>> Congratulations, you have made it
through the content modules of this class,
and now you get
to create your own media criticism.
So you have been reading
the criticism of other scholars,
and now it is your turn,
so congratulations for making it this far.
Your goal in Modules 7 and 8 is to select
a media artifact to analyze and an
appropriate critical lens to
use in analyzing it,
and then to produce that
polished piece of media criticism.
So we will do this in two steps.
The first step is to write a proposal,
and you can find
this document that I'm referring
to linked from the online classroom.
So before you can begin writing a proposal,
you have to decide what
it is that you'd like to write about.
And the goal of your proposal is
to tell me what
your planned topic is
and what you expect your argument might be.
And then I can give you
some feedback on whether
that sounds like an argument that can work,
or maybe I have
some suggestions for resources
you could read to
help you make that argument,
or I might have some ways
to clarify the argument
or make the argument better.
So that's the goal
of turning in the proposal.
So first, you have to decide,
what am I going to analyze?
So you could select a film,
and we saw a couple of examples of this,
the Kristy Maddux article
on Iron Jawed Angels would be one example.
The Celeste Lacroix article
analyzed several films,
looking at a common theme across the films.
So those are some examples of that approach.
You could analyze a television show,
and it might be a whole series
that you analyze, it might be a season.
You may have an argument
that leads you to focus
a special attention on
just a couple of key episodes.
That just depends on what your argument is.
You could analyze an advertising campaign.
You could analyze news discourse
about a particular topic.
So the Jamie Landau article that
you read for the module on
queer criticism looks at
lesbian and gay families as
covered in the media as an example.
You could analyze an activist
or social movement use of the media.
You could select another
media text altogether.
So we saw an example in
the Thomas Leslie article of
an analysis of popular science books
and science textbooks.
So it's up to you what you select.
I really think you should
select something that you
find interesting or provocative in some way.
So if you think about why any of the authors
that we read for
this class wrote the pieces that they wrote,
and you can think
about this for the articles we read,
you can think about it for the book
review that you conducted.
It really just depends
on what you're trying to do.
But think about why did
these people write
the articles that they wrote?
And I would argue that
they saw in those media
texts something that struck
them as unusual or noteworthy.
So Thomas Leslie is
reading a popular science book,
and he sees this story about Galileo,
and he knows from his historical reading
and his historical research,
he notices that the story he
finds in these popular science books
does not match up with historical fact.
And he begins to wonder if this is a pattern.
So he starts to look for other books,
and he notices a pattern.
And then based on his research
and based on his own creative thinking,
he comes up with an argument about that.
First, he argues that science is a culture
and that it can have a folklore about it.
And then he argues
that historical inaccuracies in
folklore resonate and they
hold even though they aren't true,
and finally, that the function
of these stories is to
link science to intellectual morality.
So he offers several examples from
the books to substantiate his claim.
And then in the end, he makes
this conclusion about the Cold War,
if you will, in his language
between science and religion.
So it all began with his noticing
this story that struck
him as unusual because it
didn't match up with what he
understood the facts to be.
And I could work through
that same example with
any of the other articles
that we read or
with any of the books that you
read for your book review projects.
In every case, the author
said, "Wait a second.
Something isn't right here."
Or, "Wait a second.
This is really interesting."
And I wonder what it means to
think about this in a new or different way.
So you certainly can pick
something of which you are a fan,
but the point of your paper should not
be this book is really great,
or this movie was terrible,
or I love this television show.
You need to make a critical argument,
and that doesn't necessarily mean negative,
but it needs to be an interpretive,
critical argument based on
evidence in the text from
which your reader will
learn something that the
reader did not know before.
So that's the focus of the paper.
You need to be able to make an argument
about what you see.
So you notice that Leslie does not just say,
this story is bad
or this story is poorly written,
he has a much
more nuanced argument than that.
And the same is true of
the other articles that we
read for this class.
They don't just say this news coverage is bad
about gay and lesbian families or
the movie Iron Jawed Angels is awful,
or that it's really great.
In fact, Kristy Maddux
begins her article by saying,
"I really like the movie,
but I notice that
it has some troubling implications."
So she does begin by stating she's a fan,
but then she goes off and makes
an argument about the film.
So think about that as you
think about selecting an artifact.
You need to do more than just
a critical review of it,
the way that Roger Ebert might
do a review of a film.
You need to do something more than that.
You're making an argument
in a scholarly conversation.
So you have to think
about what critical lens do you plan to use?
How are you going to read
this particular text?
And so you have several
examples from the class,
the rhetorical, the cultural,
the feminist, the queer,
and the activist applied lens.
So you just need to determine
which lens would be most appropriate for
helping you to make an argument about
the text and to do that,
you go back to the question I posed before.
What about this media
artifact stands out to you?
And if you're not
certain exactly what argument
you'd like to make,
you might think through the lenses
and apply them to the particular text.
So you might say,
I'd like to analyze this particular film,
what would a queer lens say about this film?
How would that be different from
what a cultural lens would say?
Or a rhetorical lens.
And so if you think about
what these lenses would offer
to reading or analyzing your artifact,
you can determine which one might be
the most appropriate for
the work that you're trying to do.
Once you have done that,
you need to think
about what your argument is.
And along the way, you can find
a substantial amount of
help in other scholarly sources.
So you're welcome to cite
the work that we've read in class,
and you should also do
other research about work
from the lens that you're using,
and even perhaps work
on the media artifact that you are studying,
or perhaps if you're studying
a brand new movie or something like that,
there isn't going to be previous
research on that exact movie,
but there will be previous research
on that kind of genre.
So if you're going to analyze a horror film,
you may want to look at previous analyses of
horror films to help you make your argument.
And so for the purposes of the proposal,
you should include at
least three annotated sources
from scholarly work,
so peer-reviewed journal articles, books,
or book chapters that
you plan to use in your paper.
And if you look on the online classroom,
you will see links to
the reference librarians page for
this class to help you determine
how to find scholarly sources
that will be appropriate for this project,
and you'll also find links to APA style
to help you with
citing those sources appropriately.
So for the three sources
you use in your proposal,
you should annotate them,
and an annotation as described here,
is simply one or two sentences
where you summarize the argument in
your article and
then another sentence to explain how
the article is going to help
you in making the argument in your paper.
So again, to look at the proposal,
what you need in the proposal is to
tell me what media artifact
you're going to analyze,
what critical lens you plan to use,
what argument you expect that you will make,
and you're welcome to change
this or to develop it a little bit,
but at least what you're thinking right now.
And then at least three scholarly sources,
including annotations. And you
can see here how I'm
going to grade the proposal.
You can then read the rest of the guidelines
for what the full paper should look like,
but it really shouldn't be a surprise.
You are doing a shorter version of
the books and articles
that you have read in this class.
So by now, you know what
a good media criticism looks like,
and your goal is to produce your own with
an original argument that
I will learn something from.
So at some point, after you have
turned in your proposal
and received feedback from me,
you should set up a meeting with me
either face to face or via Google Hangout,
and we can talk in
specific about your paper and your progress,
and I'd be happy to answer
any questions that you have.
And again, use
the articles that we've read in class,
as well as the books that you've read for
the book review for help in
terms of a model for what
a good piece of media criticism looks like.
You're also welcome to
ask questions of the reference librarian.
He is here to help you,
and he's embedded in the class,
and he's also created the class page for us.
So I hope that you will talk with Mark and
thank him for being with us
and also ask him any questions that you have.
So I am helpful and willing to
be a resource, he's very helpful,
and he's here to be
a resource so that you have a lot
of support if you need it along the way.
So the goal of
this video was just to give you
a sense of what the guidelines
are for the final project,
as well as the
first step of the final project,
which is the proposal
that you're turning in in this module.