Prof. Katherine Larsen
All of your writing assignments will ask you to perform several discrete though interrelated tasks:
Considering these three issues together begins to raise questions as to who decides what the dominant culture of any given time and place is and how it does, or does not, evolve. Is "popular culture" a pejorative term? An oxymoron?
Long paper topics will grow out of your individual interests and research, and will be refined in consultation with me, Ann Brown, and your classmates. In addition, the topics for the short papers should help you establish a useful framework for approach your own research.
Assignment: Keeping in mind the strategies that writers such as McKendrik, in his intro to The Thrill of Fear, or Walpole, in both of his prefaces to the Castle of Otranto, used to place their texts into larger and more acceptable contexts, address some aspect of the need for self justification within the gothic culture pro or con, past or present. You may draw on any of the critical texts we have read so far in class as well as the contemporary articles you gathered as part of your first library assignment.
Goals: Given the ambivalent approach writers of Gothic had to their own writing, and the critical reaction to the new and almost immediately maligned genre, at least one question initially comes to mind: "Why write?" One answer (and there are most certainly many more) might be the by now oft-stated (modern) argument that these writers were, in part, engaging in covert acts of protest against the dominant culture. Of course this raises a whole new set of questions. Is it more effective for a marginalized author to work within an already established (and socially "acceptable") genre or to break out and create a new, albeit, dismissed and derided genre in hopes that it will, eventually, be seen as valid. And what about that question of validity? Once something has been validated, and perhaps appropriated (think of the all the parody that existed side by side with the serious Gothic) by those who oppress, is it no longer an effective vehicle of protest?
Suggestions: Before you start writing, decide on the form (rebuttal? criticism? defense? justification?), audience (preaching to the converted? trying to sway someone with a more conservative (or liberal) approach than you have adopted? gendered?) and vehicle (in other words, where can you envision a piece such as yours appearing? What's the context?).
Assignment: Do the likes of Burke, Keats, and Poe still carry weight? How, if at all, do the ideas of sublimity and melancholy apply to our own cultural moment? Are these aesthetic ideals still valid? Still valued? If so by whom, how, and in what context? Or, if you feel that they have indeed lost value, can we say that anything has taken their place? For this paper you will be drawing on any modern forms you wish to tackle - film, music, television, art, architecture. Feel free to bring to bear research you may be already doing for your long paper assignment.
Goals: It would seem that we do not often encounter serious aesthetic arguments within the framework of popular culture, or if we do they tend to be of the usually watered down variety found in reviews of books, films, and television programming. What this assignment is asking you to do is to scratch the surface a bit in order to determine whether or not aesthetic arguments are still being made. Implicitly, it also asks you to consider exactly what constitutes an aesthetic argument.
Suggestions: You may want to also think about the related issue of the audience to whom aesthetic arguments are directed now and how it may or may not differ from target audiences of the past.
Assignment: Discuss any of the various vampires we've encountered in terms of their cultural place values. Again, consider definitions as you are beginning to think about this. What exactly is a vampire in the twenty first century?
Goals: There is plenty of criticism out there on the ever-changing metaphor and symbolic value of vampires. They are variously markers or our politics, our sexuality, our relation to power, our relationship to art, our deepest psychological hang-ups. As Nina Auerbach observed: "Vampires go where the power is." But, is a vampire ever just a vampire? In part you are also being asked to consider the recent tendency to assign cultural value to anything and everything. Where, if at all, do we draw lines?
Suggestions: Try to think beyond the literal bloodsuckers. Feel free to bring in any other "vampires" not considered in class, or any research that you have done for other assignments.