reference to scholarly sources as evidence.  (note the implication: wikipedia is a great reference source—but not a good scholarly source)

3.  Using a body of carefully selected secondary texts, construct a “theory” that helps explain both how this text is read and how we may read it as participating in the political and cultural contexts that produced it.

4.  Use that theory to perform a detailed and sophisticated analysis, incorporating both the text’s formal features, its probable audience and its historical contexts.

At a minimum, your essay should make use of one primary and two secondary sources.  It should be at a minimum 6 FULL pages in length, using 12-point TNR or equivalent font, double-spaced with standard margins and no extra space between paragraphs.  It's likely your paper will be a little longer than 6 pages--you should shoot for 6-8 pages total, but going a little over is ok.

My expectation is that the remainder of the semester after break will be spent preparing this project.  Therefore, I anticipate that each of you will meet with me several times to update me on the progress of your project before the end of semester.  At a minimum, meet with me briefly within the next few weeks to tell me what you’re writing about—I will endeavor to help with finding secondary sources in any way that I can. 

In the last week of class, we will run a “conference” in which you will present your work as part of a panel of two or three other students.  This will be your Formal Presentation, worth 10% of your grade.

Assignment # 4: Response Paper # 2, Superman, Maltese Falcon or Kenneth Fearing

The last assignment of the semester is similar in many respects to the first.  I'd like you to write one more response paper, on one of the three "texts" listed above, to be turned in on Thursday, April 23rd.  The response should include a small amount of research on the text's history, and reveal something about your personal encounter with it, a single point of analysis that you might perhaps use as a starting point for an analytic essay, were you to write one.  The length should be approximately 2 pages, double-spaced.