English 192-020
Freshman Seminar: Identity and Contemporary U.S. Popular Culture
Instr: Blasini, Gilberto M.
Office: CRT 487; 229-4540
e-mail: gblasini@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 9:00-10:50am; CRT 104
Course Description
This seminar seeks to develop your media literacy skills by making you a more critical reader of popular culture - without taking any pleasure away from your engagement with novels, films, TV shows, popular music and videos. With this larger aim in mind, the seminar focuses on the role that contemporary popular culture plays in the formation of identities, both individual as well as collective, here in the U.S. Now more than ever before, popular culture constitutes a pervasive source for understanding or even misunderstanding who we think we are and where we think we belong (if at all) in the U.S. and the world at large. These ideas are further complicated by how music, novels, films, and television shows contribute to a sense of history or collective memory. In other words, popular culture asks us to remember events and situations in very particular ways - mostly by fostering communal alliances in terms of national unity. These alliances, nevertheless, usually take place at the expense of not acknowledging the different cultures that coexist in our country and in the whole world for that matter. We will use films, TV shows, popular music and videos to explore how popular culture constructs versions of history and U.S. society, particularly as they relate to cultural difference in terms of age, race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, among others. Finally, this course will introduce you to the study of popular culture - particularly film, television and music - from an academic perspective. As such, it will offer you an insight into approaches and terminology used in media studies.
