The following page is a three column layout with a header that contains a quicklinks jump menu and the search CSUN function. Page sections are identified with headers. The footer contains update, contact and emergency information.
Note these REVISED OFFICE HOURS leading into Finals:
Monday, Dec. 8, 9:00-10:30am
Wednesday, Dec. 10, 9:00-10:30am
Friday, Dec. 12, 9:00am-12:00pm, 3:00-5:00pm
PLEASE NOTE: Due to a scheduling error, I have had to change my
office hours for Friday!
Monday, Dec. 15, 9:00am-12:00pm, 1:00-4:00pm
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 9:00am-12:00pm
313 students, take note:
Due to our mounting workload as we near semester’s end, I have taken the unprecedented (for me) step of cutting our in-class final exam. That’s right: we will NOT have a required final. Your semester grade will be calculated on the basis of our other major assessments, including class participation, the video analysis presentation, the retail analysis essay, the blog project, and the fandom project essay (400 points total).
So, no final. This goes for BOTH of my 313 classes.
However, you may if you wish submit an extra-credit final paper, eligible for a maximum of 50 points, based on the following prompt:
So, you’re sitting at Acapulco’s during Happy Hour on a Friday. Your finals have just ended, and you are basking in your freedom. The place is crawling with people and the music coming from the bar is punishingly loud, but you’re mellow. After all, the semester is done, and you’re enjoying dinner and conversation (drinks too, if you’re a drinker) with a few good friends and fellow CSUN students.
You’re all leaning into each other to make yourselves heard as you talk about what you’ve been taking, class-wise, over the past semester, and what you think of it all.
You start talking about your experience in your just-completed English 313 class. One of your friends (you can decide who, but make it a very smart friend) is especially curious about the course because s/he is thinking about taking it next school year. You search for words to try to explain what the class is all about, but, before you can gather your thoughts (remember, Acapulco’s at Happy Hour is no quiet, peaceful little hideaway), your friend asks a pointed question about something you posted on your class blog a few weeks ago:
“Popular culture always is part of power relations.” — John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture
“This sounds suspiciously political,” says your friend. “Tell me, what exactly is that class about, and what does ‘power’ have to do with it? If I take this course in the fall, am I going to be studying politics?”
You think about this question and you try to answer it honestly and completely, but it’s difficult. Hey, the joint is jumping and it’s hard to focus. One moment in the conversation leaps out at you, though, and stays in your mind even afterwards, as you make your way home. It’s a follow-up question, or challenge, posed by your friend:
So, tell me about ‘power’ in popular culture. Honestly, did this class empower you at all? I mean, if there’s supposed to be some sort of power struggle going on, what’s your place in it, and has taking this class given you any power?
You’re still mulling over this question late that night, when, to your surprise, you find yourself willingly returning to schoolwork — that is, sitting down at your desktop/laptop/notepad and trying to come up with a thorough, cogent response to your friend’s question. (Hey, I know this is a bit unrealistic, but we instructors have to have our fantasies!) Now that you have your wits and your books and other resources about you, and are able to compose your thoughts in a serious manner, you decide to write a message to send to everyone in your group of friends and fellow students. Maybe you’ll even blog it. “I’ll show those skeptics what it’s all about,” you say to yourself. At the top of your message you write/type the following prompt to yourself:
If popular culture is about power, then how can English 313 affect the balance of power? What power, if any, has the course given me?
Then you start writing…
So, there you have it, a prompt. If you choose to write an extra-credit paper in response to this prompt (and I stress that the choice is up to you), your job will be to respond to the above prompt in a organized, well-defended, cleanly-presented typewritten essay, one that draws on John Fiske and other sources and/or examples from our class readings and/or discussions. I’d say a 2 to 3-page essay, tops. Be sure to talk about, and honor, your own experiences and outlook! Tell yourself that you are writing for an audience of smart, ambitious University students who are used to challenging work and genuinely curious about the study of popular culture.
Remember that this extra-credit paper would be worth a maximum of 50 points. An excellent paper would earn about 50 points, while a mediocre effort would earn, say, about 30 to 35 points. In any case, I must have any and all papers from 313 (both classes) no later than MONDAY, DECEMBER 15.
NOTICE: Due to illness, the MWF 313 class for Friday, Nov. 21, has been canceled. Class will resume on Monday, Nov. 24. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks.
Prof's current state? (Image poached from Jay Stephens' wonderful LAND OF NOD comic.)
Dig Professor Steven Wexler’s English 312: Literature and Film for Spring 2009:
THE JAMES BOND FORMATION
Bond, James Bond.
ENGL 312-02 (class no. 13097), Tuesdays 4:20-6:45pm, JR 319
This course (says Prof. Wexler) examines the James Bond formation, the spectacle of espionage, nationalism, and masculinity as depicted in the Ian Fleming novels and Albert and Barbara Broccoli films. Our license to theorize will help us rethink 007’s transformation over the last fifty years in light of our own political, economic, and cultural changes. With the help of agents Edward Said, David Harvey, Judith Butler, and others, we’ll attempt to answer important questions such as how do You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun orientalize the East? Does Auric Goldfinger personify the Federal Reserve under the gold standard? What do the various Bonds and Bond women suggest about our conceptions of sex and gender? How does Live and Let Die appropriate civil rights consciousness on behalf of Cold War politics? Could Quantum of Solace be an illiberal glance at transnational capital, class disparity, corruption, and paranoia? Short papers, group presentations, final paper, and Web work.
For more information, email Wexler, Steven Wexler.
Punks in Berlin, photographed by Amodiovalerio Verde.
Torn jeans that you can buy that way (image nicked from ShopStyle.com).
This classic photo of the Screamers in L.A. (1977) comes courtesy of pioneering photographer and CSUN alum Jenny Lens, whose site, www.jennylens.com, you should visit straightaway!
Since so many of our upcoming readings in 313 involve fandom and subcultures, I thought I would share with everyone some interesting and important scholarly sources on the topic of subculture. Here are three:
Subculture: The Meaning of Style by British scholar Dick Hebdige (1979, revised ed. 2005).
This is a seminal book: not the first academic study of youth subcultures, but probably the best-known and most influential. Hebdige was part of a wave of scholars looking at Britain’s postwar, music-based subcultures (mods, rockers, glam, etc.) but one of the first to write seriously about punk. He is especially concerned with how the punk subculture distinguishes between the authentic and the inauthentic.
Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice by Australian scholar Ken Gelder (2007).
Gelder’s book is quite recent and quite useful. He posits six ways by which subcultures are typically defined:
Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style by our pal, Britain’s David Muggleton (2000).
This is the book from which our Muggleon excerpt in The Audience Studies Reader comes. The very title of the book announces that it is a response to, critique, and thus extension of Hebdige. I imagine that Muggleton feels ambivalent about the title, for he is quite critical of Hebdige - and others working in the same vein. Indeed Muggleton criticizes the entire “CCCS school,” by which he means the kind of cultural studies then practiced at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He faults the CCCS school for ignoring the subjective viewpoints of the participants in subcultures. He calls this “a neglect of indigenous meanings” (3). In essence, he thinks Hebdige and others do too much theorizing without actual ethnographic research within the subcultures themselves. The heart of this book, therefore, is in Muggleton’s interviews with subculturalists: typically, young people involved in music and/or fashion-related movements.
Note too that some scholars, Muggleton among them, now resist the term “subculture,” believing that it may have outlived its usefulness. See for example After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by Bennett and Kahn-Harris (2004), and The Post-Subcultures Reader, edited by Muggleton and Weinzierl (2004). (It never fails: just as I begin to understand a concept, I find out that a lot of people have already declared it passé. Sigh.)
After some delays, it’s looking like the class blogs for the MWF 11am section of English 313 are about ready to go live. Check out the link to “ENGL 313 Student Blogs” at the top of this page.
Those of you in the MWF 11 am section, I have changed your status from that of mere “subscribers” to that of blog “administrators.” You should now be able to write and manage blog content, and to have limited control over the design of your blog pages as well.
Please contact me immediately if tech problems persist!
The 1950s outcry (panic? crusade?) against comic books remains relevant to this very day.
In this connection, check out the following pieces in response to David Hadju’s recent book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America:
1. A review essay by Louis Menand in the New Yorker magazine that discusses both Hadju and Bart Beaty’s fine book, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture.
2. An online symposium in the Toronto paper The Globe and Mail featuring Beaty and fellow comics scholar Jeet Heer, in debate over Hadju’s book.\
3. Another article by Heer, up at Slate magazine, here.
Everything old is new again, or eternal.
A still from THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (dir. Richard Brooks, 1955), which we'll soon be discussing in class.
Soon 313 will be discussing the concept of moral panic, a term used by cultural critics to describe episodes of widespread public anxiety over putatively “deviant” or “dangerous” behaviors or groups that are said to pose a threat to society.
Often young people and youth culture are the targets of moral panic, as discussed in both John Springhall’s Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics and James Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage (both of which are excerpted in our e-reserve readings). We’ll be exploring this theme in upcoming classes.
The Wikipedia page on “moral panic” is unusually thorough and well-documented. Worth a look, and worth bookmarking.
Also, here is an example of something fascinating that developed just recently and might or might not be categorized as an instance of moral panic: the widespread reaction to an online “game” or pastime called Miss Bimbo, in which players compete to create the ultimate stereotypic “bimbo,” or idealized female figure (the link here will take you to a story in the London Times online). Yow, it’s a mind-boggler.
Finally, here’s an excerpt from the lyrics to that classic by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” (released on Gee Records in 1957):
I’m not a juvenile delinquent
No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no
No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no
No-no-no, I’m not a juvenile delinquentDo the things that’s right
And you’ll do nothing wrong
Life will be so nice, you’ll be in paradise
I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquentBut listen boys and girls
You need not be blue
And life is what you make of it
It all depends on you
I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquentIt’s easy to be good, it’s hard to be bad
Stay out of trouble, and you’ll be glad
Take this tip from me, and you will see
How happy you will be…
(Lymon, incidentally, died of a heroin overdose at age 25.)
Courtesy of the Marxists Internet Archive (http://www.marxists.org), you can read Adorno & Horkheimer’s classic and very influential essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944), online.
Essential stuff for students of popular culture!
UPDATE: You may be interested in the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University, where Horkheimer and Adorno began their classic work.