critical approaches to popular culture
In this class we will encounter the power of imagination as expressed in popular literature and film. Using Joseph Campbell’s infamous book The Hero With a Thousand Faces as a framework for our discussions, we will examine the ways in which our authors explore the figure of the hero in popular culture today.
Our major thematic questions will include: In what ways do popular narrative structures—those story patterns animating film, graphic novels, and “science fiction”—participate in particular ways in universal archetypal stories about who we are and where we’re going? In what ways do such narratives tap into our imaginative inner resources for guidance? How and why does our culture today more often than not actively suppress our imaginative capabilities? How do the works we will study explore the openings and closures of consciousness in contemporary society? How do our writers pose imaginative challenges to the mainstream ideologies (including academic) concerning personal and social human consciousness?
In addition to Campbell’s Hero, we will also read the Black Panther graphic novels by Ta-Nehisi Coates and the founding cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. The films we will view include Avatar, Black Panther, Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Matrix Trilogy. We will explore questions related to 1. differences between literary and film media; 2. the role of imagination in the construction of our realities; and 3. the ways in which Mythology—which in all times and places is the same “beneath its varieties of costume”—provides us with “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story” that lies as the source of all our stories and experiences.
Assignments will include frequent entries in your reading response blog; participation in online discussion groups; two vocabulary quizzes covering the critical terminology we will use in discussing popular literature and film; two major essays (building on various written assignments throughout the course); and a multimedia project (e.g. graphic, audio, video, web-based, etc.).