Paper 2

This paper (minimum 1200 words, submitted via email) builds on the “Coming to Terms with Culture” short assignment. Our main goal is to analyze a specific cultural artifact and reflect on its larger cultural significance while drawing on outside sources. Your analysis will need to substantially incorporate at least two sources, including at least one source that you locate through your own research (you are also welcome to draw on class readings as relevant). You should use these sources to extend your thinking on the text you are analyzing, putting the text into conversation with these outside sources. To do so, draw on Joseph Harris’s notions of “forwarding” and “countering.”

For Harris, “a writer forwards a text by taking words, images, or ideas from it and putting them to use in new contexts. In forwarding a text, you test the strengths of its insights and the range and flexibility of its phrasings. You rewrite it through reusing some of its key concepts and phrasings” (37-38). Similarly, in countering, “Your aim is not to refute what has been said before, to bring the discussion to an end, but to respond to prior views in ways that move the conversation in new directions” (57). That’s what you’ll be doing with these outside sources as you apply them to your cultural artifact.

Toward this end, your writing should address the following prompts and questions:

• Ultimately, you will need to offer your own argument, insight, or perspective about the text you are analyzing. You could do this by forwarding and countering ideas from your sources to help support and develop your argument. Alternately, you could make your own argument independent of the sources, using the sources to add to your paper in other ways (background information or context, helpful quotes, etc.).
• To support your argument, you will need to analyze specific details from the text. How would you define the text’s project? What is the purpose of the text? How does it shape our ideas about what it is about? What sort of perspective does it offer? What keywords, passages, examples, or details can you identify from the text to support your thinking about its purpose and perspective? What details from the text are particularly important in terms of our understanding of it? Your outside sources could also be relevant here: you can potentially draw on the sources and their ideas to analyze the cultural artifact and help us understand it from different perspectives.
• This is not a requirement, but one way to develop your analysis is to compare one text or creator to another. For example, if I were analyzing Taylor Swift, I could compare one of her country songs to one of her pop songs, or one of her pop songs to a song by Nicki Minaj or Rihanna, or one of her songs to song from a different genre, such as punk music. A comparison could help you be more precise in articulating how your text helps us think about our concepts in a different way.