Your assignment is to write an 7-8 page final paper (in which you may
incorporate some of the materials from your industry analysis paper if
they are relevant) in which you compare two media texts as texts.
This paper does not require any research aside from your
experience of these texts themselves. Although you are welcome to read
about the subject of your paper in the popular and scholarly press, the
central ideas in your assignment should come not from external sources
but from you.
The main work you must do before you begin to write is to
view/experience your texts multiple times and to think about and make
notes on how they communicates meanings. Your thoughts about the texts
should reflect the ideas about analyzing media that we have considered
in class and that we have read about in our course readings. Three
aspects of your texts that you might consider are:
- Their use of form (narrative or non-narrative) and style (visual and/or auditory) to create meaning.
- Ideological messages they convey about society (recall from our discussions and readings that ideological meanings are those that support the dominant social structures and the patterns of inequality they support).
- Their representation of social identities such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.
For the purposes of our course, a text is a single object, such as a
movie, television series, magazine, videogame, website, or music
recording. In selecting your texts for this assignment you should
consider only texts of the same type, such as two movies or two
videogames. This is not an “adaptation” paper in which, let’s say, you
compare a movie and the videogame based on it.
Important: A comparison involves considering both similarities and
differences between two things. Your paper should try to balance these
considerations
A topic proposal is due by email on Thursday, April 3, and
in it you should identify the two texts clearly, describe them briefly,
and give some indication of the approach you intend to take with your
paper. I will respond to your email either by approving your topic or
asking you to resubmit it. I will not accept any papers on topics I
have not approved.
Your paper should have a thesis statement in which you set forth some
contention or argument about the subject. This thesis statement should
identify a clear meaning or set of meanings conveyed by the two texts
and a relationship among them. In crafting your argument you may
include points from your industry paper that are relevant to the claims
you are making about textual meanings.
Your paper must be written in well-crafted sentences and paragraphs of
appropriate length (no one or two sentence paragraphs—this isn’t a news
story). You must spell correctly and use standard grammar, syntax, and
word usage. Your paper should have an introduction and conclusion and
should be organized logically as a series of points in support of your
thesis. Your paper should have a title, something more descriptive
than “Final Paper,” please. Sources must be cited properly as we have
discussed in class. Badly written papers will get bad grades even if
the ideas contained in them are good.
This paper is due at the beginning of class on Thursday, May 8, and it is worth 25% of your final grade.
Very important: I will not read your paper if it is not typed and
double-spaced, with 1-inch margins on all sides and 12-point Times or
Times New Roman font. I will not read it if the pages are not numbered
and stapled together. I will not read it if it is printed in any color
other than black. Seriously, I’ll hand it back to you and it will be
late.
Even more important: Papers containing plagiarism will be given an F
and the appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken with your Dean.
Grading criteria:
1) Adherence to the requirements of the assignment.
2) Clarity, expressiveness, and organization of the writing.
3) Degree of thoroughness, insightfulness, and originality in the research and analysis.
4) Concreteness, clarity, coherence, and originality of the argument
and adequacy of research and analytical support for that argument.
The grade given to average work on all assignments is a C. Therefore,
grades of B or A indicate impressive achievement above the average.
Grades of A in particular indicate especially exceptional work. Grades
below C indicate inadequacies in any or all of the grading criteria.
Notes on citations of audiovisual texts:
-Italicize titles of books, movies, newspapers, magazines, television shows, games: The Da Vinci Code, Spider-Man 3, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Laguna Beach, World of Warcraft.
-Put titles of episodes of television shows in quotation marks. When referring to a television show, refer to episodes by their original air date, e.g.: “In the series premiere of Laguna Beach, “A Black & White Affair” (originally aired September 28, 2004), we are introduced to the show’s main characters.” You have the option of putting episode titles and dates in footnotes instead.-When first mentioning a movie, put its original release date in parentheses, e.g., “In Spider-Man 3 (2007), Tobey Maguire and Kristin Dunst return to play Peter and Mary Jane.”