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This week I am asking you to read a section from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this section he discusses how politics in the television age is governed by the discourse of show business because entertainment is what he calls the "meta-ideology" of television. Please read the section of the essay entitled "Reach Out and Elect Someone" which starts on page 91 of the document and goes to page 103. I will make a separate version of just the selected pages and post it on the course resource page.
This week's homework assignment was to watch a political advertisement and to make two readings of the advertisement, one a reading from a dominant framework and a second reading from an oppositional framework. Post these readings on your blog.
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| Stuart Hall |
This week we will have a guest scholar speaking and conversing with us on the work of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Marxist approaches to media studies. The speaker will be Dan O'Reilly Rowe who is a documentary filmmaker,
video artist, and media scholar. His research interests include video game
theory and role of computational media in social movements and education. Dan
divides his time between the US and Australia, working with non-profits,
community organisations, and universities to develop media resources and
programs. He holds a Master's in Digital Communication and Culture from the
University of Sydney, Australia.
Dan has asked us to read two excerpts which I have emailed to you and which are also linked on the syllabus or available on the course resources page from the link on this page.
Please brink your laptops or a tablet computer.
Please remember to post your addition to the Medium is the Massage, a page illuminating any insight you have about contemporary media.
This week we will be peer-reviewing the written responses to Lolita. You should have your response written and posted on your blog before this week's class session. The recommended approach to the response is to take any quotation or longer passage from the book, quote it and then discuss its implications, context or importance to understanding the characters or themes of the book. Come to class prepared to read and comment on other responses. Everyone in the class is required to read and respond to Lolita.
Next week is the mid-term and all blog posts for the first half of the semester are due. Please post on whatever you have read for the semester, this includes your revised response to Lolita. Next week we will be reading The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan. After you read it I would like you to compose your own page that graphically presents an observation or idea that you have about media. Post the page on your blog.
This week we will be reading and discussing Heart of Darkness. In some interesting ways, Heart of Darkness is very much like the Wizard of Oz a comparison we might develop in class discussion. We will be considering how observing the binaries in any work can be an effective tool for opening up a work for deeper reading, especially for revealing the ideology of a work. This is especially effective when considering a text like Heart of Darkness which explores many conflicts within the characters and their experience. Don't forget to ask the important first question when considering a narrative work which is "Who is telling the story and what do we know about them." That is a very interesting question in this work.
This is a novella so it is short enough to try to finish before coming to class. It is also available as an audio book. Check the course resource page for relevant materials. You can post on your blog before or after class, or both, about your experience with the text. If you have not send me the URL of your personal blog please do so as soon as possible.
Next week we will be reading the common text for all Literature and Media Studies classes this year, The Magicians by Lev Grossman. You need to acquire your own copy of this text. This an excellent work of fantasy writing that makes specific reference to some of the great works in the genre especially The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and of course The Lord of the Rings. But much of the novel takes place in a college that is not unlike art school with all its pitfalls and personal challenges. Many students have liked reading this novel and I think it is a great read for a holiday weekend.
Here is a link to a professional blog post on Heart of Darkness. It is illustrative of the perfect length for a blog post, confines itself nicely to a single major point and explores that point reasonably, giving the reader other places to go, linking them to more possibilities.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/dec/05/theunjustprejudiceagainstc
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