Length requirements: 1500-2000 words (including the title and bibliography/works cited
pages). For every 100 words under or over the word count, papers will be penalized 1%, e.g.,
a 1250-word paper will incur a 2% penalty, while a 2125-word paper will be levied a 1%
penalty.
Submission requirements: Students should upload their assignment to D2L Brightspace as a
Microsoft Word document (.doc or .docx) or PDF (.pdf).
Responses submitted by email to the instructor will not be accepted and will be
considered late if they have not been uploaded to the submission box on D2L
Brightspace.
Formatting requirements: Double-spaced, 12-point font, Times New Roman/Arial/Cambria.
Citations should be formatted in APA citation style (either 6th or 7th edition), with a
bibliography or works cited section at the end of their submission. Students unfamiliar with
APA citations are encouraged to review the Purdue Online Writing Labs manual or avail
themselves of an online citation generating service.
Submissions should include a cover page that includes student name, number, and course
information, along with an appropriate title (e.g., They Dont Make Them Like That
Anymore: Modern Hollywood, Blockbuster Franchises, and the Disposable Film Star).
Students may use first-person pronouns (e.g., I, my, etc.) in the course of writing their
paper.
Turnitin: Students submissions will be checked for originality after they have uploaded their
assignment, using Turnitin (see the syllabus). By submitting their assignment to the dropbox on
D2L Brightspace, students will have automatically uploaded their assignments to Turnitin; they
do not have to access the Turnitin site directly, as the anti-plagiarism functionality is built into
the dropbox on D2L Brightspace. For their assignment to be accepted for grading, students
must produce a similarity index score lower than 20%. Papers submitted with a score of
20% or higher will not be graded until they are resubmitted with a satisfactory score.
Research requirements: Students must cite or refer to at least five (5) academic sources, of
which no more than two (2) can be from the course assigned readings. (Course assigned
readings do not have to be used; all academic sources can be from outside of the course.)
An academic source can include an article from a peer-reviewed journal, a chapter from a text
published by a university or scholarly press, etc. Non-academic sources like newspaper
articles or blog entries can also be used but will not count towards the minimum number
of academic sources that must be included in the paper.
If students are unsure as to whether a source can be considered sufficiently academic, they
should ask the instructor to confirm its acceptability.
Instructions: Students can choose and answer one of the following questions:
1. Choose one or more movie franchises (other than the Marvel Cinematic Universe) and
explain whether these examples illustrate or disprove the argument that Hollywood has
run out of ideas or only makes blockbusters.
2. Choose one or more television series and explain whether these examples illustrate or
disprove the argument that how post-network television programming is produced to be
binged.
3. Choose one or more movie franchise, television series, or music artist or music-based
subculture (or other kind of popular culture), and explain whether these examples illustrate
or disprove the argument that globalization is imposing American popular culture and
entertainment media on the rest of the world.
4. Choose one or more advertising or marketing campaigns and explain whether these
examples illustrate or disprove the argument that advertising sells values, lifestyles, and
ideals more than actual products or services.
5. Choose one or more music-based subculture (other than punk or hip-hop), and explain
whether these examples illustrate or disprove the argument that popular culture and trends
are initially shaped by young and/or marginalized peoples before being recuperated.
6. Choose one or more movie franchises, television series, music videos, or advertising or
marketing campaigns (or other kind of popular culture), and explain whether these
examples illustrate or disprove the argument that representations of gender (or sexuality, or
race, or some other form of difference) in popular culture are structured by either the
gaze or stereotypes.
7. Students may pursue their own research agenda and pose their own questions (or modify
an existing one), with the prior approval of the instructor.
Papers will be evaluated according to the following criteria (in order of importance):
persuasiveness and rigour in arguing for
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