Course description and objectives

This is a course on communication and popular culture, but it is not designed to be just a four-month long celebration of comic books, hip hop, the Internet, and the like. Instead, our primary focus will be on the politics of popular culture and we will spend our time exploring several different critical and analytical perspectives on the subject. In particular, we will address such questions as:

• What is “culture”? And what distinguishes popular culture from other varieties?
• Of what value is popular culture -- and to whom is it valuable? Is there really anything more to popular culture than “just entertainment”?
• Who controls popular culture, what are they doing with it, and should we be worried about this?
• Is popular culture repressive or liberatory? Does it reinforce and support existing structures of social power? Or does it serve as a source of healthy resistance to the status quo?
• And why should we study this popular culture stuff anyway?

Bear in mind that few (if any) of the questions we’ll address this semester have easy answers. How well you do in this class will depend on your ability to think critically about the role of popular culture in contemporary society and your to argue your position(s) well, not your ability to memorize and repeat the “right” answers.

Readings

The following required books are available at the University Bookstore in Coffman Union.

• S. Elizabeth Bird, The Audience in Everyday Life
• Greg Elmer (ed.), Critical Perspectives on the Internet
• Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture [1999 edition]
• Carl Hiaasen, Team Rodent
• Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
• Kembrew McLeod, Owning Culture
• Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics
• Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
• John Seabrook, Nobrow
• Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line...
• Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements

Graduate students

If you are a graduate student, a slightly different set of course rules applies to you. In particular:

• You are required to do all the readings listed on the syllabus.
• You are required to attend all class meetings.
• Your final research paper must be (a) 6250-7500 words long and (b) suitable for submission to a scholarly conference and/or journal.
• You must submit a proposed paper topic by 29 Sep and a completed paper by 15 Dec, but you do not have to meet any of the other intermediate paper deadlines/requirements.

Grading

Your final course grade will be based on two factors: attendance/participation (20%) and a major research project (80%). Grade point totals will translate to letter grades as follows:

• “S/N” grades will only be given to students who have registered for the course on an S/N basis.
• “I” grades will only be given under extraordinary circumstances (i.e., major life emergencies).

Attendance/participation

I will take attendance every time we meet. Unexcused absences, late arrivals, and early departures will all affect your grade. In general, the only absences that will count as “excused” are those resulting from:

• major life emergences (with suitable documentation (hospital receipts, funeral notices, etc.)) or
• major religious holidays (with written notice presented at least a week in advance).

Our class meetings will be structured around discussions rather than lectures. As such, this is not a course that will reward passive spectators, and you will be expected to make significant contributions to our discussions -- both in class and online -- on a regular basis. Ideally, you should aim to:

• attend all required class meetings (this includes arriving on time and staying until the end),
• make at least one significant contribution to our in-class discussions every time we meet, and
• contribute roughly 250 words of productive commentary to our online discussions every week.

Meeting all the goals above will earn you an A for attendance/participation. Should you fall short in one of these areas, you can make up for it with extra work in one of the others . . . but bear in mind that:

• In-class presence matters: if you miss a class, you should contribute more extensively to our online discussions immediately thereafter.
• Consistent effort throughout the semester counts more than isolated bursts of heavy activity: 100 words/week for 15 weeks will serve you better than 1500 words in one massive post.
• Quality counts for more than quantity: a brilliant and insightful 100-word Discussion Board post will typically be worth more than a mediocre 300-word post.
• “Fluff” contributions will not help your grade: I reserve the right to penalize people who make repeated and obvious efforts to pad their participation score with off-topic comments.

Research project

Your major assignment for this course is a research project that culminates in a 5000+ word paper. This paper must be on a topic appropriate to the course’s central theme and it should make a persuasive, well-supported argument about your topic. Your final paper is due by 9:45 am on 15 Dec. There are several mandatory intermediate deadlines (29 Sep, 13 Oct, 27 Oct, 10 Nov) that will help you complete this project in a timely and satisfactory fashion.

This assignment is explicitly designed so that it can be used to satisfy the Senior Paper requirement for Communication Studies majors. If you intend to use this project for this purpose, you will need to:

• inform me in writing of your intent to do so by 15 Sep,
• register for Comm 3995 by 16 Sep, and
• earn a grade of B- or better on your completed project.

WebCT

We will use WebCT for several things this semester:

• graded online discussions of assigned readings and related issues,
• “virtual lectures” designed to stimulate (additional) online discussion,
• course-related business announcements, and
• a resource site for official course documents and all our non-book readings.

WebCT is accessible from the My U Portal via the “my Toolkit” tab. To use WebCT, your browser must have both Java and cookies enabled, and it must allow pop-up windows. Recent versions of Firefox, Netscape, and Internet Explorer (but, sadly, not Opera) should all work.

Academic integrity

I assume that the vast majority of students are honest, but to help us avoid potentially disastrous misunderstandings, the following is a partial list of major examples of academic dishonesty:

• plagiarism in any of its forms
• copying papers (in whole or in part) written by other students
• having someone else research and/or write substantial portions of your research project for you
• knowingly assisting someone else in their efforts to engage in any of the above practices.

The minimum penalty for academic dishonesty is a zero for the assignment in question . . . and, of course, in cases that involve your final research paper, such a penalty will result in a final course grade of F.

Further information about the University’s official policies with respect to academic dishonesty -- including more detailed explanations of what constitutes “plagiarism” and “cheating” -- can be found online at http://writing.umn.edu/tww/plagiarism/

Etiquette

• The discussion portions of our class sessions will occasionally cover topics that provoke strong differences of opinion within the group. I do not expect us to walk away from our class meetings in perfect and total agreement about the issues under discussion, but I do expect all of our conversations to be characterized by mutual respect and collegiality. Impassioned arguments and strongly expressed opinions are acceptable in this class; verbal bullying and personal attacks, on the other hand, will not be tolerated under any circumstances.
• Significant disruptions of the normal flow of course-related business -- e.g., using your cell phone in class, excessive side chatter, engaging in premature leave-taking behavior -- may result in penalties to your attendance/participation grade.
• If you wish to, you may make audio recordings of our class lectures and/or discussions, provided you can do so without disrupting the ordinary flow of the class. The purchase and/or sale of either written notes or audio recordings of our class meetings, however, is strictly prohibited.

Miscellaneous

• My office hours are 12:30-2p on Tue and Thu, 2-3p on Wed, and by appointment. Don’t be shy. Take advantage of these. Please. It’s why they exist.
• If you miss an assignment deadline, I will penalize your grade in direct proportion to the lateness of your submitted assignment. Major life emergencies and major religious holidays constitute exceptions to this rule, but only if you provide the same type of documentation listed under “Attendance/participation” for such circumstances.

Reading/assignment schedule

Gray-shaded dates denote Graduate Seminar Days, which are optional attendance days for undergraduates, but the readings listed in the lefthand column are still required.