This is the page for: Understanding English and American Popular Culture

(Course-related content will appear here in reverse chronological order: the newest things at the top of the page, and older posts toward the bottom.)

One More Thing…

I’ll accept your reaction papers for the panel discussion on The West Wing (our last panel discussion) until Tuesday, April 29th. However, you also will have to prepare a preparation paper for the 29th, because there’s a panel discussion that day. Make sure you get both done! For more about preparations and homework, see below on the main page for this course.

Preparation for April 29th & May 1st

UPDATE: The Internet Archive link is down, but you can see it on Google Video.

Here’s a list of the things you need to check out for the first week after midterm exams:

For April 29th:

While V for Vendetta offers us the chance to examine bad leaders a little, something I will lecture about, as it’s an interesting and important contrast to the optimism of The West Wing — we’ll be mostly focusing on those people who enforce leaders’ decisions… that is, one form of the Man of Action, “Cops” (another archetype that should remind us of Jack’s role as The Sherriff on Lost).

For May 1st, we’ll have a panel discussion focusing on another form of the “Man of Action,” The Soldier. For this panel discussion, you should check out two films:

Remember that for both of those discussions, you will need to prepare Panel Discussion Question/Thoughts sheets beforehand, and Reaction Papers afterward. It’s going to be a busy week!

You might think of working ahead by checking out the films Fight Club and Catch Me If You Can, which will be for the following week’s discussion. I’ll post more about what else you need to prepare for that week a little later.

Midterm Exam

Well, it’s exam time. Some students have emailed me asking if I could give any details about what they need to study.

As I said in class last Tuesday, you’re responsible for everything we’ve discussed. However, it might be a little easier if you think of it this way: the focus of the exam will be two essays.

For each, you’ll have a choice from within a group. The first group of questions will be about things related to our Panel Discussions. The second group will be related to things that were covered in my lecture, and the media I discussed.

There may also be a couple of multiple choice questions about general information from the lectures, things that you should know if you were listening. But the main focus is thinking about the things we’ve discussed up to now.

So this is one of those exams where your preparation was happening all the time up to now. But reviewing your notes is a good idea.

I will accept your reaction papers for the last Panel Discussion (on The West Wing) anytime before the next Panel Discussion. Don’t forget that after the exam, you’ll be responsible for a lot of media — our first week back after exams, you need to have watched all the media listed here:

April 29th: Who Watches the Watchmen: V for Vendetta and The Departed

May 1st: A Soldier’s Tale: Power, War, and The Warrior Code in Flags of Our Fathers and It’s Everybody’s War

You’ll also need Preparation Papers for both panels, and will have to write reaction papers after both. See you soon!

Han (Next week’s Panel Discussion)

Next week, we’ll be discussing The West Wing. While the discussion will be general, I’m asking everyone to watch one episode of the show. The pilot episode of Season 1 is an alright place to start, but most any episode will do.

Unless you’re one of the panelists, make sure NOT to watch Episode 4 of Season 5 (Han) because we’ll be watching at least some of it in class. It will be part of the discussion, but the discussion will be more general, and will be focused on presidents and powerful people in media, not necessarily only on The West Wing.

I do recommend you take a look at the transcript for the episode I’ve mentioned, however. It’s available here, as are transcripts for many other episodes. In the meantime, Check out the panel discussions schedule and make sure you’re prepared. I’ve made slight changes to the schedule, as mentioned in class. A recommended preparations schedule will be posted soon…

Article on Racism in American Media (…. Or Is It?)

This article is an excellent example that ties together the complexity of discussing race in America, the heritage of racist pop culture (King Kong), and also the use of archetypes in images.

Make sure you check it out (and click on the image so you can get a good look at the picture they’re discussing). We’ll touch on this article — along with much more — next week! (That is, on April 8th!)

Panel Discussions Schedule

April 3rd: On James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” and Bamboozled

Hyo Im Kim, Hye Jung Lim, Naomi Tsai, Holly Chuang

April 10th: Anxieties of Influence: How “The Other” (Black, White, Western, Japanese) Has Affected Korean Pop Culture

Ji-Woong Lee, Min-ji Kim, Chahwan Ryu, KyungHee Park

April 17th: POTUS: What’s The West Wing Really About?

Sunyoung Ko, Jung-won Lim, Eunsuk Jun, Bi-Ryong Han

April 22: Midterm Exam (No Panel Discussions This Week)

April 29th: Who Watches the Watchmen: V for Vendetta and The Departed

Saem Yoo, Ki-wook Yeo, Bo-young Lee, Kwan-yong Chun

May 1st: A Soldier’s Tale: Power, War, and The Warrior Code in Flags of Our Fathers and It’s Everybody’s War

Yoo Jeong Lee, JiYoung Jung, Eun Ju Kim, Eun Min Cho

May 8th: Breaking All the Rules: Fight Club, Catch Me If You Can, and the Romanticized Outlaw Archetype

Yu-mi Jeon, Se Kwang Oh, Yoon Jung Kim, Eun-seon Lee

May 15th: Aw, Poor You: The Appeal of Tony Soprano and Hannibal Lecter (A Discussion of The Sopranos and of The Silence of the Lambs)

Han-goo Myong, Seung-Min Lee, Gun-Shik Jung

May 20th: Bechdel’s Rule: What Can We Watch With Female Characters Worth Watching?

Hyejin Yang, Kyunghee Jung, Jinwoo Kim, Young-a Cho

May 27th: Bloodthirsty Women and the Black Widow Archetype: Rethinking Kill Bill

Lee-seul Choo, Ja-Kyung Yun, Suji Gang, Yoo Jin Chung

May 29th: Nice Girls Don’t… Gender Rules and Archetypes in the Romantic Comedies of Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail: watch at least two.)

Heein Jeong, Hye Won Shin, Jin Ju Kim, Sang [?] Lee

June 5th: What Will Tomorrow Look Like? — The Fifth Element and Brazil

Sang Woon Hong, Sun Jun Choi, Yu-hwa Han, Minjoo Yu

For next week I’ll prepare a list of stuff you’ll need to watch. The list won’t be complete — I’ll be adding a few things to it, but it should be semi-complete.

괴물

Here’s that powerpoint I promised you!

The Host character archetype / genre analysis (powerpoint)

On April 1st, we’ll be watching the remainder of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, discussing Blackface minstrelsy, stereotypes and archetypes, and doing a related exercise in class.

On April 3rd, there will be a panel discussion about James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” and you need to prepare some questions in order to get a homework for the panel discussion. I’ll collect your presentations. Bonus marks for anyone who asks a good question to the panelists, so think hard and make sure you prepare!

The Gwaemul Analysis

Someone emailed me on Sunday to (correctly) point out that I haven’t yet posted my analysis of 괴물. The problem is that I haven’t got enough room on the server that hosts this site. I am currently looking into some other place where I can host the file, and as soon as I find one — hopefully later this week — I’ll post a link here.

Tuesday, we’ll be looking at the last 40-odd minutes of Bamboozled, and then talking about the history ofblackface minstrelsy a bit more, discussing racial stereotypes and character archetypes — and how much they overlap — and doing an (interesting!) exercise.

Remember, Thursday, there will be a Panel Discussion of James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village.”  (Linked further down on this page.) You will need to make some preparations for that panel, especially thinking about the essay and having some questions ready. They’ll count towards your panel discussion grade, and if you actually ask them, and they’re good, they’ll even count towards your all-important participation mark. So think up some good questions, folks!

(And yes, I’ll explain this more in class on Tuesday!)

Panel Discussions

A few people have asked me to expand a little on the subject of the Panel Discussions part of the course.

Each student will be required to participate in a Panel Discussion event. These will usually, but not always, be held on the Tuesday class meeting. The Panelists will be expected to prepare for a one-hour (actually, 50-minute) discussion of a given topic. The discussion should focus on the general topic, and on whatever assigned material I have chosen for the panel discussion, but of course can also stray to subjects related to it.

For example, if we were to discuss the Korean movie Memories of Murder, and you if you were on the panel for that discussion, you might consider preparing thoughts on the following:

Not only are the above reasonable topics for a Panel Discussion of Memories of Murder, but you can also prepare questions for your panel members, or ask them questions spontaneously. Remember, you should also be able to answer your own questions!

You should also be mentally prepared for the fact that the audience (all of your classmates) will come to class with questions prepared for you, and that I (Gord) will be acting as moderator, urging people to contibute, choosing students to ask questions, and maybe even asking a question or two of my own!

Now, all of that probably doesn’t give you a really good idea of what we’ll be doing, so I thought I’d like to a video online that will give you a clearer sense of things. Here is an example of a Panel Discussion at a conference in New Orleans, about whether the Harry Potter character Severus Snape is a good guy or a bad guy, and the nature of characters in Harry Potter in general. The language might be challenging at certain moments, but the interaction is pretty good — there’s agreements, disagreements, changes in topic, returns to earlier questions, and more. This is what a classic Panel Discussion is like — lively, interesting, and thoughtful, but fun too.

That should just about do it for explanations. Except for one thing: the grading part of the exercise. I will be grading you individually and I will be taking the following into account:

Part of your grade will also be determined by your participation in Panel Discussions led by others, in the form of prepared questions.  At the end of each panel discussion that they have attended as a non-participant, students can submit written questions and prep sheets for  a checkmark. (Which will only be given if the prep sheets show a reasonable amount of thoughtful preparation for the panel.)

That should just about do it for explanations. Every please remember that our first Panel Discussion will  take place on April 1st, and the topic (in general) will be James Baldwin’s essay “The Stranger in the Village” (which was linked in the last post I made on this site) and on the archetype of “The Other.”

Homework & Preparations for March 25th/27th & April 1st

Here’s what’s up for the next couple of weeks:

On March 25th, I’ll be finishing up my lecture on Genre in 괴물 and then we’ll be watching the Spike Lee film Bamboozled (IMDB, Wikipedia, subtitle file in case anyone wants to “read the script” beforehand).

If you’re not familiar with Spike Lee, I envy you the pleasure of discovering him for the first time. He’s one of the best directors in America at the moment, at least in my opinion, and certainly has been the most famous African-American movie director for a long time. His films are both entertaining and often satirical, but also intelligent, critical, and politically charged. Bamboozled is about 132 minutes long, so we’ll be watching it for much of next week, though I hope to get in some comments about blackface minstrelsy — a form of popular entertainment in America and, in fact, around the Anglophone world — from the early/mid-19th century to the early/mid-20th.

As preparation, you should consider reading up on Blackface Minstrel preformance, such as on this Wikipedia page. Feel free to explore further on your own. A noted and fascinating bookn on the subject — one I’ll be using for reference in preparation of my lecture — is John Strausbaugh’s 2006 text Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (Tarcher/Penguin: New York, 2006).

Also as preparation, I expect that you will watch the following movie, which is available free online: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (free online at Google video, or download it from the Internet Archive here for free. It’s so old that that’s legal!). I expect that you will watch this three-hour movie before our next class, or at least during the coming week.

By the way, The Birth of a Nation is the film I mentioned in my lecture on 괴물 in connection to King Kong. The Birth of a Nation is the most famous and politically charged example of a film depiction of African-Americans not only because of the use of blackface on white actors, but also because of the subject of the film — it’s a glorification of the forming of the racist, criminal organization known as the Ku Klux Klan after the American Civil War. You can read more about the film here, and feel free also to enjoy this short clip from DJ Spooky’e remix of the movie here.

(And yes, Birth of a Nation is very long, and a silent movie, and disgustingly racist too, but is effect on film history, and the way the racism manifested in the film, make it very important to the subject we’re watching. So yes, you really should watch it. Part II is especially important.)

Bubble Sisters

Here are some more videos, mp3s, and texts to check out when you have a free moment, which will present more images from the era when blackface was commonplace (in the West, anyway). I encourage you to explore them throughout this week:

Finally, on April 1st, we’ll have a classroom discussion of Bamboozled and various archetype of The Other, followed by a panel discussion on Baldwin’s The Stranger in the Village.

(On April 3rd, I’ll probably give you a crash course on the influence of African-American culture on American (and world) popular culture, spanning from the swing era and its jazz big bands all the way to hip-hop today, and including not only music but dance, language, fashion, and youth culture identity. I’ll have more online for you as that day approaches.)

Happy Easter Long Weekend!

PS: I’ll post a copy of the 괴물 Powerpoint once I’ve finished giving that lecture. So, sometime next week. You should be reviewing your notes and other class materials, because you never know when a surprise quiz might appear on your desk!

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