Essay #1
Due Thursday, September 27 in class.
4-5 pages.

For this first essay, your job will not be to study a cultural text or practice, but to locate someone else's work and explain his/her argument, theory, and method. I want you to begin with a popular text or practice in which you are interested or to which you feel some allegiance (as we are focusing on "reading popular culture," I would prefer you stay away from the more 'high' forms such as 'literary' novels, poems, etc).
NB: If you are unsure of how to begin or have no particular cultural text or practice in mind, you should spend some time playing around with keywords in your database/library searches (trying different theories, media, titles) and just see what comes up.

Then, once you have decided on a potential focus, I want you to locate an article (through JSTOR, EBSCOHost, Project Muse, MLA Bibliography, edited collections, etc.) that uses one of the methods we have studied thus far (Marxism (in its various forms), Psychoanalysis (ditto), Structuralism, Poststructuralism, or Feminism) to analyze a specific cultural text or practice in the form/genre you have chosen. For example, you might find a (post?) marxist reading of American Idol, a psychoanalytic analysis of French fashion in the 80s, or a structuralist interpretation of 70s Seattle underground funk.

Once you have located an article, I then want you to proceed to evaluate it in extreme detail: what is the thesis, how does the author make clear his/her argument, what form does his/her analysis take and how do he/she use this specific theoretical apparatus? In other words, your essay will be a detailed analysis of this article that sets out to show how scholars "do" cultural studies with a focus on the popular. I want you to analyze their method, detail their deployment of specific theoretical apparatuses, show how they prove their thesis and how they rely upon this theory to make their 'point.' Could they make a similar argument in the absence of this theory? Could another one stand in just as well? Why or why not?

The goal here is to see, as Stuart Hall puts it, "theory in action." We've been talking for a few weeks now on how these theories work and how they function in the cultural studies universe, now let's locate some actual applications. As always, let me know if you have any questions (if your questions are specifically search/research related, I would encourage you to approach a reference librarian as well).