Out of all possible texts in the world, why are you drawn to this text? What is its pull for you, why does it fascinate you? What about it makes you want to spend a semester with it? Why do you want to share it with us? What questions do you hope to answer in your journey with this text? What can't you explain about this text? What is its mystery for you?
Using Negus & Pickering's approach, in what ways does this text embody or generate creativity? What experiences does it express, evoke, or engage in you as its audience? What does it draw out of you, or draw you into? What do you recognize or realize as you interact with it? How does it express or embody tradition, innovation, or both? What drives the communicative impact it has on you?
What from Lehtonen's conceptualization of how texts work and meanings are generated is relevant to how you "read" this text, who you are as you engage with it? What technologies does it employ? What does it require of you as you engage with it? What are its contributions to your personal knowledge, your cultural, historical &/or social knowledge? What drives its polysemy?
Using Langer's concepts, what is the text's created illusion, semblance, its presence? What image, illusion, experience does it generate? What is its living form, how does it express "the life of feeling" ... "the forms feeling can take"? What are its rhythms (rhythms can be visual, aural, intellectual, ideological, etc.). What features "animate" this text, make it come to life? Such aspects as images, themes, ideas, colors, line, light, mass, dialectical tensions, tones, mass and size, for instance.
Choose constructs, claims and methods from the course readings that in your view are most useful in analyzing how you interpret your text, and why. Dig more deeply into the text and its context(s). To support your claims, delve into specific examples - characters, scenes or locales, language, imagery and other aspects that exemplify the dynamics described below. In your paper, I want you to address each of the broad categories below; however you decide which among these warrants the most depth and attention.
Context as Co-Text: Analyze your own positionality as
a reader of this text - in your first reading
of it and in subsequent readings. Discuss specific expectations
and assumptions that you, as a
member of particular interpretive communities, bring to the text.
How are these affirmed,
questioned, negotiated etc. in your ongoing interaction with this text?
What identities of your own (in terms of gender, race and ethnicity,
class, sexual orientation, etc.) do you bring to your reading? With which characters
or voices do you identify
and why? Analyze these in terms of their complexity, dimensionality
and agency - to what extent
are these identities rooted in and a response to the sociocultural
dynamics of the world in the
text? How does this explain why you are drawn to these
particular identities or voices, among
all those presented?
Heteroglossia, polyphony and polysemy: Explicate
significant threads or themes in the fabric of
contending world views , languages, &/or speech communities in
your text. How do these relate
to/represent the dynamics of the social world within this text?
What key issues of the time, the
culture, &/or the genre are set into motion in the world of the
text? How are prevailing
ideologies affirmed, challenged, negotiated etc. in the world within
the text?
Explicate how the above aspects interact in specific ways in
your text - how the “zones of contact” among various contending world views,
languages (including
your own) etc. influence
the process by which meaning is made and the judgements we as readers/audience
come to?
Intertextuality and Articulations: In what
ways does your text invoke or evoke existing or
traditional popular images or representations of characters, communities,
locales etc.? In what ways does it innovate what it invokes? How
does your text articulate these prior representations or ideologies
in its own social world (e.g., to
affirm, resist, refine, reclaim etc. these categories or characterizations)?
How do these
articulations (using Hall’s definition of articulation as conjoining
or linking disparate elements)
add to or complicate your reading of the text?
In addition to course materials, do research on significant events and prevailing issues and themes of the time (e.g. check ‘the year in review’ news summaries for its period, information on rankings on similar popular commodities - e.g. best sellers, top albums, top films, tv shows, etc.).
In this paper you’ll analyze your text as an utterance - as symbolic action that springs from and contributes to the sociocultural system of its time. You’ll examine the context within which the text "speaks,” and the social system which it influences. As you cover the items below, generally focus on how the text responds to prevailing norms, values and ideologies at the time it was published. You’ll analyze how this text negotiates tensions between tradition and innovation; accommodation and resistancea esthetically, ideologically, and materially (as a marketplace commodity). As before, address each of the broad areas below; however you decide which among these warrants the most depth and attention.
Intertextuality & articulations (continued):
Analyze significant images, themes, etc. in your text in relation to
other texts of its kind or within traditions of its genre. Does your
text offer innovations in its form or structure? In its worldview?
In what ways does your text invoke or evoke existing or traditional popular
images or representations of characters, communities, locales etc.?
How does your text articulate these prior representations or ideologies
(e.g., to affirm, resist, refine, reclaim etc. these categories or characterizations)?
How do these elements respond to events, issues, ideologies, beliefs, anxieties
etc. in the social system? How does the constructed world of
the text negotiate or articulate the ‘Zeitgeist’ of the historical time
and place of its production?
Struggles over meaning in your text:
Analyze the politics of representation in your text - in general, the
questions, “who gets to speak? On whose behalf?” Look
for issues of appropriation, commodification, etc of what/who is represented,
and how. Analyze how race, ethnicity, gender etc. is constructed
in the network of characters/ voices; analyze networks of power that animate
the text. Focus on how the text negotiates competing ideologies
or representations – sites of contest, ambiguities, untidy packages, unresolved
issues, themes, values etc. Analyze aspects or themes of hybridity
as opposed to fixed categories of identity, the sense of borderlands, etc. Again,
here you’re after the dynamics of the struggle over meanings, and
how these work against yielding a tidy package — not ‘either - or,’ but
‘both - and.’
Success as a commodity in the marketplace:
Analyze marketing and sales information to determine the visibility
of your text in its time or perhaps since its time. What audience
is/was reached (e.g. elite audience, popular audience)? What means
of production were used, to what effects? Whose interests were served
in the production, marketing and reception of the text? What do these data
imply or demonsrate about the zeitgeist of the era, the tensions at play in the
social system? What
impact
did/does it have on its sociocultural context?
I'm not giving you specific questions to answer in this paper. Here, you choose your questions and your focus (or foci). Since you're all doing different texts, you decide what features of your text are central to its epistemology and its dynamics for the reader - in a phrase, how it generates meanings - and you'll also decide what approaches are especially useful and enlightening in delving into these features.
Often, past seminar members have said that in the prior papers they've had to forego or cut content in order to cover what they needed to cover in each particular paper. Here, you set your own guidelines, and it's up to you to determine the questions you ask in relation to your text - and the theories that best serve its dynamics.
This paper is your culminating analysis of what you've learned about / from this text -- you will explicate and justify what in your view is most important, central, perhaps even defining about your text, and also what theoretical framework(s) and critical methods can yield the most significant insights about its dynamics -- how this text interacts with its reader(s), its context, its co-text and the world in which it lives, to generate meanings.