ENGL 198T Senior Seminar in English

POPULAR CULTURE. Reality TV, music sports, summer blockbuster movies, iTunes, YouTube, fanzines, ezines, body art, shopping, MySpace, Facebook, Star Trekkers—all of these come under the heading of Pop Culture. And they all have an enormous influence on how we think about ourselves, what we know about the world, and where we find our place in it. By examining various aspects of popular culture from different analytical approaches, students will develop and practice advanced-level critical reading, thinking, and writing skills. Students will engage in extensive research projects focused on academic inquiry: they will evaluate, analyze, and interpret a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to enter into scholarly conversations; integrate primary and secondary sources into their analysis. The final paper will go through a series of revisions and peer reviews.

Please click here to see samples of final research projects in popular culture.

SPORTS MATTERS. In this course, we will focus on sports as a cultural phenomenon as a means to polish sophisticated critical reading, thinking, and writing skills.  We will investigate the centrality of sports and its rhetoric in modern multi-ethnic U.S. culture, allowing us to examine our own assumptions and ideas along with varieties of arguments and questions posed in the assigned readings. We will consider how issues of race, gender, and class are worked out through the rhetoric of sports—for example, in such concepts as the “good sport,” the “level playing field,” or “three strikes.” To this end, we will use sports to help us think about how national belonging is enacted, as well as the ways in which social hierarchies are structured along the lines of class, race and gender. In addition to analytical texts chosen by the instructor, students’ own cultural knowledge and interests will form the basis of their research in this class. Students will develop their own independent research projects based on the readings in the course and their own interests.