AMST203sum04syl.html

AMST 203 Summer 2004

Popular Culture in America

Dr. Nancy L. Struna
Office: 2103 Holzapfel, University of Maryland
Email: nlstruna@umd.edu
Office hours: by appointment

	Dr. Nancy L. Struna Office: 2103 Holzapfel, University of Maryland Email: nlstruna@umd.edu Office hours: by appointment

Course Description:

This is an online, active learning course that examines various dimensions of the production and consumption of popular culture practices, both historical and contemporary, in the United States. One simple premise of this course is that whether conceived of as peoples' systems of shared meanings, attitudes, and values or as the texts and practices of everyday life, popular culture performances and artifacts are "made." Popular culture forms thus reveal much about who past generations think they were, who we think we are, and who we think others are and were. Popular culture can also reveal much about social and cultural tensions in and across time. A second premise underlying this course is that in their popular culture activities, people create culture and society. In other words, in practices such as music, sports, reading, TV watching, and more -- even t-shirt wearing! -- people actively engage and re-interpret cultural messages and values, economic activity, institutions, and the very social relationships that underlay local, national, and international communities. With these premises in mind, we shall explore a range of popular culture practices, both past and present, and, hopefully, leave this course thinking differently about both the construction and the significance of popular culture.

For some of you, AMST 203 will fulfill a general education, or CORE, requirement. CORE distributive studies courses are designed to acquaint students with the content and methods of various academic disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, provide them with some breadth of knowledge and opportunities to write, and encourage them to think critically and make judgments about questions that rarely have simple "yes" and "no" answers. To do well in this course, you will need to think critically about the material. Understanding and interpretation, rather than memorization and regurgitation, are the keys to success in this course.

Course Procedures:

Course url: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~nlstruna/amst203sum04/index.html
Syllabus url: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~nlstruna/amst203sum04/syllabus.html
WebChat url: http://www.otal.umd.edu/webchat/sum04/amst203.html

This course is online, except for book readings, and all discussions, assignments, and thinking exercises (my alternatives to lectures) are provided for asynchronous involvement. This means that each student can read the assigned chapters and articles, work through the thinking exercises and questions, and contribute to the chats any time of day or night! There are set dates for when projects and quizzes are to be emailed to me, so please read through the course requirements and grading section carefully.

Summer session I is a six-weeks term, and I have laid out the topics and required readings by week. You need to get the three books and follow the syllabus for access to thinking exercises, other online material, and each week's chats. Links for the thinking exercises, which will include questions about the readings, will appear at the beginning of a given week. I will send out quizzes via coursemail, and you can submit your responses to me via email. Submit projects the same way.

Required Texts:

C. Lee Harrington & Denise D. Bielby, eds., Popular Culture: Production and Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001). Identified as Harrington & Bielby on the schedule, with assignments by page numbers.

Jim Cullen, The Art of Democracy. A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2nd edition, 2002). Identified as Cullen on the schedule, with assignments by chapter.

Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, & Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Identified as Jenkins et.al. on the schedule, with assignments by page numbers.

Online articles, identified on the class schedule.

Course Schedule:

Week 1 (week of June 1) -- Introduction to Popular Culture (Thinking Exercise 1a, Thinking Exercise 1b)

Topics: What is popular culture, genres of popular culture, modes of analysis, cultural studies approach, circuit of culture, significant questions, early American popular culture
Text reading: Harrington & Bielby, pp. 1-23; Jenkins et.al, pp. 26-41; Cullen, ch. 1-2.
WebChat

Week 2 (week of June 7) -- Locating Popular Culture in the Past (Thinking Exercise 2)

Topics: history of selected popular culture forms continued, regional into national forms, production of mass popular culture, dominant mass-media forms
Text reading: Cullen, ch. 3, 4, 5, 6.
WebChat

Week 3 (week of June 14) -- Production & Consumption (Thinking Exercise 3a, Thinking Exercise 3b)

Topics: What goes into the making of popular culture, (popular) culture industry, cultural capital, relations of production, social & cultural significance of popular culture
Text reading: Harrington & Bielby, pp. 36-79, 94-117, 243-54; Jenkins et.al., pp. 159-247, 537-621.
WebChat

Week 4 (week of June 21) -- Meanings and Messages (Thinking Exercise 4a, Thinking Exercise 4b)
Topics: How meanings are constructed & negotiated, who generates them, encoding & decoding, convention & invention, intertextuality, reading texts, individual vs cultural meanings
Text reading: Harrington & Bielby, pp. 123-32, 203-09, 219-42; Jenkins et.al., 45-86, 122-153, 503-31.
Online resources = "Encoding/Decoding," selection from Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners; "A Beginner's Guide to Textual Analysis," by Alan McKee
WebChat

Week 5 (week of June 28) -- Identity(ies), Representation, Performance (Thinking Exercise 5)

Topics: Constructing identities, identity categories, representations in popular culture, stereoptypes, pc seen from lens of performance theory, globalization and its impact

Text reading: Harrington & Bielby, pp. 259-325; Jenkins et.al., pp. 253-314, 649-98.
WebChat

Week 6 (week of July 6) -- Taste and Regulation (Thinking Exercise 6)
Topics: "Taste" as judgment, valuation; how the regulation of popular culture draws from taste,
Text reading: Harrington & Bielby, pp. 80-93, 133-95; Jenkins et.al., 339-70, 430-449.
WebChat

Course Requirements:

1. Critical reading, questioning, and thought about the readings are expected so that you can contribute to weekly online class discussions via the webchats (20% of final grade). Contributions should take the form of both thoughtful questions and thoughtful responses, and you should plan to write at least 250 words per week (equivalent of one double-spaced page). Chat contributions need to be made weekly and must be complete by the subsequent Sunday morning, 7:00, of each week, except for the final week, when the end time is Saturday evening, 7:00. Anything added after this time will not received credit.
2. Quizzes (3 of 4, 30% of final grade) -- based on weekly readings, lectures, and chats. You'll receive 4 quizzes, each with 3-5 short essay questions, by email on the mornings of June 11, June 18, June 25, and July 2. You need to return them by 10:00 on the mornings of June 14, June 21, June 28, and July 6 (each, 10% of final grade). In other words for weeks 2-5, you receive quiz questions on Friday mornings, and you email answers on Monday mornings by 10:00. I evaluate your responses as I would any take-home exam/quiz (knowing you have full access to any and all material). Also, I will drop the lowest of your 4 grades, so only 3 quiz count. All missed quizzes get recorded as failures -- only one of which can be the "dropped grade.
3. Projects/papers (2, 50% of final grade) submitted by email. It may be helpful to think of these two projects/papers as a "midterm" project and a "term" project. I will provide more information later.
A. For the first project/paper (15 % of the final grade), you have a choice of one of these :

analyzing the particular history of a group of people or a form/source of popular culture from images viewable/usable at the Library of Congress's American Memory Collection project and situating them within Cullen's larger history. Product will be a 5-7 page, double-spaced paper, with images from the LOC AM project clearly referenced.

summarizing and synthesizing all of the assigned readings for week 3. Product will be a 5-7 page, double-spaced paper, with images from specific articles/chapters clearly referenced.

This "mid-term" paper is due by noon on Friday, June 25.
B. For the second project/paper (35 % of final grade), you have a choice of one of these:

a description and analysis of the representation of a group of people, as gleaned from a mass-mediated popular culture form (e.g., tv show, movie, film, magazine, newspaper) and their presentation(s) in a live-experience form (e.g., concert, garage sale, museum going, mall visit, ball game, etc.). In effect, I am asking you to describe and analyze "identity portraits" -- how your subjects are "made" to appear or are identified in a mass media popular culture form and how they appear and/or self-identify in a less or unmediated experience. For the purpose of this assignment, consider a social/cultural group as one whose members share one or more of the following: race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, rural/urban, age, disability, etc. Product nay be either a web display or a traditional paper (10-15 pages).

an exploration of a popular culture form or practice in depth. This project will (a) cross time/cover a period of time (as distinct from being based only on contemporary observations) and (b) draw from original sources and scholarly (research-based) secondary sources. You will be developing an intellectual argument about, or an interpretation of, a practice, and you may incorporate material you take from the web IF you can prove that the material is a valid primary source (a first-hand account or piece of evidence) or, if an article, it was based on original research and was refereed. Product nay be either a web display or a traditional paper (10-15 pages).

This "term"paper/project is due by noon on Saturday, July 10. Any paper/project not received by then will receive an "F."

Summary of Chats, Quizzes, & Projects Due Dates:

Each week's webchat will end by Sunday, 7 a.m. (e.g., Week 1 chat ends 6/8, 7 a.m.), except for Week 6. Week 6 chat closes at 7 p.m., Saturday, July 10. Comments added after the chats have "closed" will not receive credit.

Quizze & Projects/papers should be emailed to me on the following schedule:

Quiz 1, June 14 (a.m.)
Quiz 2, June 21 (a.m.)
Project/paper A, June 25, 12 p.m (noon)
Quiz 3, June 28 (a.m.)
Quiz 4, July 6 (a.m.)
Project/paper B, July 10, 12 p.m (noon)

Statement of Academic Integrity:

You are expected to abide by the University's rules governing academic dishonesty as codified in the Fall 2000 Schedule of Classes. All incidents of suspected academic dishonesty -- including cheating, fabrication, facilitating academic dishonesty, and plagiarism - will be referred to the Honor Council for investigation. The Code of Academic Integrity is printed in the Undergraduate Catalog (hard copy and online).

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