What’s not to like about the current box-office and best-selling success story, The Help?  An indictment of the last years of the Jim Crow South with a lot of uplift about what people can do to resist oppression, the novel and movie would seem to be something that only the most unreconstructed movie watcher could dislike. But as is so often the case in American popular culture, the situation is a lot more complicated, and a many liberal viewers are raising their concerns, making The Help a good topic for classroom semiotic analysis. The main complaint is that, as is so often the case with popular stories of this kind, The Help features an attractive white protagonist who leads a cast of nonwhite characters to a kind of victory over their white oppressors. “What’s wrong with that?” a student may well ask. Here’s where the construction of a system of signs into which The Help can be situated can be especially useful. For example, The Help can be classified with such films as Avatar, Dances With Wolves, and other successful, liberal, well-meaning films that made audiences—white audiences, that is—feel good by showing them good white folk allying themselves with oppressed nonwhite folk against bad white folk. One could argue that the films provide nice role models, especially for younger white viewers, but the problem for many critics is that it implies that nonwhites can’t advocate for their own interests without benign white heroes to lead them. Good-hearted condescension is still condescension. But there is a further problem. The presumption of such movies is that the majority (the vast majority) of the audience is going to be white, and because of that, the movies have to pull a lot of punches. It’s okay to show that Native Americans or African Americans or Pandorans (avatars of American Indians, of course) have suffered at the hands of white Americans, but that redeeming white savior (John Dunbar, Jake Sully, Skeeter Phelan) ensures that the audience—who is expected to sympathize or identify with the white protagonist—does not feel singled out for criticism or blame. This not only takes the white audience off the hook, so to speak, it allows them to leave the theater feeling good about situations they really shouldn’t be feeling good about. Now, in constructing a system of related signs, we want to locate not only associated signs but differentiable ones in order to fully assess the semiotic significance of the topic. Within this genre of racially charged films that includes The Help, Toni Morrison's Beloved offers a particularly striking counter example. Here’s a movie (like the novel it is based on) that does not let its white audience off the hook with attractive white saviors. A raw, no-punches-pulled indictment of America's racial history, the novel is an academic classic, but the box office for the movie was disappointing. Hollywood got the message and has been playing it safer ever since. Which could raise a very good question from our students: “Is it possible to create hard-hitting entertainment that really indicts its audience?”  Movies like Beloved indicate that of course it is possible. But are we likely to find many examples of such movies in an industry governed by the profit motive? No, it isn’t likely. And there is the final exfoliation of a semiotic analysis of The Help. In its profit-driven context, popular art can tell some truth, but not the whole truth. “Humankind,” as T. S. Eliot put it, “cannot bear very much reality.” The better sort of art can be unbearable, but popular culture isn’t in the reality business. ... View more

My cue for today’s post comes from a b log post by Steven Zeitchick entitled “Fourth of July Puzzle: Are America and Tom Hanks Out of Step?” Zeitchick’s post concerned the opening weekend box-office failure of Hanks’s new movie Larry Crowne, a failure made all the more interesting by the fact that Julia Roberts also stars in the film. With such star power, the movie’s disappointment at the box office is particularly striking, and Zeitchick suggests, puzzling: Larry Crowne, after all, had two of the most bankable stars in Hollywood history. Over the past quarter-century, Hanks and Roberts have accounted for nearly two dozen movies that grossed at least $100 million and defined the culture to boot, from Forrest Gump to Erin Brockovich, Cast Away to Pretty Woman. And yet here they were, together, struggling to out-open Hall Pass and Jumping the Broom. Zeitchick’s solution to the puzzle is twofold: first, he observes, star power is waning in Hollywood and is no longer a certain ticket to cinematic success. That observation is worthy of a further semiotic analysis in itself, but it’s his second point that I want to pursue here: namely, that the kind of role that has made Hanks a superstar—“the regular guy we could all identify with”—is no longer in touch with the current American zeitgeist. Zeitchick then goes on to list the sort of protagonists that do seem to be in touch with the times these days, a list that includes “the kooky and stonerish (The Hangover’s Zach Galifianakis); the swashbuckling and sometimes morally ambiguous (Pirates of the Caribbean’s Depp); and, most commonly lately, the Adonis-like and reticent (Thor’s Chris Hemsworth).” Larry Crowne is about not only an ordinary man but an all-too-common experience these days for ordinary Americans (a man struggling to cope with the loss of his job), which makes this movie all the more poignant. We could argue that a lot of people might not want to shell out the price of admission for a movie about the sort of thing they came to the theater to forget, but I think that there is more to it than that. A clue to what is going on lies in another of Zeitchick’s observations: that the sort of common-man role that Hanks has so successfully portrayed tends to be coupled with a plot in which the ordinary protagonist is thrust into extraordinary circumstances. As Zeitchick puts it: He has drifted to sleep a child and woken up a man; gone unwittingly from mentally challenged savant to phenomenally rich folk hero; boarded a plane and gotten marooned for several years on a desert island; boarded a plane and gotten marooned for several years in an airport; walked down a city street and fallen in love with a fish. The biggest lesson of the Tom Hanks canon might be: “If you look like a regular guy and act like a gentleman, you just might have the most adventurous life humankind has ever known.” What we seem to have here, then, is a variation on one of America’s most fundamental cultural contradictions. That is, American society has been structured upon two conflicting mythologies: the one democratic and populist, the other elitist and individualist. Thus, Americans tend to value at one and the same time the egalitarian vision of fitting in with the crowd, and the hierarchical dream of rising above the crowd into the rarified heights of success. One tendency aims at belonging, the other at arriving. At various times in American history, one side of this contradictory mythology has been more popular than the other. The 1970s, for example, was very much a decade for populism, for TV families like the Waltons and the cult of truck drivers. The 1980s, on the other hand, was a decade for elitism, for Wall Street and Wall Street. The present manifests a bit of both, giving us Keeping Up With the Kardashians alongside America’s Dirtiest Jobs. Popular culture often mediates cultural contradictions rather than taking sides, however, and in the typical Tom Hanks role, as Zeitchick  describes it, we find bundled together both impulses, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the common and the special. But with its tale of an ordinary man’s all-too-common experience, Larry Crowne is no such mediation, and it appears that audiences aren’t having it. That’s too bad, I think. At a time when ordinary Americans need to see precisely what is happening to them in their ordinary lives, and why it is happening, a good dose of reality wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But I expect that with the disappointing results of Larry Crowne, that won’t be coming from Hollywood again anytime soon. ... View more

The classic dichotomy by which we distinguish “high” (or artistic) culture from “low” (or popular) culture holds that the former is educational or uplifting, somehow, while the latter is merely entertaining. This dichotomy is reinforced by the way literature has been traditionally taught; that is to say, literature has tended to mean “texts from the past,” often written according to cultural and stylistic conventions that are alien to us, not to mention difficult and (that most damning of contemporary predicates) boring. Of course, popular cultural studies has long since deconstructed this dichotomy to point out (among other things) that what counts as high culture today was once viewed as entertainment (the novels of Charles Dickens and even the plays of William Shakespeare are excellent examples of this shift). And from Horace to Sir Philip Sidney, poetry (as high art) has been declared to exist for the purpose of delighting as well as instructing (or, to be more precise, instructing by way of delight). After a professional lifetime of teaching both high art literature and popular culture, I find myself contemplating just how important the entertainment component of Literature (with a capital L) has always been (more, I think, than it has been given credit for). After all, the fact that literary criticism—which, one way or another, spells out whatever may be instructive in a literary text—is not only unpopular but is often condemned by nonliterary critics is explained by its lack of entertainment value. The literary artist who can entertain an audience has always had far more readers than the critic or philosopher who can say the same thing and say it more clearly and directly. Thus the study of popular culture, especially with regard to what makes popular culture popular or entertaining, can be extended to the realm of high literary culture as well. Such a study can note not only what sort of compromises the high art writer must make if he or she wants to be published within a profit-driven publishing industry, but also what it is that entertains people generally. I am reminded here of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom. Anointed by the likes of Time magazine as America’s most lauded successor to such other high art writers as Updike, Cheever, and Fitzgerald (all who were able to achieve both critical and popular acclaim), Franzen, rather in the tradition of Victorian novelists, attempts to teach his society lessons about itself in novelistic form. Freedom was especially anticipated in this regard, hailed as a major novelist’s explanation to America of what the first decade of the new millennium was all about. But by choosing to have one major character be, quite literally a rock star, and another an heiress of sorts, Franzen narrowed his focus to a segment of American society so small that it really doesn’t apply to most of America. Franzen’s lead characters run into trouble, in effect, because they have too much money, while what went wrong for the lower and middle classes in the first decade of this millennium is that they went broke, falling further and further behind the upper-middle and upper classes.  The very rich are different from you and me, even if it is only because they have more money, and their lives do not really serve as lessons for the rest of us. But somehow, the rich remain highly entertaining to a large American audience. As I have indicated in several of my Bits posts, this obsession with the wealthy can be found throughout the “texts” of popular culture as well. The same signal is being sent. An obsession with money, and with those who have it (which in entertainment is the same thing), is coming to transvalue all other values in our society. Even when wealth is criticized, the image on the screen or on the page is still a glossy one, and images are very seductive things. At a time when the gap between the rich and the poor in America is widening to a gap as great as in Mark Twain’s Gilded Age, this signal, common to both art culture and popular culture, is a profound one. When Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges is a runner-up for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize while Keeping Up with the Kardashians is entering its sixth season, the signal is the same from each end of culture: wealth and the wealthy are what entertains Americans. It takes a cultural critic to point this sort of thing out, and we all know how entertaining, and popular, cultural critics are. ... View more

I just finished reading Traci Gardner’s post on cell phone use in the classroom. I think she’s spot on when she suggests that “the acceptable range of behavior in the classroom is changing, and we need to find positive ways to take advantage of that shift.” I always had a “cell phones off” policy in my classes until about two years ago. One of the students in class pulled out her phone and I chided her. But then she told me she was adding the assignment I had just given to her calendar. As much of a techie as I am, that was the first time it hit me: phones are increasingly powerful and connected mobile computing platforms, and sometimes my students are using them in legitimate ways. I’ve run across other instances: a grad student checking his e-mail to get my comments on an assignment; students in group work using the Web through their phones to locate information and look up terms; even students e-mailing me from their phones to remind me of the appointment I made with them in class (and would have forgotten had it not gotten into my own schedule somehow). I’ve since changed my policy on cell phones in the classroom. It now reads: Use portable technologies responsibly or not at all. I explain to students what responsible use means. It doesn’t mean using such technologies for class purposes only. It also means that if you have a call you need to take, you step outside the classroom to take it. I don’t assume my class is more important than their lives, but I do think they need to learn a certain set of “adult skills” or general social skills that will serve them later in life. If they can step out of my class to take a call, then some day they’ll know to step out of that meeting at work to take a call, too. Of course, I still have students texting or on Facebook on their laptops. That’s okay. I’ve come to believe that the writing classroom is a self-punishing system. I don’t have to penalize them for using that technology; the fact that they’re not engaged in the work of the class will be reflected in what they hand in and this will be reflected in their grades. I will say, though, that my assistant Mike has taken this a step further. He actually uses Twitter (brilliantly) in his class. But I think that deserves a whole separate post. ... View more

Due to a long history of painful racial conflict, Americans are well aware of the racial dynamics of their culture. Thanks to efforts of feminism many, if not most, Americans are now aware of the dynamics of gender within their culture. But because of a fundamental ideology grounded in individualism and social mobility, Americans can get quite fuzzy-minded when it comes to the class dynamics in their culture, and so educating students about the complex operations of social class is one of our most important tasks in the teaching of cultural studies. It isn’t that Americans don’t know that there are different social classes in this country; the problem is that they are generally unable to analyze how social class functions here. Generally lacking the traditional signifiers of social class that still apply in the Old World (certain accents, tastes, postures, and even physical features), Americans tend to equate personal wealth with social status. While socioeconomically it is indeed true that one’s bank account determines ones social caste, when it comes to culture things get more complicated. This complication is particularly evident within popular culture. That is, in an America that is increasingly run by a socioeconomic upper class (many of whose members got there through their success in the entertainment industry), it is still the point of view of the middle class that dominates popular cultural story telling. From this middle-class perspective, working-class characters are either condescended to (they are commonly depicted in popular culture as unattractive, uncouth, comic, criminal, dependent, or some combination thereof) or celebrated for rising out of the class of their birth. The idea that a working-class person might be proud of his or her social status rarely, if ever, appears in the story. Cinderella can sweep out the cinders, but she’s supposed to want to get that prince. Imagine a retelling of the story in which the Cinderella figure in, say, Pretty Woman denounces the society that enables the prince to be a prince and demands a new tax structure that would even things out. The middle-class attitude toward the prince (that is, the upper classes) is a bit more complicated. On one hand, thanks to America’s cherished belief in social mobility (as most commonly expressed in the American Dream), the middle-class view of upper-class status is one of fascination and aspiration (which is one reason why middle-class voters vote for upper-class tax cuts even when it means that they will not get the Social Security or Medicare benefits that their own taxes have paid for).  But on the other hand, the middle class feels morally superior to the upper classes, which is why shows that feature upper-class characters—like Dallas and Arrested Development—emphasize the moral inferiority of their upper-class characters. Commonly, the plot of any entertainment that features upper-class characters demands that they be “improved” somehow by a character who is lower on the socioeconomic totem pole (as indeed happens in Pretty Woman), and who is herself (or himself) rewarded by being raised socially for bringing the upper-class character into the middle-class moral range. Which takes me to the recent remake of Arthur. A signifier of Hollywood’s addiction to sequels, remakes, and adaptations in an era of movie making governed more by the marketing department than by creative, Arthur is a classic example of the middle-class view of the upper classes. They are brutal and arrogant (as is Arthur’s prospective father-in-law), but also charming and fascinatingly able to live lives of nonstop pleasure and irresponsibility (as is Arthur). But of course there must be a lower-class character who will not only thwart the brutal upper-class characters but who will also redeem the charming upper-class rascal as well, and be rewarded for it in the end by getting in on the loot. So it really doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Dudley Moore’s Arthur or Russell Brand’s. In the end it is the same middle-class point of view that is signified. Can you imagine an ending in which Arthur’s shenanigan’s prompt someone to launch a political movement that would restore equity to America’s inheritance laws, rendering Arthur’s entire predicament moot? Neither can I, but that is the movie I’d like to see. ... View more

One of the major, though seldom discussed, elements of using popular culture in the classroom concerns our (that is, instructors’) attitude toward it. For many years, that attitude tended to be negative, whether one approached popular culture from the conservative side (as did F.R. and Q.D. Leavis in the 1930s) or from the socialist side (as did Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in the 1940s). For each faction popular culture, which they called “mass culture,” was something bad—either a democratic challenge to the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes (as the Leavises believed) or a means by which capitalism maintains itself through the agency of what Horkheimer and Adorno called the “culture industry.” With the founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s, this attitude began to shift toward an increasing valorization of popular culture as a site for the expression of cultural subversion. For such popular cultural “populists,” the consumers of popular culture do not passively consume the products of the culture industry but instead actively put them to their own uses. Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), a study of the British Punk movement, is a particularly well- known example of the populist perspective. But even Hebdige came to observe that he had underestimated the power of consumer culture to co-opt even such a raucous movement as the Punks. And as I look around at American popular culture today, I have to confess that I find myself more with the pessimists than the populists. The question is why, and how can I justify that position? It isn’t that I agree with Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument that popular culture is a kind of capitalist conspiracy to reproduce capitalism endlessly. I simply don’t think that anyone in the culture industry thinks that far ahead or that deeply. The goal in the entertainment business is solely to make as much money as possible, and I really don’t think that it goes any further than this. So what's the problem? Why the pessimism? Here is where popular culture semiotics—the situating of a topic in the broadest possible cultural context—can provide a perspective. To begin with, in the last half century popular culture has assumed such a commanding role within our society that we have become what I call an “entertainment culture.” One would think that if popular culture had a socially progressive affect we would be seeing it. But what I am seeing is a puzzling (actually dismaying) increase in economic inequality, along with full-scale assaults on both the working and the middle class, in our society (take, for example, the triumph of the anti-union movement in state after state, including such traditional bastions of populist empowerment as Wisconsin). Given that, technically, the working and middle classes constitute the overwhelming plurality of voters in this country, we have to ask why they are not only putting up with all this but are often voting for it? I believe that the explanation for this paradox is the most important social question of our time, and of course any explanation would have to be vastly overdetermined. Certainly popular culture alone cannot be held responsible. But I believe it plays a significant role. From the atomizing effects of consumerism, to the obsessive celebration of wealth and power that we find in the rituals of celebrity worship (do we really need all these entertainment industry awards ceremonies?), to the generalized pop cultural suggestion that personal pleasure is all that really matters in life (can you spell Charlie Sheen?), our entertainment culture helps sow the seeds whose crop is contemporary American society. That is why I regard the study of popular culture as a profoundly serious matter. To subject it to semiotic analysis is to seek an understanding of where we are going and where we have been. And you can’t change direction if you don’t know what road you’re on. ... View more

One of the keys to effective commenting is locating the most promising moments of any student paper, those bits where the student is starting to pull it all together even if it’s not quite there yet.  By identifying those moments for students, I can help them see exactly where they need to focus their work—starting with what they’re already done, thinking about what it needed to be more successful, and then incorporating that insight into their next paper. Take, for example, some of the comments I made on the first set of rough drafts I received last semester, in response to this assignment.  For this first paper, many of my students struggled with argument. That’s not surprising, really, since it’s not something they’re expected manage well until the end of the semester. But given this particular weakness of the class, I sought out promising moments in several student papers. I start by making a marginal comment about the promising moment: OK. Here you have the start of an interesting idea because you’re thinking about the relationship between immigration, value of rituals, and change. You could develop this into an argument. I then reinforce the point in my end comment: I’m not sure I see your argument, so that’s where you really need to focus your revision.  I’ve pointed to a couple of places where you have some interesting ideas.  You could start from these places to form a clear argument but, ultimately, without that clear argument your paper is really at risk.  So work on that argument and then make sure each paragraph supports it. Here’s another example of how I try to locate promising moments.  First, I comment on the student’s argument: It sounds like maybe this is the idea you want for your argument, but you’re going have to make sure you state it up front and clearly. Then I locate those moments in the paper that hold the potential for a stronger argument: Here’s an interesting idea. The assignment is all about value of rituals and change, so you could use this to help you develop a stronger argument. And then I reinforce it all in my end comments: Right now I don’t see any argument. I’ve pointed out a couple of places where you start to move to one. Remember that you want to take a position in relation to the assignment and to the texts. Your bar mitzvah example might give you a way to do that and you start to do that in the conclusion, too. Focus on locating and stating an argument as you revise. Keeping a focus on what’s promising in a student’s paper provides an opportunity for progress, regardless the actual grade. And it does so directly in the context of student writing. They don’t have to guess what I mean with a comment like “You need a stronger argument” because I show them where they start to make one; they can now recognize their own ideas and how they can function in the paper. In my next post, I'll show how my comments work in the context of a real student paper. Stay tuned! ... View more

One of the reasons I love teaching with Emerging is that the readings are so contemporary—I find they often speak to current situations in the world. This allows me to show students how ideas from an essay in class operate in real life; it also allows my students to bring in contemporary events when thinking about a particular author during class discussion or in their papers. The current crisis in Egypt offers both opportunities. Here are some of the ways I might invite students to think about what’s going on in Egypt using readings from the text: Madeleine Albright’s “Faith and Diplomacy”: As the United States considers its reaction to the events in Egypt, to what extent should we take into account differences in religion and faith? Albright examines how politics and religion—strictly separated here—are often integrated in other parts of the world. That perspective can help students think about the complex motivations for protestors in Egypt. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Making Conversation” and “The Primacy of Practice”: Students often interpret Appiah’s central concept of cosmopolitanism as a fanciful, utopian concept of a world in which we all get along. But Appiah’s more pressing point is that we now live in a world so interconnected and so crowded that we have no choice but to learn to get along with others. The interconnection between the revolution in Tunisia and the protests in Egypt is an apt example of what happens when we live in a cosmopolitan world. Thomas Friedman’s “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention”: Friedman argues that countries embedded in global supply chains are unlikely to go to war with each other. More generally, he looks at how a globalized economy stabilizes geopolitics. But Egypt presents some unique challenges to Friedman’s ideas, while also revealing a definite slant toward Asian countries in his analysis. Steven Johnson’s “Listen to Feedback” and Marshal Poe’s “The Hive”: Both of these essays talk about the success of bottom-up versus top-down systems, which provides a unique frame for looking at the conflict between the bottom-up protests and the top-down government response. Given that Egypt effectively blacked out the Internet (in part to stop the kind of collaboration and connectivity that Poe and Johnson discuss and that was being used to coordinate the protests), these essays are particularly appropriate. Kenji Yoshino’s “Preface” and “The New Civil Rights”: Yoshino’s discussion of competing paradigms for civil rights would be a useful way to think about the kinds of changes that the people of Egypt are arguing for. ... View more

This semester I’m using Emerging to teach a class with a significant research writing component, so I’ve been thinking a lot about research: what it means in an academic setting, what students know about it, what they need to know about it, and how I might teach them. I’m teaching the class as a pilot section of our second semester FYC course. Ideally, I see an overall movement in which the first semester course introduces students to academic writing, the second semester introduces them to the basics of research, and then they move into their disciplines. I call the model I’m toying with “SAMSIL” because of its three central components: teach students how to make sustained arguments supported with multiple sources that reflect information literacy. SAMSIL also extends the skills that students learn in our first semester course, in which they write four- to six-page papers with a central argument supported by two sources. The challenges of making an argument over the course of eight to ten pages—without fluff or repetition—and of figuring out how and when to use not two but five sources begins to move students toward the more complex writing they will likely do in their major courses, all while providing them a basic grounding in academic information literacy—the ability to locate, assess, and apply information. As I said, it’s a pilot. I’ve taught a similar model before but this time I think I have the kinks worked out. We’ll begin with a short sequence based on three readings from Emerging in order to set a broad theme for the class—in this case, technology and knowledge using Marshall Poe’s “The Hive” (about Wikipedia), Michael Pollan’s “The Animals: Practicing Complexity” (about the complex ecological technology of organic farming), and Thomas Friedman’s “The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention” (about global supply chains). Giving that this is all an experiment, though, I’m curious… how do you approach researched writing in your own classroom? ... View more

One of the most important lessons to impart when teaching popular cultural semiotics is that the same phenomenon can mean something quite different when you change its historical context. This is why it is essential to situate a popular cultural topic within its own temporal framework, while at the same time comparing it to other relevant historical contexts to find the crucial differences that help mark out semiotic meaning. Take the Coen brothers’ reprise of the 1960s classic True Grit. While most of your students will be interested only in comparing Jeff Bridges’s interpretation of Rooster Cogburn to John Wayne’s, and Hailee Steinfeld’s performance to Kim Darby’s, that isn’t where the interesting cultural significance of the movie lies. To find that significance you need to look at the historical contexts of the two films. Let’s start with the original version. That movie appeared in 1969, only a year after the publication of Charles Portis’s novel of the same title. Now, by the late 1960s America was fully engulfed in a cultural revolution that was effectively splitting the country apart. Resistance to the Vietnam War was a particularly volatile flash point, and it is highly significant that only a year before the release of True Grit, John Wayne had starred in and codirected The Green Berets, a movie that was clearly addressed to American traditionalists who resented the antiwar movement (Joe, released in 1970, was similarly addressed to conservative opponents of the cultural revolution). In such a context, Portis’s novel, with its appeal to old-fashioned self-reliant individualism and law and order, not to mention its revival of a traditionalist mythology of the Old West that movies like Little Big Man (1970) would soon challenge, was a signifier of conservative reaction. (It is also significant that True Grit, both the novel and movie, revisits the fundamental material of Cat Ballou (1965), reconstituting that spoofing of the Old West as a serious homage to the frontier tradition.) Thus the appearance of True Grit as a movie in 1969 was a clear signifier of conservative pushback. Should anyone have not gotten the point, John Wayne—popular culture’s leading standard-bearer of conservative values at the time—was cast in the lead role. Fast forward to 2010. While there is still a sharp political and cultural divide in America, it does not loom so dramatically as it did in the late 1960s/early 1970s. (Can you imagine National Guard troops opening fire on an American college campus today?) The reprisal of True Grit in the current state of affairs just doesn’t have the same political force that it did the first time around. The fact that the Coen brothers—who are hardly known as conservative standard-bearers—have made the movie, and that Jeff Bridges (rather than, say, Chuck Norris) is Rooster Cogburn, also plays an important role in the depoliticization of the film. Perhaps if Clint Eastwood had starred in and directed this version things might be different, but as it stands even liberal cinephiles can be content to debate such aesthetic matters as whose interpretation of Portis’s novel is more accurate and whether Bridges’s handling of John Wayne’s only Oscar-winning role measures up to the Duke. But politically, the return of True Grit is hardly a blip on the cultural radar. ... View more

As I've mentioned in previous posts, our students have a tendency to flatten readings by reducing them to one or two simplified concepts. One way we try to discourage this tendency is to focus on parts of the readings that feel tangential or less important, thereby encouraging students to develop depth. For example, the Leslie Savan essay “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over?” is primarily concerned with the appropriation of black slang by pop culture and media. That’s an easy concept for students to comprehend—all they need to do is turn on the television (or check out some popular video memes) to see it happening. But at the end of her essay Savan talks about the controversies surrounding Black English in the classroom. Students tend to disregard that part of the essay, so in our last assignment we tried to make it center stage: While the readings we have analyzed this semester have focused on communication and change within and across cultures, in her essay “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over?,” Leslie Savan explores consumer media’s appropriation and exploitation of a particular kind of cultural communication—black language. Savan finds that while “black talk” is acceptable in commercials and ads, when it comes to education, that same language is unacceptable because it is not considered proper English. In a paper using Savan and at least one other essay we have read this semester, evaluate the argument that the United States needs a common (or “official”) language. There are risks here, of course. The issue we’re asking them to address can be very charged, particularly in a region as diverse as South Florida. However, we’ve designed the prompt to try and move students beyond absolute positions on this issue. For one thing, we’re not asking students to take sides; instead, we want them to evaluate the argument for a common language. More importantly, by directing them back to the texts, we’re asking them to make that evaluation using the ideas of the essay. Opinion has limited weight in the kind of writing we ask our students to do; reasoned analysis supported with close textual engagement is what counts. It’s the kind of work done by all of the authors they’ve read this semester, whether it’s Alvarez considering quinces or even Savan looking at the complicated ways in which slang circulates in culture. What remains to be seen is how well these assignments work. Ryan is teaching them now, and once we have student papers we’ll have a better sense of what is effective and what needs tweaking. As with the writing we ask of our students, revision is the name of the game. ... View more

The assignment sequences in our program follow a general pattern: the first paper works with one author, the second paper with two, the third paper with three, and the fourth paper with two. That third paper is always a challenge for students—they just start to figure out how to work with two texts and suddenly we’re asking them to work with three. But I think it’s an important challenge. In asking students to work with three authors we give them a first glimpse of how knowledge is produced throughout the academy. As they move into their majors and disciplines they will often be asked to work with multiple sources; this third paper assignment gives them early practice with those skills. We also try to broaden the scope of this assignment to move beyond the texts of the classroom and back into the world in which we live. What does such an assignment look like? Well, here’s the one we came up with this past fall: HIV/AIDS continues to be a global epidemic. In “AIDS, Inc.” Helen Epstein examines HIV/AIDS prevention programs in Africa, finding that not only are conversations about the disease important but that certain kinds of conversations are particularly essential. To what extent can her insights be used to help in the fight against HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases here in the United States? Using all three essays we’ve read so far, write a paper in which you propose strategies for halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases in the United States and across the globe. Epstein was a great choice for our third reading. Her analysis of HIV prevention programs in Africa is revealing. It turns out that actually talking about the disease is a great way to stop its spread. With this assignment, we want students to think about how ideas from the texts can be used out in the world. We always provide a series of questions to get students started: Are Epstein’s and Appiah’s understandings of conversation the same? How might they be used in our cultural context? And, given what Alvarez says about cultural borrowing, is it even possible to import models from African cultures to our context? How does social cohesion relate to quinces or to cosmopolitanism? What role might the “cool effect” play in both disease prevention and cultural practices such as quinces? The goal of the questions is to help students see how they can make connections between the ideas in all the essays they’ve read so far. In doing so, they work with critical thinking and synthesis, and they do so with a real-world goal in mind: slowing the spread of HIV. ... View more

In a recent article for the Los Angeles Times, Mary McNamara notes how nonplussed Edie Falco appeared upon winning an Emmy Award for "outstanding Actress in a Comedy" for her performance in Nurse Jackie.  "‘Oh, this is just the most ridiculous thing that has ever, ever happened in the history of this lovely awards show,’" Falco proclaimed upon receiving her award.  ‘Thank you so much. I'm not funny.’" Falco has a point: her character in Nurse Jackie is driven to such desperation by the pressures of her life that she must resort to various sorts of drug abuse to cope—which is hardly funny. But Falco is not alone. Audiences find the grim and sarcastic behavior of Hugh Laurie's Gregory House (not so coincidentally another medical drug abuser) funny as well. And, as McNamara points out, Showtime's United States of Tara—a program about "a mother struggling with multiple personalities" —is also played for laughs. In fact, so many contemporary television series combine dramatic and comic elements that a new genre—the dramedy—has had to be coined to describe them.  Surely something funny is going on. Or not so funny. I'm reminded of an on-again, off-again NBC series from the late 1980s called The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, a purported sitcom whose heroine suffered from so much angst from episode to episode that it too can best be called a dramedy. But in the feel-good eighties, Molly Dodd was never a popular success, and was cancelled by NBC and then by Lifetime. I suspect that Molly would feel right at home today among the afflicted protagonists of shows such as Nurse Jackie, House, MD., Desperate Housewives, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Weeds.  For in such shows we find dramatic signs of a society under stress, two years into the Great Recession amid the wreckage of the American dream with no end in sight.  Strangely, it is television, rather than the traditionally more sophisticated medium of film, that is responding to that reality, presenting to Americans exaggerated depictions of their own stressful lives, thus offering a bourgeois form of catharsis to middle-class viewers who can experience, as Aristotle put it, pity and terror in the face of someone's else's desperation. ... View more

This post is part of a continuing series on building a course around the textbook Emerging. For previous posts in the series on assignments, see here, here, and here. Every summer I enlist a graduate teaching assistant to help me design and test the assignment sequence we use in our first-year writing classes in the fall.  This past summer, TA Ryan Dessler helped out, and we decided to share our process so that others can see how we conceive, write, implement, and revise a sequence of assignments. It all started with Julia Alvarez’s essay, “Selections from Once Upon a Quinceañera.” I’ve been dying to teach this essay since we included it in Emerging.  I love that it deals with something students can really relate to.  We are in South Florida, so many of our students will have had or attended a quince, while others will have experienced similar rituals such as sweet sixteens, debutante balls, and bat and bar mitzvahs.  I’m hoping our students will be able to see themselves in the essay, which will give them a basis from which to speak to, and speak back to, Alvarez’s analysis. And her analysis is complex, which I also love.  She doesn’t end up saying how she feels about quinces. Instead she reveals how very complex these coming-of-age rituals are.  There are massive economics involved (along the lines of a wedding), but also complex cultural factors: cultural identification for Americanized generations of Hispanics, borrowing across and between different Hispanic cultures, and the relation of coming of age to issues of gender and feminism.  The more Alvarez examines the ritual, the more she discovers; she is, in fact, doing just what we hope our students will do. Why do I say that? I think it is a challenge for students to see beyond the black and white.  They read an assigned essay and reduce it to a flattened idea or concept.  They don’t want to deal with complexity.  But Alvarez shows how complex even simple issues can be and how, by exploring that complexity, we can reach a deeper and more nuanced understanding.  Perfect. From there, Ryan and I built out the rest of the sequence by determining what selection would work well with Alvarez; we decided on Appiah.  Appiah offers a set of conceptual tools for understanding how cultural practices come into place, how they operate, and how they can change.  We believed it would complement our students’ analysis of Alvarez’s text. From Appiah, we then move into Helen Epstein’s “AIDS Inc.”  In examining the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa, Epstein raises the stakes when it comes to cultural practices.  We’re not just looking at parties for teenagers any more; instead, students will use the tools they’ve been developing in the assignments to look at how to change cultural practices in ways that reduce the global spread of HIV/AIDS. We decided to end with Leslie Savan’s essay, “What’s Black, Then White, and Said All Over?”  In examining pop culture and advertising, Savan addresses many of the economic and racial issues embedded in the other essays. Once we had the set of essays, all that was missing was a title for the sequence.  Ryan nailed it: Cultural Currencies. ... View more

This post is part of a continuing series on building a course around the textbook Emerging. For previous posts in the series, see here, here, and here. The success of any given assignment depends on a number of factors, but often hinges on the choice of a certain verbs. Whenever you write assignments, therefore, pay particular attention to (and consider the possible implications of) the verbs you use. For example: Explore. “Explore” is a useful verb in assignments because it asks students to use analytical skills.  However, you might find that assignments using this verb produce papers that are meandering, since “exploring” does not require students to locate a central argument. Reflect. “Reflect” implies both regurgitation and interiorization, neither of which is consistent with the goals of these courses. Just as importantly, this verb does not ask student to enter the conversation of the texts. Discuss. Like “explore,” this verb may produce generalized papers without any clear focus. Argue. While we certainly wish students to make arguments in their papers, using this verb suggests a black or white, win or lose position.  Students are more likely to use personal attacks against the author, force the evidence, or ignore contravening pieces of text when arguing their case. Defend or refute. Like “argue,” these verbs can be combative. Consider using the following verbs instead: Extend. “Extend” is a useful work because it encourages students to enter the conversation of the text and, literally, to extend it.  However, students usually remain within the arguments presented by the authors, and simply extending them to new contexts. Examine. This verb encourages students to use analytical skills. Evaluate. “Evaluate” directly encourages critical thinking and, in the process, encourages students to take a position or to make a central point. Propose. Using this verb in your assignment requires students to enter the conversation of the texts. Assess. Like “examine” or “evaluate,” this verb encourages critical thinking. Ultimately, experience—or trial and error—will identify the verbs most useful to you in crafting assignments. The intent of this list is simply to give you practice in thinking about how the verb you choose directs the response students create. Which verbs have you had success with? ... View more