Popular Culture

In today's world of Twitter & Facebook, text messages and email, humans use technology to connect with one another in unprecedented ways. This course will explore how technological mediation shapes our relationships with one another, as well as with the animals and plants around us. Particular attention will be paid to how the technologies we increasingly depend on to communicate our thoughts to others actually shape how we think.

The classic conflict of objectivity versus subjectivity, of simply reporting facts versus shaping them rhetorically, has been the subject of a wide range of recent graphic novels that employ either the perspectives of contemporary investigative journalism applied to real events or the figure of the investigative journalist as the protagonist in fictional narratives.

The United States was formed around Enlightenment ideas of freedom and the rights of the individual.  However, from the beginning, “freedom” has had many definitions and has been put to many uses in American political and social discourse; tension between the individual and the community has been central to Americans’ self-image in a way that has not been true of other nations.  From its inception, American film has been fascinated with rebellious loners and social outcasts: characters whose individualism is not only “front-and-center” but often “in your face.” 

In this seminar, we will explore the ways American culture has been represented in popular television situation comedies from the 1950s through the present. Although we will explore multiple facets of American culture, gender will be a primary focus.

This seminar will combine research and performance to explore the musical traditions that have shaped the development of American popular music. We will examine the styles and values of the Old and New World musics whose extraordinarily fruitful interaction produced the many branches of our contemporary music: blues, jazz, country, gospel, bluegrass, rock and roll, soul, hip hop and beyond. We will learn research methods and apply those skills to research/writing projects about American music.