Post a Comment On: Cultural Studies

Final Written Reflection


Instructions: You have two hours to complete this reflection. I suggest that you spend a few minutes thinking about which questions to answer, about an hour writing your responses, and another half an hour revising and editing your responses. As we discussed, this is a closed-book reflection, so I don’t expect to see citations or page numbers. You can, if you want, refer to the syllabus to copy article titles.

Please answer one major question (50% of the final grade) and two minor questions (25% each, or 50% of the final grade).

When you are done, please save your file and give it the following name:
NameFR.doc
Mine, for example, would be TomFR.doc. Please also be sure to write your name inside the document itself. Attach the document to an e-mail and return it no later than 4 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 2007. You can take any two hours from the time you receive these instructions until you complete your writing; you are not required to write between the hours of 1 and 3.

Best wishes,
Tom

Major Questions (answer one).

1. We read extensively from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Choose any aspect of that book that struck you as particularly relevant, and explain that relevance. What is it about the concepts he describes that seem particularly useful or interesting? How have you seen his ideas at work in your own life? Be sure to use Foucault’s terms.

2. In his texts, Barthes provides some theories of how a viewer understands images. Choose a digital image from your own collection, or find an image on the Internet, and analyze it using Barthes’ terms. Make sure to include a copy of the image in your response.

3. Early in the semester, we read Stuart Hall’s and Richard Johnson’s definitions of cultural studies, and spent a lot of time talking about culturalist and structuralist models of cultural studies. What is your understanding of these models, and in what camp(s) do you place yourself as a student of cultural studies? Be sure to provide examples.

Minor Questions (answer 2)

1. At the beginning of the semester, you were asked to bring in a cultural artifact and discuss its significance. If you were asked to do the same thing now, what would you do differently? Would you bring in the same object? Why or why not? Now that you have completed this course, how would you analyze the object? What might that analysis reveal?

2 and 3.
Choose any article or chapter that we have read this semester (and that you have not discussed in response to the major question, above) and describe it in as much detail as you can. After you describe the article, tell me what you find particularly useful, interesting or illuminating about it. You can answer this question twice, describing two different articles, in order to satisfy the requirement that you answer two questions from this category.