Pick a bit of media — advertisment, song, TikTok video, film, billboard.

Pick a bit of media — advertisment, song, TikTok video, film, billboard.

Pick a School of Criticism – Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s-present)
Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism(1930s-present)
Marxist Criticism (1930s-present)
Reader-Response Criticism (1960s-present)
Structuralism/Semiotics (1920s-present)
Post-Structuralism/Deconstruction (1966-present)
New Historicism/Cultural Studies (1980s-present)
Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s-present)
Feminist Criticism (1960s-present)
Gender/Queer Studies (1970s-present)
Critical Race Theory (1970s-present)
Critical Disability Studies (1990s-present)

Decide what critical lens you might use to analyze this media — critical race theory, ecocriticism, feminism, etc. We’ve only looked at a few bits of media in our short time together. So feel free to dig into another theory that you’d like to know more about.

Spend plenty of time with your media. If I’m writing about a film, I watch it at least three times. (For a book chapter I wrote on “The Lorax,” I watched the movie about seven times.) Take plenty of notes. Find the parts of the media that seem to best help you make a point or argument about the work from your chosen theoretical lens. (My basic argument (theme) for my reading of “The Lorax” was that comedy makes an excellent platform to help people understand difficult environmental issues.)

A traditional academic paper: Develop a critique that describes, analyzes, interprets and evaluates a mass media text using a your chosen theoretical perspective. Cite sources using MLA (internal citations plus works cited list), Chicago style (footnotes) or journalistic style (cite conversationally as you write with embedded links). This should be 4-6 pages, double-spaced, about 1,000 to 1,200 words.

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